Not such a holy week
For many, if not most Christians, this is an important time of year, as we come to the end of Lent and into Easter. This year, more than ever, I have been feeling that what happens for most people in the UK is far removed from the reality we are remembering. The events in Ukraine, which contrast so markedly with our lives has brought it home. But, for me, even the term ‘Holy Week’ seems, suddenly, to convey the wrong message. How would we feel if we changed it to ‘Horror Week’?I am writing this the day before Palm Sunday. In many churches tomorrow, people will sing the 2,000-year-old hymn, ‘All glory, laud, and honour’ with its line about children singing “sweet Hosannas”. It conjures up a rather charming scene in our minds that obscures the political and revolutionary nature of the occasion. And with the hymn we will arrange procession waving imitation palm branches. In my last church people from the local churches processed through the village, stopping at each place of worship to reflect on that first occasion when Jesus entered Jerusalem. As we paused, we reflected on the story and prayed before moving with our donkey and reeds.
We made it fun, but the event we are recording wasn’t a fun event at all, and nor were the days that followed. It was highly disturbing and horrific. But all too easily, we edit out or reinterpret the turning over of the money changers tables. Yet this event is possibly the most significant related to Palm Sunday. Jesus complained - violently - that what God intended had been hijacked into a commercial opportunity. Is that not the big issue for us in the western world as we prepare to overindulge in chocolate eggs? We adapt a pagan ritual and pretty it up with our own story about resurrection symbolism as an excuse for fleshly indulgence.
They were not sweet hymns; they were political rallying cries that the children echoed. This year, events in Ukraine echo the event in Jerusalem as an oppressed people take their stand against a world superpower. Whether Russian or Roman; there is not much difference. Both are brutal and bloody. But we don’t want to hear the screams of agony where young girls are raped, and people bombed out of their homes and shot in the streets. Let us, instead, sing some sweet songs about sweet children, singing sweet praise.
And we will move on towards Easter and the chocolate eggs, not lingering too much either to mark the bloody Passover, or the crown of thorns, lacerated back and the spittle running down his cheek. Even our Good Friday processions are in danger of becoming a strange and inexplicable tradition that mystifies onlookers. What is a silent witness?
Those of us who engage in rural mission, sometimes speak of the chocolate box mythical village. It looks pretty but it’s not the real world. I fear that the churches of the western world risk presenting a chocolate box Holy Week to eclipse the sound of hammer on nails, and the screams of tortured men, and even the agonised cry from the man on the central cross, “Why have you forsaken me?”
It is unlikely that I will write another reflection before Easter Sunday, and I do plan to celebrate that, and I wish you a Happy Easter. But let’s not rush through an unholy week to get there. Real sorrow, real pain, real rejection, real betrayal, real denial, real abandonment, real blood, real passion, real Jesus.
Barry Osborne 9th April 2022
