Jesus never avoided the hard things. We have hard things to face right now, and Holy Week gives us a pattern to follow in facing them time – always remembering what follows is redemption and resurrection. (Time: 5:59.)
Video Transcript
This is Bishop Hughes in the Diocese of Newark, and it is Holy Week. The time of year – we call it the most holy time of year – where we spend our time focused on the last few days of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ as he headed towards a shameful and degrading death on the cross. As he suffered on that cross, and he died and was eventually risen three days later, which we celebrate on Easter. We do these things, not by rote and not by command, but we do them out of a desire to make this week something special, something truly dedicated to God – that’s what the word holy means, “dedicated to God” – that we take this week and make sure that it is dedicated to God as we prepare for the Easter celebration.
It’s not simply an inwardly focused set of activities that we do, going to worship inside a church that nobody sees us doing, doing spiritual practices, reading scripture, saying prayers, etc., that nobody sees us doing – it’s not purely that. It is also asking, “How do we show up for the hard things? How are we with people?” How does our life this week, become patterned after Jesus, a life that went right ahead in ministry with the hard things. He was fully human and fully divine. If he wanted to bypass the hard things he could, but we never saw that happen once in his ministry. He went straight up to the hard things, said a prayer, laid his hand on them, told them, “Be healed,” “Go away,” “You have no place here,” did some teaching, but he faced the hard things.
We have hard things to face right now, both as church and as individuals, and Holy Week gives us a time and a place to face them. I want to share an example with you. One thing that was really important to me during this week, in addition to all of these services, is the Presiding Bishop asked that we do a prayer vigil this week, prayers on Holy Monday across the nation. Monday night was not a good night for us to do it, but we did do a prayer vigil on Holy Tuesday. And on Tuesday, a group of us gathered at Delaney Hall for that prayer vigil. Delaney Hall is the detention center for people in some form of immigration status that has them detained. Either they’re undocumented or they’re in mid-process, and for whatever reason, they have been detained, and sometimes they are released. While we were standing there, several people were released who should not have been detained in the first place. But there you have it.
While we were there, it was a beautiful day on Holy Tuesday, but it was also a windy day, and I could not help but think of the Spirit of God, that wind that blew over the place, over the places that we call void, that were nonexistent, that brought the Earth into being. That God’s Spirit, the Ruach, the wind, hovered over all of that, as God called the earth into the existence. And there was that wind blowing in the midst of our prayers. And it made me wonder how God might bring wholeness and healthiness into existence in a place that is full of suffering and degradation.
This is what facing the hard things looks like. It means as a Christian – and I think that’s the toughest part for us, because we know how to show up as a political person – but as a Christian, to ask ourselves, where would Jesus be in this? And Jesus is always going to be with the vulnerable, those who are the most hurt, those who are suffering, those who are dehumanized, those who need divine help.
And this is our calling as people, particularly this week, devoting ourselves to God in Holy Week. This is our calling is to show up and face the hard things. For some of you, it might be going someplace or to a person for prayer. For some of us, it’s going to mean studying hard things, learning about things that we don’t really know all that much about, like white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. For some of us, it’s going to mean really taking a moral inventory of our position on things and asking ourselves, “Am I thinking like a Christian, or is my thinking based on partisan politics?”
Whatever the case may be, the important thing for us to remember is, not only do we not go alone, but Jesus went first. Jesus went in the hard thing first, making a way for us and showing us how to do it, and also showing that what comes at the end is always redemption and resurrection. And resurrection is so sweet when we have faced the hard things rather than ignore them or run away from them. May your week be holy indeed.
