Our Holiest of Days
Holy Thursday, let us recall that when praying on the Mount of Olives, Jesus endured taking all my sins, our sins, into himself. Past, present and future.sins. He knew the sins I would commit this week, this year, this lifetime. Yet He still loves me. Loves all of us.
As we die and go through our “life passing before our eyes” or life review, I believe we will see all the good we did in this life, as well as the bad. But imagine, Jesus saw only my bad and your bad, all our bad. No wonder he was reeling from the burden as He prayed in the Garden. Mine alone...
No matter the form you take for worship, consider taking a moment to comfort the struggling Jesus today. It may seem odd to comfort the Almighty since we look to Him to comfort US in our need. But consider:
“My Heart and I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: and for one that would comfort me, and I found none” (Psalm 69:21). Why not Be the one, as St Mother Teresa of Calcutta is famous for saying. For more thoughts on this, here is an article from Bishop Barron’s site. Asking Jesus, "How can I comfort or tend you today?” is a great way to begin. https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/we-can-console-jesus/
Good Friday, How can the day commemorating a horrific death be considered good?
Answer: It's all in the "what comes next": The outcome, the result, the impact, the victory, the learning, the experience.
Sometimes this is known as the silver lining. But that trivializes it. The "what comes next" is more important, potent, grace-building than the event itself.
Suffering and difficulties have meaning. In this case, Jesus's death on the cross unlocked the gates of heaven for us. Forgiveness was born and His "Love ran red and my sins washed white." We have to know that to make sense of His Passion. Or our own suffering.
Please play this wonderful cross song (free) by Chris Tomlin (the whole album is wonderful!)
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=29qzPVAagf0
For more love of the cross: https://www.churchpop.com/crowds-of-univ-students-nuns-priests-carry-wooden-cross-through-polands-streets-in-way-of-the-cross/
For this Happy, Good, Wonderful Friday, we thank you Lord.
Holy Saturday, a day of pause. After the horrific day yesterday, we want to hurdle every wall, run a 2 minute mile, buy the fastest ticket to get to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. The happy ending is in sight. But Saturday is a day we must stop/pause. Like a comma in a sentence, it slows us down, so we read more carefully, so we pray more fully, understand more deeply His love for us.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, one of the most intelligent, unemotional human beings you’ll ever encounter, a psychiatrist by trade, a conservative author, who often weighs in on belief but claims to only believe in the Truth, is fascinating to listen to. In a recent interview with Colm Flynn of EWTN, he talks about our God as the God of the Gaps. “We conjure up God to explain the things we can not explain… Faith is necessary because we can’t know everything for certain.” God bridges us from the ugliness and brutality of Friday to the beauty of Jesus’s resurrection through the patience, peace and contentedness of Holy Saturday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe-OAa4jqok . In addition, be sure to watch Peterson’s wife’s testimony of her health crisis and her journey to becoming Catholic this Easter weekend.
Holy Saturday is an essential step in our preparation for Easter Sunday, the day we become more alive with Christ.
Easter Sunday, Alleluia
Reading between the lines of John 20, Mary Magdalene likely had a sleepless night, getting up before everyone else to run to the tomb of her Rabboni, her teacher. Then and now, women don’t venture outside in the middle of the night. In Mary’s day it was foollhardy. Unheard of. But ignoring the risk, she runs.
When she sees the tomb’s stone rolled away, she panics. Where have they taken him? Unbridled sorrow drowns her. Would she have thrown herself to the ground to cry? Gently eased to her knees? All we know is after she peeks into the tomb, she again runs. This time to the apostles to wake them with the news.
Then she runs again, back to the Jesus’s tomb.
Women today run often. On treadmills, on the streets, in marathons and Ironmans. In performance wear, engineered sneakers, with water bottle in hand. But Mary of Magdala, she ran in slip-on sandals and layers of floor-length robes. Would she have tangled in her clothing and fallen? Would her feet have become bruised and blistered from her sandals? Surely. After all, the distance she ran from the Talpiot Tomb, supposedly the tomb where Jesus was laid, to the Old City in East Jerusalem is three miles. And she did it three times. Out of love.
So Magdalene ran two and a half 5k races that morning. Surely she was bruised and battered, her clothes dirty and torn from her running and falling. But there’s no mention of it.
For all her efforts, she is rewarded. She is the first to see the resurrected Jesus. I hold her in awe, as I do our Virgin Mary and her son. Jesus. What a good and faithful servant of our Lord!
