We are now approaching the conclusion of Lent and the start of Holy Week. Each year in Holy Week we review the familiar story of faith. 

 

On Holy Thursday, Jesus celebrates the Last Supper with His Apostles. For the first time in the history of the world, the Eucharist is offered. Jesus changes bread and wine into His body and blood, to be consumed by His faithful followers so that they become intimately united to Him. In so doing, Jesus institutes the priesthood that perpetuates His presence and His ministry in the Church for the ages to come.

 

Then Jesus goes with the Apostles to the Garden of Gethsemane where He prays intensely before His arrest. So begins the long night of His trial and beating that ends with Jesus’ death as He hangs from the cross on Good Friday.

 

These details of the story we know well enough. But have we really learned the lessons of Jesus’s passion and death?

 

If we step back from the narrative of Jesus’s suffering and death and think widely, we should first allow ourselves to be impacted by the reality that this is not simply a story of remarkable heroism. 

 

Stories of military men and women, police, or fire departments or even everyday people are filled with moments of bravery and sacrifice that inspire us. The crucifixion of Jesus could be such a story but only if He were only human like us. But the divinity of Jesus makes His pain and suffering something even more important, something astonishing.

 

Why would God the Son empty Himself and take the form of a slave coming in human likeness as St. Paul says (Phil 2:7)? God who made the world and each of us humbled Himself to be taunted, struck and tortured by His own creatures.

 

That reality brings home to us the very nature of sin. It is a profound offense against God. Each of our sins, big or small, rebels against the goodness of God. Sin is not then simply a violation of rules in this world. The offense of sin strikes at the dignity of God.

 

The struggle between grace and sin, between good and evil, surrounds us and we are part of it. So serious is the consequence of our sins that God Himself came in this astounding fashion to repair our offenses.

 

The Gospels also record that prior to the crucifixion, Jesus staggered through the streets carrying His own cross. In that moment we sense the temptation to Jesus’s humanity to simply call it quits, to give up there and then. But He continued on to fulfill the loving but mysterious will of the Father to confront our sins from the cross.

 

Also in that moment we can recognize our own temptation not to continue our struggle for holiness. It would often be easy to give up, to say that it is too hard, that the Father is asking too much. But again, we learn from Jesus that grace is given for us to struggle on with hope in all our trials.

 

Taken as a whole, these days marked by Jesus’s suffering remind us of the serious business of our lives. We are all confronted with a choice for or against Christ. There is no middle ground. And our choice will be lived out for all eternity.

 

For that reason to follow Jesus will mean to take up our own cross. Our faith involves a deep and sacrificing commitment to God’s will that goes beyond mere feelings or shallow thoughts of constantly evolving moral values that mirror the social opinions of our day.

 

Holy Week has deep lessons for us. And how good they are. Because they lead us to what comes next; the joy beyond our imagining of the resurrection of Jesus shared with us.