Days of Holy Week

Since I’ve started going to the Maundy Thursday services these past few years, they’ve become my very favorite day on the whole church calendar, the holiest of Holy days. Every year it seems another layer of the mystery is pulled back. Nothing ever awaits me at that service but a deeper understanding and joy—as distinguished between happiness—as something that occurs in a relationship, with God. Or my relationship to some of my fellow parishioners. To people in general, as a matter of fact.

I will tell you what has always bothered me and left me perplexed—the resurrection. I’ve never felt a deep spiritual connection to it—to tell the truth, I’ve never really quite understood its meaning. It’s the last words to the disciples, the culmination of all of his teachings on Jesus’ last night on earth that gets to me. There he is with his disciples. He decides to do something radical to get their attention and to teach a lesson. He ties a towel around his waist and begins washing their feet. It’s the ultimate act of humility—or at least in his time it was. Love one another as I have loved you. Not the “warm fuzzy” love one another, as Patricia says, but the get down and dirty kind, stand up for each other, fight injustice, lift up the lowly, the weak, the oppressed. I think it’s the most important point of Christianity. That, and the Eucharist—this is my body, this is my blood—be with me, be with God when you eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of me.

I missed the Good Friday service but I did make it to Easter Vigil. Bells. Cake. Champagne. Ancient service. And this year, it was made extra special by the baptism of Mary Grace Brown.

This morning, Easter, I think the choir was a little tired—as they always seem to be by the time Easter rolls around. Nobody works as hard as they do during Holy week, with all of the extra services and special music (most of us can conveniently be “busy” on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, but the choir is has to show up).

Of course, this is one of the big mornings of the year where we have lots and lots of visitors, families drawn to church by tradition, because it is how Easter is celebrated, like Christmas. I love seeing all of the children in their Easter finery and eating leftover Vigil cake, and the air of festivity. Basically, I never place high spiritual expectations on Easter morning. In fact, as I drove to church today, I was a little unsettled wondering quietly just why I don’t “get” the resurrection.

So Patricia’s sermon caught me off guard. In the earliest version of the story, she said, Mark ends on a very unresolved note—the women go to the tomb, it’s empty, and they flee the place with “terror and amazement.” No resurrection. No happy ending. No resolution. It is in fact up to us to finish the story, said Patricia. For us to live out the teachings of Christ, down here on earth. She joked that she might be a little perverse in choosing to read Mark’s version of the death of Jesus on Easter morning to John’s later version in which the resurrection happens. But trying to live the teachings of Christ is actually something that makes sense to me. So I think I might be a little perverse, too.