Holy Week is the Hallway to Life
It is Palm Sunday. This coming week will be filled with the chaos of disorder and the abyss of suffering. Many people have regarded the past year as a desert of illness, political unrest, financial hardship and worldwide strife. The week we are entering now is an event that experiences and embraces all of that. It will remind us of the essential truth of our existence. God has made us; God has acknowledged our pain; God has saved us! The hallway of our lives has been dark, but the light is here. Open wide the door to Christ.
The week we are about to enter is not remote from our burdens, our heartbreaks, our regrets, our humiliations and our lamentations. If there is anything we must realize right now it is this…Christ is here! Christ is living!
St. Josemaría Escrivá, in his Easter homily of 1967, reminded us of God’s active calling, informing us that God is reaching out to us “through the suffering and joy of the individuals we live with…the elements that shape our family life…through the significant issues, conflicts, and trials of each historical period.”
The hallway we enter this week is dark. In that hallway is the Last Supper where one disciple hastily leaves to begin the iniquity of betrayal. In that hallway is Gethsemane where Jesus agonizes with tears of blood while his apostles sleep. In that hallway is Pontius Pilate’s Praetorium where Jesus is put on trial, where the people cry “Crucify Him” and where Jesus is sentenced to death. In that hallway is Golgotha where Jesus hangs on a cross, is mocked by the people and dies. Dark indeed!
Yet, through this darkness, through this suffering, we are transported from the dark hallway of life into the throne room of God. As we enter into Jesus’ suffering, we recognize that He has endured it for our sake. There we feel His embrace and a fellowship unlike anything we’ve ever known. There he envelops and overshadows our pain. Whatever we are dealing with, we can find our suffering in Christ’s. He knows what it’s like to endure sleepless nights and exhausting days, to experience agonizing pain, and to pour Himself out for others who are only hostile in return. This week, we will see Him first flattered, but then criticized, lied about, betrayed, abandoned, mocked, humiliated, whipped and crucified. It tells us that there is no suffering we can experience with which our Lord cannot relate, and, as we experience a portion of what He did and yield to Him in it, we find a precious intimacy with Him. We find life.
Walk forward in that dark hallway because Christ is the threshold of the door into life. If you are in a season of deep pain and loss, you have a particular opportunity to know the Lord Jesus more deeply. The more we share in Jesus’s sufferings, the more we understand the power of His resurrection, and the more we can see His glory.
Michael Card, a man who captures truth in song, wrote the following:
He took the pen of pain once more
To write upon their hearts
The lesson they had been so slow to learn
But writing in the sand
The fiery serpents came to call
With a holy message and a bite that burned
Lift up the suffering symbol
And place it high upon a pole
Tell the children to look up
And be made whole
In time the brazen serpent
Became an idol in the land
And they left the living God to worship clay
When they forgot their suffering
Soon true faith had disappeared
So some idolize a brazen cross today
Lift up the suffering symbol
And place it high upon a pole
Tell the children to look up
And be made whole
Brothers and Sisters, Blessed Holy Week! The Hallway to Life!
Fr. Michael Harrington, a native of Swampscott, MA, is a Catholic Priest for the Archdiocese of Boston, and Currently the Pastor of St. Mary’s of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Cambridge. In the past he served as The Director of the Office of Cultural Diversity for the Archidiocese of Boston and is currently a Consecrated member of the Institute of Jesus the Priest (the Pauline Family).
