For most people this week is like any other week. All around us people are waking up, going to school, going to work, buying groceries, running errands, going to meetings, seeing friends, calling family members and sleeping. Sometimes I have to remind myself that while I walk around during this week aware of and focused on the events of Holy Week and Easter, perhaps the majority of people in the world don’t know or don’t care that this is the week that the Christian church remembers the last week of Jesus’ life and the terrible way in which Jesus died. What is a new insight for me in the past few years is that there is still a great deal of confusion about what to make of this week, even for those who would identify as Christian.
Holy Week and what happened in that week in the story of the life of Christ is traditionally understood as the culmination of what God wanted all along, that is, that Christ is able to complete the sacrifice that God demanded. The formal theology for that idea is called “Substitutionary Atonement.” Simply put it states that humans are sinful and therefore not worthy to be in the presence of God or even worthy for relationship with God so God demanded a sacrifice to atone for the sin and Jesus was appointed as that sacrifice. Believe it or not, I grew up having been taught that theology and I lived with it for most of my teen and young adult years. What never made sense was the idea that God couldn’t simply forgive the sin. After all, God could do anything, right? So why would God need to go through the whole saga of becoming human, walking on earth, and ultimately marching to death in order to satisfy God’s self? Like many others, I didn’t question this theology openly because I was not told there were alternatives.
As my theology has grown and changed over the years and as I have developed an actual relationship with the person of Jesus, my experience of Holy Week has changed drastically. No longer is it a self-imposed, self-mutilating, violent act of God in order to satisfy God. Instead, it has become a story about God who became incarnate in the Christ and who lived as one of us, albeit much more courageously than many of us. I cannot say with 100% certainty that God has only ever become incarnate in Christ. My experience in life has been that Christ has been the ultimate vessel in which God has uniquely lived. Having said that, I have also seen God manifest in others who have walked this earth even if not as completely as God was in Christ. That’s important because it impacts the rest of the story. The rest of the story is that Christ lived entirely on behalf of those who were powerless. The story of Christ we read about is a story of a justice seeker and outcast lover who did everything in his power to EMPOWER those who were oppressed, outcast, forgotten, abused and poor. Page after page in the story tells us that Jesus had harsh words for those who were in power, including those who were in power in the religious institutions of the day.
The story of Holy Week, then, is a story about what happens when people in power feel threatened and want to get rid of the threat to their power. They do anything and everything to discredit, to malign, to marginalize, and yes, even to kill those who would challenge their power. The story of this week is a story about fear. Jesus walked through this week with courage and knowing that he had to continue to speak truth to power and that he might lose his life if he continued to do so. Jesus walked through this week knowing that if he tried to save his life by shutting up, he would lose himself. So, he continued to walk the path of justice and love and he ended up dying at the hands of fear. The story of this week has been repeated many times in history in a variety of ways. The question for us is how the story of this week encourages us or calls us to live any differently. What is your story as it intersects with this story of Holy Week?