How are we to understand what is happening in this coronavirus Holy Week? None of us has ever experienced anything quite like it and it leaves us somewhat bemused. Our Churches are shut and we are not able to gather as we normally would. How are we to enter into the spirit of this special week feeling so disorientated?
Can we apply our own feelings of disorientation to help us enter into the minds of those who were caught up in the whole drama of what happened in Jerusalem all those years ago? Perhaps we can sense the thoughts that were rushing through the minds of Jesus' disciples and friends as they experienced the events of that first Holy week? Is it possible for us to feel the same shifting moods, to somehow allow them to wash over us, and give us some perspective as we try to fathom what is happening to us in this coronavirus Holy Week?
Using Matthew's gospel as our guide, we sense that the exhilarating mood of Sunday will soon be passed, replaced with a feeling of uncertainty and even danger. Jesus' parables take on a slant which cloaks them in the apocalyptic language of crisis and judgment and the Pharisees sit up and take note. A time of tribulation is described and it ends with the great parable of final judgment ... 'in so much as you did(n't) do this to these the least of these you did(n't) do it to me'.
Jesus is then anointed by Mary at Bethany in an act that mirrors his burial. He and the disciples now gather in the Upper Room, where in an atmosphere of intense intimacy, he disturbs their thoughts once more with talk of betrayal and denial and of his going to his fate. It is the offering of himself for them, in his own very body and blood, which confounds them. They leave for Gethsemane, where he prays with the weight of that awesome fate on his mind. 'If possible let it pass' he prays 'but not my will but yours'. His arrest is imminent. It's not as Peter would have wanted it - and it's all very disconcerting, so much so that his anger boils over. He can't understand as his mind is all over the place. 'I don't know him'. He leaves in tears. Jesus is now alone and at the mercy of his captors. No longer free. There is a trial of sorts, and sentence is passed. A cross is loaded onto his shoulders. Up a hill he stumbles. This is not the hill of the beatitudes, where justice, peace and consoling mercy were ushered in, but a hill where anger and vitriol and scorn instead are vented. He cries out 'My God, why have you forsaken me?'
Is this the cry of our world today in all of its confusion and disorientation? What answer comes forth? None but that the events of the first Holy Week, and of this and of every Holy Week, are the events of the Trinity, and in this everlasting bond of love which flows eternally between Father and Son through the Spirit, the loving presence of God is immersed within the lives of each and every one of us. It is in the essential necessity and reality of the ascent of both hills, the hill of Beatitude and the hill of Calvary, that the answer lies. It is where, in the disorientation of this present age, we find our consolation and our hope, our Resurrection.
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