After five weeks of Lent, we are now at the doorway to our holiest time of the year. Beginning on this Palm Sunday, we will celebrate Holy Week. As we do so, we walk with Jesus in His suffering. Then we will join ourselves to the glory of His resurrection and to the wonderment of His followers.

At every step, we should seek to stir up in our faith and in our hearts gratitude that the Son of God has come to save us from eternal death. Because now, by faithfully living out our trial in this life, we are offered the eternity of friendship with God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Still, Holy Week reminds us that because of sin, there is a struggle, a price to be paid in this life to reach eternal happiness. That sin began with Adam and Eve. All of us were born into the loss of God’s life in us that resulted from their sin. And then we have joined Adam and Eve by our own sinful choices.

We must now convert our hearts and renounce our sinfulness. And we must do so on Christ’s own terms, which is to say, in keeping with our Catholic teaching.

Our focus on sin this week is not simply negative thinking. It is the context that makes the sacrifice of Jesus for each of us all the more real, all the more personal. And it helps us to appreciate the cost of our own personal sins.

It is precisely our effort to make real and personal the story of Holy Week that I would like to urge in this Year of Mercy.

As we attend Mass on Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday, as we make time for the Service of the Cross on Good Friday, we should strive not simply to recall the history that it recounts, but instead we should also try to place ourselves at the side of Jesus. We should ask ourselves, as friends and followers of Jesus, what should we have done had we been there? And, what would we have done?

For example, the Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday night, begins with the Last Supper. Jesus, with a combination of joyful love and a heavy heart meets one last time with His friends.

But rather than just a human gathering, Jesus leaves the gift of Himself by instituting the Eucharist and the priesthood. It is the first Mass.

How easy it has become today to become casual about attending Mass, especially on Sunday. But if we are truly and personally the modern day friends of Jesus, we must rejoice to be invited to His supper at every Mass. We would not leave Him alone even at that first moment of His sorrow.

After that supper, Jesus went to the garden. We then place ourselves with Peter, James and John, keeping watch as Jesus goes through the final temptation of Satan to appeal to His humanity to be unfaithful to the will of His Father.

 We have all had lonely moments in life, moments when we felt the need for solidarity. Jesus brought Peter, James and John, and us to the garden, giving that opportunity to accompany Him. The three Apostles failed. Even now, we have the chance not to sleep but to join ourselves to Jesus in that moment of suffering.

On Good Friday, we move with Jesus from the emotional stress to the physical agony that He underwent.

What is striking about the passion of Jesus is how, once more, He suffers alone. The disciples have run. Mary is brought to Him at the foot of the cross.

Once more, we should be moved not just by the sacrifice and suffering, but by the loneliness of Jesus. Throughout that long agony, there is no one to offer a word of consolation that might give strength to suffering humanity.

Even now, at a distance of over 2,000 years, Christ gives us the opportunity to stand with Him in that trial. We too might fear that we might have run as the others did. None of us will ever know. But spiritually, we can walk with Him now. We can pour out our hearts and renounce our sin.

We can stand at the foot of the cross, helpless, appalled at the beaten and disfigured Jesus. And at the same time we can recognize that He did this for us. This is the price of the forgiveness of our sins. And then we can truly be grateful.

Jesus went through all that He did, and by God’s design, we live centuries later. Still, this week, we can convert our hearts, appreciate that suffering and deepen our friendship with Christ as a result.