Holy Week

Greetings,

I want to talk about Holy Week. Some of you might be thinking of something different than what I am referring to. There are different holy weeks to different people. To some, Holy week might be the week leading up to the Super Bowl. To others it might be that one precious week you get for summer vacation. And to others it might be that one week during the year when your kids go to summer camp. I could see how that could be considered a very holy week. While all of those might fit into the broad definition of a holy week I want to write about the Holy week.

Holy week is the week that begins with Palm Sunday and ends with Easter Sunday. It is a week when Christ was heralded into Jerusalem by the very same people that would scream cries of "Crucify Him!" only days later. Holy Week is special to me. Along my journey home I have found it helpful to me to notice the mile posts along the way. Anytime you go through a traumatic event and survive it you have a tendency to notice things that had, beforehand, gone unnoticed. Holy week is one of my mileposts.

I think it special to me because I get to see the human side of Christ. During this week we see him sweating blood in the garden as he prayed, praying to his father to "take this cup from me", and, finally, we see him carrying his cross up the Via Delarosa towards the hill at Golgotha. I'm not sure why it helps to see the human side. I suppose I spend so much time studying the divine I forget that there is another side to him. Our creeds tell us that Christ was begotten by the father and that he was fully human and fully divine. That takes allot of thinking to grasp that the chestnut!

For me, I think the one thing that makes Holy week something important in my life is the fact that Christ could of given up on but he didn't. Think about it, Christ had, just a short time ago, asked his father to take the cup from him. He didn't want to go through the pain and suffering. In this we see a normal reaction of a human being. Who would want to go through that torment? Yet, he was so in tune with the father that he continued the statement, "if not, then your will be done"! What a statement!

In Christ's struggle I see what I strive to be. I want to be the person of faith that says , "I really want to do this but, God, if you don't want me to then I won't". Or, even, the opposite that says "God, I really don't want to do that thing that you are calling me to do but, if you really want me to, I will"! I see the obedience that Christ had to his father!

For me, Holy week is about choices. Christ could have chosen to give in and give up but he chose not to. Jesus didn't have to walk that lonely path towards the cross of Calvary but he chose to. He chose to be our sacrifice, he chose to be the savior of the world. It was hard but he chose it anyway. His human side must have agonized over the "fully divine".

Max Lucado wrote a great book entitled He Chose the Nails. In his book Lucado builds the idea of Christ choosing Calvary for each of us. Choices, that is what Holy week means to me. Choices that make differences in the world, choices that make positive impacts on my future and the future of those around me, that's what Holy week teaches us. Christ chose the nails for me and I choose to honor that. My salvation means something more to me because of his choice. Because he chose those nails I can choose to share his story with others. Because he walked that lonely road to death I now have power over death itself. Choices, that's what life is about!

I challenge you this next week to make good choices. Each choice that we make affects more people than we can ever imagine. Some pretty big choices were made during the week we will be celebrating. Let's pray that the choices we make will honor the sacrifice that was made for us. Amen.

Blessings,

Derek