Being Present During Holy Week

We often want to skip from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday while flying over the days in the middle.  We attend regular worship services on Sundays, and during the week in between many of us follow our regular routines of work, daycare, errands, and deadlines.  It is difficult to observe religious holidays that don’t fall on days the rest of the world recognizes as important.  The world goes on, and so do we.  Plus it is so much easier to celebrate holidays that are surrounded in joy and love. 

It is easy to approach the drama of holy week the way that we approach other tragedies in our lives.  All of us, at some point in our lives are guaranteed to be at the center of a story that is tragic.  Where is God during this pain and suffering?  We expect God to be with us when we gather for praise and prayer here in church.  But we most want God to be with us during our times of tragedy; especially there.  And that’s the good news behind the sad story that convenes us this Holy Week.  Where is God?  God is with us, in our human suffering, betrayal, disappointment, and trouble.  There is no tragedy in which we walk that God has not walked before us so that God could be fully with us. 

God doesn’t give us an explanation for the tragic, or rescue us from the tragic. God gives us something that may be even better – God's presence with us in the tragic. What a great comfort to know, in our moments of greatest difficulty, that God has been there and that God is there with us. 

After his son died in a car that plummeted into Boston Harbor, William Sloane Coffin preached a now-famous sermon that has become a classic statement on the relationship of the Christian faith to the tragic:

When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, a woman came by carrying quiches. She shook her head, saying sadly, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I swarmed all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady! Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper, that he was probably driving too fast in a storm? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road?” Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around with his finger on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, “It is the will of God.” My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.

God is not far away in the hour of suffering. God has created us as frail creatures, but God is not absent. Jesus shows us that God is especially present in moments of suffering.