lent readings, week 7

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/H888dWV55zU

In last year’s April 6th New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the impact of pandemics through history in a piece called, “The Spread.” In it, she traces the Christian roots of the word quarantine. This week, as we experience Holy Week in new and repetitive ways due to the ongoing partial quarantine, it is helpful to read her words:

The word ‘quarantine’ comes from the Italian quaranta, meaning ‘forty.’ As Frank M. Snowden explains in “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present” (Yale), the practice of quarantine originated long before people understood what, exactly, they were trying to contain, and the period of forty days was chosen not for medical reasons but for scriptural ones, ‘as both the Old and New Testaments make multiple references to the number forty in the context of purification: the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness...and the forty days of Lent.’

For Christians who celebrate, Holy Week—not unlike Jews who celebrate Passover—is both a time of celebratory gratitude and a gruesome reckoning of what salvation costs. For Christians, the Sundays that bookend Holy Week are all smiles: Palm Sunday celebrates Jesus’ Triumphant ride into Jerusalem, when he was worshipped as the Messiah and recognized as the One for whom Israel waited. Easter Sunday, of course, offers us a collective chance to rejoice in the resurrection of Christ. His conquering of death practically changed humanity, allowing us to live with the knowledge that we are justified to our Creator and redeemed by God, unified and sustained forever.

Easter is a time to celebrate, but Holy Week is a time to grieve and reflect. Both matter, and both give us an opportunity to experience God. Many of our Christian traditions elevate Easter but ignore how often life throws us into grief or confusion. This second Covid Easter, I find myself resonating a lot more with the dark middle of Holy Week than with the festive Sundays on either end. All is not well with us. Whether physically, mentally, financially, medically or spiritually, many of us are struggling to improve our situations. The experience of profound powerlessness is frightening. Although we think it will end, we aren’t at all sure how it will change us, or if we will survive as people to recognize our country or ourselves.

This is why I am so thankful for the 40 days that pop up over and over in Scripture. God, in the Bible, relentlessly shows us that the journey through life is difficult. Most of us go through large swaths of time where we struggle to find our bearings, to know how to keep ourselves or others healthy, or to understand why we face what we face. Answers don’t come. Indeed, Jesus, the man whose life we trace during Holy Week, faced a dark night of the soul that lasted for days. He was lost, scared, and dreading the path ahead. Weakened, he asked for friends to be with him, to pray with and encourage him. They didn’t. As the days unfolded, his people, his community, scattered.

Maybe his days of intense struggle purified Jesus, just as our days of quarantine might purify us. The end is not wholly in sight though, and for now, even at Easter, we face the confusing grief of uncertainty. This Holy Week, I am greatly comforted by the idea that Scripture prepares us for (and Jesus also faced) long periods of hardship.

I invite you to resist the temptation to reduce “Easter” to the Sunday Celebrations. This quarantine has been more than a time to pause or regroup or finish projects that enhance your life. It has possibly also been disorienting, confusing, frightening and dark. I hope you notice the same Jesus who arrived and later resurrected to cries of Hosannah also cried his guts out in the dark, scared and alone. There is an invitation here. His life invites each of us to bring every piece of us to God. The Hallelujahs and the What the Hells? The moments of victory and the moments of terrified despair. The moments of feeling comfort and the moments of feeling utterly abandoned.

We call it Holy Week. This year, I will believe that every moment—good, bad and ugly—is Holy

To Ponder:

“Jesus is not some impossible horizon in the distance, far removed from the realm of possibility or your everyday life. He is very near. This is the nearness that union with Christ brings; you are in Christ and Christ is in you…Christ now set you free to be your true self: the self you are by grace, not the self you are by nature…Jesus came from heaven in order that the image of God might be restored in you.”                                                                                                         -Rankin Wilbourne

“When we walk with God, all things become new.”          -Mary Wineinger

“There must always be remaining in every life, some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathless and beautiful.”                    -Howard Thurman

“Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of it’s plenty. Joy is not meant to be a crumb.”    -Mary Oliver

To Read:

Mar 31 Isaiah 54:1-8; Mark 12:10-11

Apr 1 Ps 18:25-36; 20

Apr 2 Isaiah 55:1-12

Apr 3 Ps 32:1-5; 38:1-11, 15-18

Apr 4 Isaiah 61:1-11; Luke 6:20-31