Category: Holy Week

From Psalm 31
In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame; 
deliver me in your righteousness.

Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe,
for you are my crag and my stronghold; 
for the sake of your Name, lead me and guide me (1, 3).

It is a day for quiet.  A time for silence.  A season to take refuge.

It is God’s sabbath, and what a sabbath.  We Western 21st century Christians are accustomed to celebrating sabbath on Sunday, but in Jewish religion and tradition the sabbath day was Saturday. 

The Gospel of Luke records that after Jesus’ death, the women who loved and followed Jesus went with Joseph of Arimathea as he put the body in his own fresh tomb. They saw where the body lay and went home to prepare spices and ointments.  Then they rested because by now it was the sabbath (23:50-56).

About the day after the Crucifixion, the other gospel writers say nothing. They skip from Good Friday to the Day of Resurrection. Earlier readers of scripture would have known why.

If we pause with the women on this Holy Saturday, we will know that God works in the silence of this day. But we must be still to hear him.

 The psalmist sought refuge in God in the psalm we recite today.  With him, in silence we shut out the noise, the temptation, the busy way of the world.  Today we seek a cave in which to hide; today is a day for withdrawing and trusting that even though it does not look like God is in charge, the Almighty One is carrying out his plan of salvation. He is clearing the path that opens the way for us to come to him. He is slashing through the clutter of our lives and knocking down the obstacles. 

In some outrageous way, this virus that has beset us makes it easier. On this particular Holy Saturday, crowds are not rushing to the mall for last minute shopping or bustling about to pick up the Honey Baked Ham. Not that God caused this disease or sent it to us or condones it.  But that even in this devastation God will work, though we may not recognize it in the throes of our despair.

There is a price to be paid to be sure. Tomorrow I will not get to hug my precious grandchildren.  I won’t get to sit with them at Easter dinner and listen to their laughter as they tell us of all the goings-on in their lives.  But one of them will talk me through using FaceTime, and that will have to do this year. 

We do not get to see all the ways God works.  Not on this side of heaven. Perhaps for one day we can stop trying and asking and demanding. Perhaps for this day we can be silent. This is a day for believing that God has not left us alone in our sorrow.  

Tomorrow will look different.

For all of the lectionary readings for Holy Saturday, click here.

Marjorie George serves the Diocese of West Texas as a consultant in Adult Christian Formation. Reach her at marjorie.george@dwtx.org.  Or leave a reply below.

Of course, we grieve today.  Of course, Jesus would recall from the cross one of the great psalms of his people – a psalm of lament:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
    and by night, but find no rest (Psalm 22:1-2).

We seek answers. We want explanations that assure us that after all, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. “Did God know from the beginning that Jesus was going to die on a cross? Was it God’s plan all along? Ah, then this suffering is justified,” we say. And, gosh, we feel better. 

And while we are questioning the Lord Almighty, let’s get to the bottom of this pandemic that has us all terrified: “How did this happen? Whom shall we blame? Is God really OK that we are not gathering in worship this Sunday to celebrate Easter? Are you kidding me? Did anyone see this coming?”

But finding answers is not the point, says N. T. Wright in an article in Time magazine this past week. “It is not part of the Christian vocation,” he says, “to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain – and to lament instead.”

Perhaps what we need in this season, says Wright, “is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. Lament is what happens when people  ask, ‘Why?’ and don’t get an answer.”

Philip Stevenson, priest of blessed memory, used to say when grieving parishioners asked him, “Why?” that it was the wrong question. Ask, instead, he would say, “Where do I see God in this?”

“The point of lament,” getting back to Wright, “is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments,” he says. 

What if we turned Psalm 22 around and put it in the mouth of God: 
“My people, my people, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from listening to  me
and the words of my longing for you?”

As Wright points out, God was heartbroken again and again when his own people turned away from him and went a-whoring after other gods, in the words of scripture (judges 2:16). God in Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. God longed to gather Jerusalem to himself “as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Lk 13:34, Matt 23:37). But Jerusalem did not, would not, listen. 

If there is a time for everything, this is a time for lament. We need not go far to find the words: two-thirds of the psalms are psalms of lament. Yes, yes, we lean forward to the hope of Easter. Yes, we know that death does not have the final say. But if we are going to walk the entire way with Jesus this week, today we lament. 

N. T. Wright concludes his article: “As the spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell.” And out of that, he suggests, may come new hope, new understanding, new possibilities, and new wisdom. 

For the complete N. T. Wright article go here.

For an excellent companion article from the N. T. Wright Online website, go to ntwrightonline.org

For the full lectionary readings for Good Friday, go here.

Marjorie George serves the Diocese of West Texas as a consultant in Adult Christian Formation. Reach her at marjorie.george@dwtx.org.  Or leave a reply below.

Both Matthew and Mark, in their gospel stories, report that after Jesus and the 12 had celebrated the Passover meal that night in the upper room, they sang a hymn before leaving for the Mount of Olives (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26). The NRSV has it in Matthew that they sang THE hymn.

Wait, what? What hymn? Are we supposed to know which hymn is THE hymn?

Indeed, the Jews celebrating Passover would have known which hymn, as would the first century Christians who continued to use the Hebrew scriptures, considering themselves Jews in every sense who had accepted Jesus as the foretold Messiah.

The aforementioned hymn would have been the Hallel, including Psalm 116 which is appointed for Maundy Thursday in our lectionary. Six psalms were part of the Hallel – psalms 113 to 118 – that the Jews were commanded to sing on the night of the Passover celebration. They were sung not all at once but at certain points throughout the meal. Hallel means “praise,” which was what faithful Jews did on this night when they remembered that God had saved them from the angel of death when he rescued them from slavery in Egypt (see our Old Testament reading for today.) 

Interesting that Jesus chose this celebration, this remembrance, as the setting for his final act of opening the way for all of us to be in relationship with God.

A night of praise and thanksgiving is to be our response to God’s love for us.

“It is too small a thing,” Isaiah had said of the chosen servant, “that you should raise up the tribes of Jacob to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (49:6).

Psalm 116 calls us to respond. We too are obliged to remember, to sing, to praise God, and to offer ourselves in thanksgiving. 

On this strange Maundy Thursday, when we cannot gather as community to humbly wash the feet of our neighbor, when we cannot glorify God together for the sacrifice of the bread and the cup, we can recite Psalm 116. Perhaps gathered around the table with our family, we can tell each other for what we are grateful and how we will praise God with our lives in response. 

Then we can sing our favorite hymn. The Doxology is fitting.

Psalm 116
1 I love the Lord, because he has heard
    my voice and my supplications.
2 Because he inclined his ear to me,
    therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
3 The snares of death encompassed me;
    the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
    I suffered distress and anguish.
4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
    “O Lord, I pray, save my life!”

Pause here to recall the ways in which God has rescued you.

5 Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
    our God is merciful.
6 The Lord protects the simple;
    when I was brought low, he saved me.
7 Return, O my soul, to your rest,
    for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
8 For you have delivered my soul from death,
    my eyes from tears,
    my feet from stumbling.
9 I walk before the Lord
    in the land of the living.
10 I kept my faith, even when I said,
    “I am greatly afflicted”;
11 I said in my consternation,
    “Everyone is a liar.”

Pause to recall the ways in which you keep your faith in hard times.

12 What shall I return to the Lord
    for all his bounty to me?
13 I will lift up the cup of salvation
    and call on the name of the Lord,
14 I will pay my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all his people.
15 Precious in the sight of the Lord
    is the death of his faithful ones.

Pause to commit to at least one way you will honor and thank God for all God has done for you.

16 O Lord, I am your servant;
    I am your servant, the child of your serving girl.
    You have loosed my bonds.
17 I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice
    and call on the name of the Lord.
18 I will pay my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all his people,
19 in the courts of the house of the Lord,
    in your midst, O Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord!

How will you praise God in thanksgiving?

Listen to the Doxology on UTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQxZ3hPbBWg

Find all of the lectionary readings for Maundy Thursday here.

Marjorie George serves the Diocese of West Texas as a consultant in Adult Christian Formation. Reach her at marjorie.george@dwtx.org.  Or leave a reply below.

I have a friend who came to the Episcopal Church as an adult, although she had been active all her life in another Christian denomination. It was an Easter Sunday when her children dragged her to St. Mark’s Church in downtown San Antonio. What she was struck with that first time, she says, were the words, especially the words of the confession, asking forgiveness “for what we have done and for what we have left undone.”  “That’s exactly how I felt,” she says, “but I had never had the words to express it.”

When we don’t have the words, the Church provides them. How often do I go to the “back of the book” – pages 814 to 841 in The Book of Common Prayer – when I need help and don’t know how to ask for it? 
“Direct us, O Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favor . . .” – from a Prayer for Guidance (p 832).
“Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what you would have us do . . .” from another Prayer for Guidance (p 832).
“By the might of your spirit, left us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God . . .” from a Prayer for Quiet Confidence (p 832).

So it is with the psalms.  We read them and exclaim, “Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.”  

Psalm 70, which is appointed for Wednesday in Holy Week, uses words that are also found in Psalm 40 (vss 13-17) with minor variations. There is speculation that Psalm 70 was detached from the end of Psalm 40 for use in temple worship, just as one might take part of a hymn and use it as a chorus.

We are familiar with the first two verses of Psalm 70 as the opening words of Noonday Prayer (BCP p 103). 

The scriptures we read this Holy Week put us in remembrance of the first Holy Week and all that have followed. The words put us at the scene as we follow Christ’s journey.  Interestingly, in the Revised Common Lectionary, which most Episcopal churches use, the lectionary readings for Holy Week do not change from year to year, unlike the readings for Sundays and the weekdays the rest of the year.  Every Holy Week we read the same words we read last year and the year before. Even so, they offer new revelation for our lives. As today’s post from Society of St. John the Evangelist (ssje.org) says, the continuing revelation of God is sometimes less like learning something new, and more like remembering something we’ve forgotten.

I invite you, the Church invites you, to find words today that speak comfort or transformation or hope or even lament to you in this time. Find them in the prayer book, find them in the psalms, find them in your favorite poetry, recall them from your own history.

Read them again and again as we walk toward Easter.

Psalm 70
¹ Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
    O Lord, make haste to help me!
² Let those be put to shame and confusion
    who seek my life.
Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor
    who desire to hurt me.
³ Let those who say, “Aha, Aha!”
    turn back because of their shame.

⁴ Let all who seek you
    rejoice and be glad in you.
Let those who love your salvation
    say evermore, “God is great!”
⁵ But I am poor and needy;
    hasten to me, O God!
6 You are my help and my deliverer;
    O Lord, do not delay!

Find all of the lectionary readings for Wednesday in Holy Week here.

Marjorie George serves the Diocese of West Texas as a consultant in Adult Christian Formation. Reach her at marjorie.george@dwtx.org.  Or leave a reply below.