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“I dread Holy Week.”
It was an honest and simple statement from the gentle woman sitting in front of me. She spoke not only for herself, but for most of us, bearing some of the weight we all carry when faced with the prospect of the Passion of Jesus Christ.
How like Jesus himself.
He desired to eat the meal but dreaded the thought of drinking the cup. When the awful time came, he was as clear and straightforward as the reluctant woman who feared the Passion: “Father, if it is your will, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” He tasted the anguish. He bled with worry.
But as the great Isaiah prophesied, this God-With-Us would not turn back. He remained unshielded before the battle of life and death. Face set like flint, he clung only to the one who sent him - his Father.
My friend who so dreaded Holy Week had it quite right. It is an inevitable, dreaded season of life. We die our thousand deaths. We pour out our hearts and tears for our young, mourn the lost loved one, the broken companion, the unraveling parent. We sweat the love and bleed the sorrow.
“If only there were a way out,” we think.
But unexpectedly, wondrously, the one who did not have to be like us, and still chose to, did not flee. He entered the garden of Gethsemane to repair the garden of Eden. Not clinging to the robes of power and authority, he took the towel of a slave to wash our feet. He taught us how to love, and how to live.
CS Lewis wrote in his Poems that love was as warm as tears: unsettling, uninvited, cleansing, and comforting. It was fierce as fire, flickering with life, smoldering with rage, constant as an eternal flame. Love, too, was as fresh as spring, new and alive, daring and bold. But he ended this song of Love with the most telling piece of all:
Love’s as hard as nails. Love is nails. Blunt, thick, hammered through The medial nerves of One Who, having made us, knew The thing He had done, Seeing (with all that is) Our cross, and His.
The wood of the cross, on which hung the Savior of the world, remains waiting for us. It bore the one who says to us, now and eternally, from the cross: “You are worth it.”
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