JUST A CLOSER WALK
     Beginning with Palm Sunday, Christians observe the most sacred time in our year of faith. The liturgies celebrated in Catholic Churches are mirrored in Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches everywhere.  Depending on their own calendar, members of the Orthodox churches often celebrate Holy Week the same time we do. But, because neither Holy Thursday nor Good Friday are holy days of obligation, many Catholics do not make a habit of observing those days. Palm Sunday and Easter, like bookends, anchor our worship and center our faith.

            Jewish people keep Passover often during the same time. Not only is it their most solemn celebration, it also is the one that requires the gathering of family and friends. They will be as bereft as we during this time of social distancing. All of us, this year, will be kept from the most meaningful community expressions of faith.
 
            Each of the major days of Holy Week recalls a moment in the last hours of Jesus’ earthly life.  Nevertheless, they are not meant to be snapshots or mini-dramas. Beautiful as it was in many ways, the movie “The Passion of the Christ” - by having the actors speak in Aramaic and Latin, and creating a brutally realistic reenactment of the torture and death of Jesus - missed the point. It was more like a live version of a Renaissance oil painting than a meditation on the Passion. The Church, in its Liturgies, tries to access the meaning of the events, rather than reliving the events themselves.
 
             That is what we mean by the mysterious word “mystery.” For most of us who speak English, a “mystery” is a puzzle to solve or a “who-done-it.” In the ancient languages of the early Christians, a “mystery” was a reality beyond the obvious or material. Their whole world was “sacramental,” with a small “s.” From that mindset  came our seven Sacraments, with a capital “S” - each one putting us in touch with the saving grace of Christ, won for us by His death on the cross; yet, each on doing so with different sights, sounds, tastes, touches - symbols all.
 
            In this strange springtime of 2020, when we are locked  away from one another and from our usual activities,  the sacred routines of Holy Week - taking home blessed palm,  watching the ancient ritual of the washing of feet, walking in procession with the Eucharist from the barren church building to a place off repose, kissing the cross, lighting the fire, listening to the age-old stories of God’s love for His people,  renewing our Baptismal promises, being sprinkled with fresh water - all of that is lost to us this year. We will receive it back in 2021, God willing, with renewed appreciation. Meanwhile, what can we do?
 
            I offer these thoughts for each of the key days of Holy Week. You could read this at one sitting; or read each’s days thoughts as the week unfolds. Or both.

PALM SUNDAY     This day is odd and disjointed. Usually, two Gospels are read, one for the blessing of palm; the other, as part of Mass. One tells of the giddy triumph of Jesus and His followers as they enter Jerusalem, their capital city and center of their religion. The other tells how many of those same merrymakers demanded His death and, in their bloodlust, gleefully watched Him die.
 
            There is a double irony here. The crowds shouted out, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the Lord’s name!” The word “hosanna” means “save us!” or “salvation.” What the crowds cheered for Him to be and to do on Palm Sunday, He did – for them and us - on the following Friday.
 
            These ceremonies are designed to disorient us. Take a moment today to recognize how true to each of our lives is the juxtaposition of joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy, camaraderie and solipsism, love and hatred. We like - as the song says - “to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” Palm Sunday asks us NOT to do that; but, instead, to embrace the tension, to hold the opposites together. It models such an open approach to genuine human living through the actual experience of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
            Saint Paul says of Him: “... He did not consider equality with God something to cling to. Instead, He took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be a human being and it was thus that He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even to death - indeed, death on a cross! It was for this reason that God exalted Him ...!”
 
HOLY THURSDAY     You would think that, if any Mass were to feature the Gospel story of the Last Supper,  with its description of a Passover meal turned inside out by the institution of the Eucharist,  Holy Thursday would be the day. But no. Instead, we hear a story from Saint John’s Gospel in which the only similarity to the familiar story of the Last Supper are just the two words, “Do this!” 

            Do what? We think first, always, of taking bread and wine and the speaking of the words of institution which transform these two common, basic foods into the Real Presence of Christ.  It is the central act of the Catholic Church. It is “the source and summit.” It’s even the reason why young adult Catholics, generation after generation, come back to church when they have kids of their own. It’s the reason why elderly Catholics drag frail bodies to Mass. It is the reason why the scandal of a deviant clergy, mediators of Eucharist, has nearly destroyed us.
             But Saint John’s Gospel story simply assumes the meal as a prelude to Jesus’ gentle gesture of service. He washes his friends’ feet. And when Peter objects that it is undignified of Jesus to do so, Jesus says, “If I do not wash you, you can have no fellowship with me.” Really?!
 
             Yes, it is that essential! It is that simple! The Mass is the source and summit of our Faith. But the soul of our faith is service - simple kindness. The serving of one another in humble affection is the fundamental priestly act, the moment of consecration, in the life of each follower of Christ. We are, says God in the Book of Exodus, repeated in the words of Isaiah, the First Letter of the Apostle Peter and the final book of the Bible, Revelation. 
 
            In this time of social distancing, we are being forced to do what Jesus desires us to do. We are serving one another with distancing, masks and genuine human concern. “Do this!” Serve one another. When the last Corona Virus germ had died in the summer sun, will we still serve one another?
 
GOOD FRIDAY     The history of Catholic worship tells us that this particular Liturgy - which is not a Mass - is one of the oldest in Christendom. We hear, as we did on Palm Sunday, a Gospel story of the Crucifixion.  But Saint John tells us not of a crushed and beaten prisoner but of a Christ who - in contrast to an outwitted and diminished representative of Caesar - reigns from the cross. Jesus confronts His accusers with logic and righteous anger; He stares down the symbol of Imperial Rome; He carries His own cross with no one to help Him; from the cross, He looks to the welfare of His closest loved ones; and, with His dying breath, He triumphantly shouts, “I have done it!!” Not much to mourn here.
 
            The prayers of the Good Friday ceremony are for every category of living thing on the earth. No one is excluded from the priest’s prayers. In fact, this year, the Church has written a new petition just for Corona Virus sufferers. Why? Because no one was excluded from Christ’s priestly prayer to His Father, “That all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You!”
 
            The action that dominates the Good Friday liturgy is the veneration of the cross. But the words the celebrant uses to present the cross to us are odd: “Behold the wood of the cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.” Not the “savior of the world” but the “salvation.”  
 
            We don’t often look to Broadway or Hollywood to help us understand our faith. However, in “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” both the play and the movie had to meet the challenge of portraying the Resurrection.  In the theater that was accomplished by having the cross, with the actor portraying Jesus on it, cantilevered out over the audience. As the music swells to a crescendo, the unseen arm slowly brings the cross closer and closer to the front seats of the theater. Hot white spotlights make both the cross and the body on it seem to glow, like a Transfiguration. Finally, at the peak of intensity, all the lights go out! 
 
            But, in the movie, the director took a different approach. As the actors board a bus to return home -   leaving their “Jesus” actually murdered on a cross - the camera shoots the cross from behind and at a distance. The sun is setting behind it. The sun glows brighter and brighter until we can no longer make out Jesus’ body. All we can see is the cross alone. “Behold the WOOD of the cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.”
 
            Our attention is deliberately directed AWAY from the torture and death of Jesus and TOWARD its meaning. It is not simply that Jesus died for my sins and yours. No. He died to save the world. 
 
            Every evil in our society, every lack, every ruin, is ultimately the fault of some human being. The Corona Virus that has crippled the entire world might have been prevented if money available for research had not found its way to the pockets of pharmaceutical executives. The spread of the virus might have been contained if nations did not conceal information or hoard technologies. Fewer people might have been infected if we’d had more regard for one another at the outset. And so on. This same tangle of selfishness, greed, deceit, laziness, stupidity and ineptitude lies behind every horror we know -  homelessness,  disease,  abortion, alienation,  abandonment, displacement and refugee-ism, militarism, isolationism,  sexual exploitation, global warming,  ecological disaster, over-population, poverty, hunger.
 
            The last words of Jesus - different in each Gospel - reveal to us the pattern of that salvation.  “Forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” “I am thirsty.” “Father, I commend myself into your hands.” “I have accomplished my mission.”  
 
            So, on Good Friday, we kiss the cross because we wish to honor OUR mission; to be what we are called to be - human beings in the mold modeled for us by one particular one of us, Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee. Pick up a cross in your house and kiss it - a rosary, a wall hanging, a picture, anything will do. Resolve to be a mensch.
 
EASTER VIGIL     Fire. Light. Stories. Songs. Water. Blessings. Vows. Wow!! What a show!

            It’s too bad, in one way, that these elements have become ritual. Ritual in the Catholic Church equates with “solemn.” And solemn often deteriorates into “stuffy.” They’ve lost a lot of their punch, their pizzazz.  
 
            In the movie “Castaway,” one pivotal moment when the Tom Hanks’ character succeeds in lighting a fire. Hanks played the moment lightly, with his exuberant line, “I have made fire!” He did it the most primitive way. He rubbed sticks together.
 
             But imagine a world without fire - primitive humans huddled together in the pitch darkness, for warmth and protection, waiting desperately for the sun’s return. In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, the very first word ever spoken by God is simply, “Let there be light!”
 
            When Hanks’ character draws a face on the soccer ball, found amid the litter washed ashore from the plane crash, he names it “Wilson.” In both scenes, he is Godlike. Made in God’s image and likeness, man is meant to “fill” and “subdue” the earth. Fire subdues it; people fill it. He has a blank slate on which to create his world. And, like Adam, he “names” the creature. But, his ill-advised attempt to escape the island on a badly-made raft causes him to lose Wilson. Unwilling and unable to swim after it, he cries out to the soccer ball as it floats away, “I’m sorry, Wilson!” Lonely Adam has committed the Original Sin. Cain has “killed” Abel. A futile apology echoes down the canyons of time.
 
            That is why, right after we light the Paschal Candle and shout into the darkness, “Light of Christ,” the first scripture we read is always the story of Creation.
 
            After the discovery of fire, perhaps the greatest leap forward for humanity was the gift of Tesla and Edison - the electric light. It was, as we say today, a “game changer.” Until then, people’s lives revolved around the sun. Up at dawn; in bed immediately after the evening meal. Only the wealthy could keep the darkness at bay with racks and racks of candles. The world as we know it today would be unimaginable without electric lights.
 
            The Bible is a bunch of stories, some entertaining, some frightening, some meant to be moral lessons. They are our story, humankind’s story, told through the lens of one people’s faith in a loving God.  We all have family stories. One way to experience the Vigil as we shelter is to tell our children - and retell ourselves - our own families’ stories. Song, too, is a basic human experience. Music-making may be almost as old as fire-making. What are your favorite songs ... and why? What does that tell you about yourself?  Do you like what it tells you? If you have children, they almost certainly are “into” rap and its offshoots. It is music without melody. What does that mean? Is it meaningful? Is that a conversation to have across generations? So, dispel a little darkness. Throw another log on the fire, if you’ve got a fireplace or a fire pit. Light a candle or two. And share.
 
            The blessing is one of the oldest forms of prayer. Maybe, better than calling it “a” prayer, it is a connectedness between people, a link forged by their common acceptance of the Divine. Parents have always wanted the best for their children and people have always wanted the best for their loved ones. Early on, we somehow learned to evoke God on behalf of them. Blessing!
 
             Parents are the “priests” in their home, the family Church.  It might trigger a fit of the giggles if you were to put your hand on your child’s head; it would be awkward and trespass unspoken boundaries to touch another loved one that way.  Catholics -- who make the sign of the cross so easily on themselves -- have an aversion to making the same sign over somebody else.  But how about holding hands and reciting the Our Father; it’s a very different prayer when the “our” in Our Father is physical.
 
            Vows. Listen to the questions: Do you renounce Satan? It sounds so bizarre. Most people have stuck him in the closet along with the Bogeyman, Dracula and aliens from outer space. However, when you have explained away all the reasons why bad things happen, when there’s no one else left to blame, there is still an unfactored remainder of evil for which we have no explanation. Is that okay with you? Or do you want to recoil in horror, try to protect your loved ones, and wish that you - like Superman - could don a cape and “fight for truth, justice and the American way?” If so, then you have renounced Satan. On the other hand, if you’d rather cling to the status quo, well.....
 
            Do you believe in God, the Father almighty ... in Jesus Christ, His Son and Our Lord ... in the Holy Spirit, Church, forgiveness, resurrection, life without end?? Notice how we are not asked to “believe” in Satan. Belief is not primarily agreeing with a set of doctrinal statements. It is a conviction and conversion of the heart. The dogmatic definitions in our Creeds simply describe was the heart has embraced. “The heart has its reasons,” said Blasé Pascal three centuries ago. He was wrong about a lot of stuff; he was right about that. We could reduce these three questions to one: Does God matter to you?
 
            The Easter Vigil is a Mass filled with words.  So many words.  Only two really matter:  “I do.”
 
EASTER SUNDAY     Easter celebrates the Lord’s resurrection and ours.
 
            Of course, the stories surrounding Christ’s Passion, death and Resurrection are the oldest parts of each Gospel.  It’s only logical, as Mr. Spock would say, that those are the first things the Apostles would have told others, the core of the Gospel message.
 
            If you were to put the four Gospels side by side, you would see that the closest connection from one to the other is this story. For example: Each Easter, when we read about the resurrection from one of the Gospels, it is always an “empty tomb” story. Jesus is not actually IN most of those stories. The main characters are the women who come to care for Jesus’ body. Their names vary; they are interchangeable, except for Mary Magdalene. She is the link; she is the witness. The stories are different from “appearance” stories in which the Risen Lord is present, speaking and interacting with His closest friends.
 
            It’s also logical that the things that would pop out from such a comparison would be the differences. And, boy! do we have a doozy this year!
 
            In Cycle A, we read from the Gospel according to Matthew. There is an angel at the tomb. In Mark, it’s “a young man;” in Luke, “two men in dazzling garments,” in John, no one at all, until Jesus shows up as “the gardener.” That could be an understandable confusion as the story was told and retold - like what happens when you play “Telephone” and “Happy birthday to you!” comes out the other end as “Slap a shirt on the shrew!”
 
            However, what this particular angel says to the women is remarkable: “... tell His disciples ... I am going before you into Galilee; there you will see Me!” And, in fact, the Risen Lord’s primary appearance in Matthew’s Gospel actually does take place in Galilee. Yet, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples to “Remain here in the city.” The city, of course, is Jerusalem.  In fact, almost all the resurrection stories do take place in and around Jerusalem.  Except for Saint Luke’s story of the two disciples who meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus ... and except for Saint John’s story about Jesus meeting them at the seashore over breakfast.
 
            Jerusalem is about seven miles from Emmaus; but it is almost eighty miles from Capernaum in Galilee, which was Jesus’ base of operations near the Sea of Galilee. The Risen Lord might be able to bi-locate. The Apostles definitely could not. Either they stayed in Jerusalem; or they went to Galilee. Hmmmm.
 
            In the Gospels, geography matters. It makes a difference because places in the Gospels are almost always at the service of the message. Galilee was where all the good stuff happened. Sure, there were some important moments on the final journey to Jerusalem. But most of the miracles, most of the teachings, most of the things that drew the disciples to Jesus happened in and around Capernaum, the village by the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The resurrected Jesus resurrects the joy, wonder and intimacy of His first days with the Apostles and their first love for Him.
 
            Saint John’s Gospel has a different story to tell. Jesus first meets Mary Magdalene. Their encounter is startling, touching and instructive. He commissions her, “Go to my brothers and tell them ...” He next appears in the locked banquet hall where He had celebrated the Last Supper. There He greets the disciples with one word, “Shalom!” Then He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit ...” Sound vaguely familiar? The first “action” God performed in the first book of the Bible was to “breathe” over the turbulent waters; the first “word” God spoke was “Let it be!” In Saint John’s Gospel, the first line is, “In the beginning was the Word ...” Several lines later, the “Word” becomes flesh. Now, here, in the Upper Room, that Word-become-flesh reenacts the first creative action of God. He “remakes” the world. He speaks again the word which He Himself is.
 
            The two Gospels are very different in their style, vocabulary and point of view. But they are close in their message.
 
            In these turbulent times, when darkness of contagion broods over the abyss, we will - all of us - be called upon to “remake” the world, to bring light into the darkness, to bring “peace” into this chaos, to “let it be.” Right now, of course, we’re almost afraid to breathe. Breathing is dangerous; breathing can hurt another person. But we soon will be required to “go to Galilee,” to revisit the “happy place” of our lives before Corona Virus, to be disciples of a message of renewed, and/or renewable life. This will be our Easter.
 
            Breathe. Let it be. Shalom.