Holy Week

Today was Maundy Thursday. Holy Week has officially begun.

Really it started last Sunday, with Palm Sunday. Our Sunday morning service included children waving palm branches, prancing around the church in excitement.

Palm Sunday is always bitter-sweet. Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph. The crowd cheers, they wave palm branches, they lay branches and cloaks on the ground for Jesus' colt to ride on, like Sir Walter Raleigh laying his coat in the mud for Queen Elizabeth to step on. Jesus is Lord and King. When people tell him to quiet the crowd he responds "If these were silent, the stones would cry out!" And the people aren't silent. They shout "Hosanna!" They shout "The King!"

But we can never quite forget that the next time we see a crowd shouting at Jesus they are shouting "Crucify him!" How many people were in both of those crowds?

So we celebrate, but when we are done we burn the palm leaves, and save the ashes. We save them for almost a year, until next Ash Wednesday, when the priest spreads them on our foreheads in the shape of a cross and says "Remember O man (or woman) that dust thou art and to dust wilt thou return."

Palm Sunday is always bitter-sweet.

In the evening we celebrated Passion Sunday. A string quartet played Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, and our rector David Widdicombe offered a series of meditations on those last words.

Jesus says "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." This doesn't mean "They don't know, so they shouldn't be held responsible." The ignorance is not the excuse. It's more like someone saying "Forgive them for they robbed my house". "They know not what they do" is why they need forgiveness, not why they deserve it. We are forgiven freely by the grace and love of the suffering God--the God who suffers on our behalf. We don't know what we are doing, but we are forgiven.

Amen.