Lenten Journey to Return to Our Calling: Living in Holy Week Today (Week 6)

I was telling the youth on Sunday that I’m coming into Holy Week this year feeling more worn than anything else. It’s hard to feel celebratory when the overall world is in crisis, with the continuing political polarization nationally, with anxieties about how new technologies like AI will affect the job markets for those I care about, and even just the day-to-day health struggles of those that we lift up on our prayer list. And with that, Easter has felt just like something to get through in the midst of an anxious world.

Brueggemann encourages us not to be mired in despair, however, but rather to consider what it means to live out Holy Week today. As he wrote in Monday’s devotion: “As we walk the walk from Palm Sunday to Easter through the Thursday arrest and the Friday execution and the long Saturday wait in the void, imagine all of us, in the wake of Jesus, changing our minds, renewing our minds, altering our opinions concerning self and neighbor and world.” In faith, we can trust that we remain free to pursue shalom and that we receive blessings when pursuing restoration. After all, Daniel and his friends were rewarded for sticking to their vegetable diets in Babylon, and we similarly can find comfort that adhering to our faith is often rewarded.

For our world is indeed broken. Brueggemann notes it “traffics in brutality,” and I’ll confess that I often feel exhausted, despairing, and numb when fresh outrages come up, be it the latest developments taking place in the Middle East or revelations that Cesar Chavez groomed young women. And many alternative solutions, in turn, often turn out to be “places that make promises of safety that leave us more anxious, offers of joy that leave us disconsolate.” But rather than give up, we’re called to travel into “a world of welcome that sees the other not as threat or competitor but as cohort on the pilgrimage of humanity.”

In that light, we’re also called to then reimagine what it is to live in a holy time, one where God can still do the miraculous. God today remains the same Creator God that brought the world into being, that delivered the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, and that even conquered death so that we do not need to fear its arrival. We can trust that God is reliable, faithful, “an adequate source of life in a context of scarcity and anxiety,” able to provide for us even as He provided for the Hebrew people wandering in the desert.

Brueggemann encourages us to view the cross “not simply a one-time deal,” but rather as the indicator on how to live “an alternate life that is marked by risky innocence that has the power to heal, to create caring neighborhoods in the face of rapacious markets, to evoke new possibilities in the face of despair, to enact new forms of liberation in the face of endless locks of oppression.” The cross’s secret, then, is being willing to sacrifice one’s own self-interest for others’ wellbeing: a path that does not guarantee monetary value but rather divine companionship.

Reflection Questions:

• Was there anything in the week’s devotionals that felt especially timely or relevant?

• How are you feeling about Easter this year? What are you looking forward to? Is there anything you’re dreading?

• If God empowered you to act in faith, what would that look like? What do you feel like you’re lacking?