Typically I write sermons on Thursdays and then polish them on Fridays or Saturdays. Not this week. It has never worked for me to write an Easter sermon on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. Even sermon writing on Holy Saturday is a stretch for me—but I’m not interested in getting up at 3 AM on Easter morning to put my thoughts down on paper. Each year during Holy Week, I set my rhythms and routines aside so that I might follow along in real-time with what was/is happening for Jesus in his final days and hours.
I get it. It’s tempting to leap from Palm Sunday to Easter. It’s also tempting to wave a palm frond and shout “Hosanna” as Jesus enters the Holy City at the beginning of the week and then sing Easter hymns days before that holiest morning has dawned. Staying with Jesus’ day-by-day, hour-by-hour story is an act of solidarity for me.
When I was young, my mother introduced me to the song “Jesus Walked This Lonely Valley.” I would stand next to her at the piano and sing with more emotion than I did with most songs. The first verse always cut straight through me: “Jesus walked this lonely valley. He had to walk it by himself. Oh, nobody else would walk it for him; he had to walk it by himself.” (Listen here.)
No one, not even Jesus, should have to go through difficulty alone. That was my conviction at seven, and it’s my conviction still. No, I genuinely don’t want to walk alongside Jesus this week. No, I don’t want to see what happens when those in power are threatened by Jesus’ love-drenched truth. No, I don’t want to be reminded that, in the end, Jesus truly wondered whether God had forsaken him. I don’t want any of this—and neither did Jesus if his prayerful agony in Gethsemane is to be believed. (And I believe!)
If in love, Jesus was willing to keep putting one foot in front of the other out of sheer love for the human family, then out of love for him, I will summon courage and strength to go with him. Because I truly don’t want him to walk this lonely valley by himself.
How are you walking alongside Jesus this week? It’s not too late to go back through the Holy Week emails I’ve been sending. Neither is it too late to make a Good Friday service at one of our sister churches in Montrose, Delta, or Ridgway. And it’s certainly not too late to sit down with Mark’s compact gospel and read it in its entirety—aloud if you can.
We sometimes discount the power of showing up. This is the week when we discover that tucked inside the showing up, hidden inside the heartache, are gifts waiting to be given. This is Easter’s unexpected proclamation, something we are helped to feel in our bones whenever we have been willing to go the distance.
With you on the journey,
