Church

A Holy Week Bonanza

A few of our best Holy Week articles over the years.

Mockingbird / 4.15.22

“How do we know whether the Jesus we imagine, perhaps even the Jesus we love, how do we know if the beauty we find in him is truly there; how do we know we aren’t encountering our own projections?” Will McDavid, on the anti-wish-fulfillment of the Passion.

“On Tuesday night of Holy Week, I sat under fluorescent lights at a plastic folding table and gripped a styrofoam cup of bad coffee. Around the room sat men from all walks of life. Respectable businessmen, craftsmen and laborers, men living in a residential rehab or halfway house, and me: a young clergyman who looks like he has it all together.” Connor Gwin’s reflections on his AA Anniversary.

“You could say that unlike most body parts, feet tend to be a source of commiseration rather than comparison, a body part that places us all on similar, er, footing. It’s no coincidence that Jerry Seinfeld once quipped about one of Elaine’s boyfriends, ‘He’s not a doctor, he’s a podiatrist.'” DZ, on the disgusting beauty of foot-washing.

“To describe Peter’s defection, Jesus uses that horrible word ‘disown,’ which Peter will do not once but three times. What emotions fill Jesus’ heart at this moment? Surely deep disappointment and despair, but what else?” From Larry Parsley’s meditations on Mark, An Easy Stroll Through A Short Gospel.

“He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road…” From Francis Spufford’s remarkable Unapologetic, on Jesus.

“Just as we are all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church…” From W.H. Auden’s A Certain World.

“When ventures fail, it is this condemned servant, this failed investment, who becomes our hope. When we find ourselves to be not just the sharks but the bait as well, the problem becomes the solution; his crucifixion is the place to look.”

“That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque…” From Tom Holland’s UnHerd article published in 2020.

“Within this darkness of understanding, we only have promise and story to fall back upon: the promise that the Christ enthroned in heaven is the same one who died for our sins, and the story of someone who defeated death, whose wounds were tangible and who gave us a Holy Spirit to be present with us.”

“What has happened on the cross is not merely our escape from God’s wrath, but God’s victory over sin and death. Christ has trampled down death by his own death and brought us through the waters of baptism to the other side where we stand speechless. Escape would not be enough to claim victory.”

An Easter sermon by Rev. Fleming Rutledge from the 10th anniversary conference in NYC.

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