This Holy Week is Like the First One
How death is defeated: “You were born for this moment’’
As it was in the beginning: the world turned upside down then stopped, shut down. Fear and betrayal — doubt and death — terrorized the world. They stayed at home until darkness was penetrated by light.
“You are not alive, right now, by chance,’’ Father John Riccardo teaches from Detroit, one of the global pandemic’s largest hot spots in the world — about to hit its apex. “You don’t happen to be here living at this time in the middle of this pandemic. You were born for this moment… God made you for this moment.’’
This week is “the single most important week in the history of the Universe,” he stresses, because this is “the week when God went to war against the foes we can’t compete against…’’
During Holy Week, God waged war on:
- Death, the first born child of Satan, who hovers over our world.
- Sin, the way we so often fail to be who we are capable of being.
- Satan, the fallen angel who is the father of lies and division. He hates humans because God chose to make us his heirs, giving us gifts even the angels were not given.
“The reason this week is so great is Jesus is triumphant over all of them, which is why, even in the midst of everything that’s going on right now, you and I can live our lives without anxiety and without fear,’’ Riccardo says. “God has acted on our behalf and He’s done something about death: it doesn’t win. Death will take me but it can’t hold me…’’
Passover: The prequel for Holy Week
The Bible is God’s Word, and the Father is the Divine Author. Riccardo recommends we reflect on Holy Week by first reading “the prequel,’’ the story of Passover told in Exodus chapters one through 15, which “sets the stage and backdrop for everything in Holy Week.’’
Then — as now — there was panic. But Moses tells God’s children to look back at their attackers and to remember, “The Lord will fight for you. You have only to stand still.’’ (Exodus, 14–14). The word, “still,’’ is especially appropriate for us today, making it abundantly clear we can’t save ourselves. We need Him.
The 10 commandments are written in order of priority
The first three commandments are about putting our Creator first. As St. Augustine said, our hearts are born restless — until we rest with our Father. We long for more, to be with God, to become more like Him, but we get distracted by the four false idols of money, pleasure, power and honor.
Those false idols were all humbled in 2020:
“So many of the idols we’ve had in our lives have been leveled: wealth, the stock market, our 401(k), this illusion that we’re just on a steady path to progress,’’ Riccardo says. “Sports? Countless idols. Those all have been leveled. The only one who is truly able to deliver, ultimately, is God. God has fought for you.’’
Jesus is the lead actor in this story
“Jesus is doing something on the cross — It’s not that something is being done to Him,’’ Riccardo says of Holy Week. “This is why He came… God came to rescue His creation, most especially the creature He loves more than any other, made in His likeness and image and that’s you and that’s me.’’
- From Palm Sunday through Wednesday, we see the ecstasy and agony, the highs and the lows, the treacheries of betrayal and desolation, of feeling abandoned, scared and let down. During his entrance on Palm Sunday, Christ is hailed as Messiah and then comes betrayal and crucifixion. Scripture is a drama and God is the Creator and Author of all stories.
- Holy Thursday, marks the institution of the priesthood (an unbroken tradition begun at the Last Supper) and the Eucharist, that most magnificent gift, the gift of Himself hidden in bread and wine. Today, in our Lenten isolation, God is deepening our hunger for the Eucharist.
- Good Friday. Why is a day of peak torture and death called “Good?’’ Because it looks like Jesus is the helpless victim but He’s not. He’s actually the aggressor, allowing Himself to be tortured so He can lie in wait, deceiving the evil one, dying to grab and attack death and sin itself.
- Holy Saturday. He descended into hell to bind the strongman. He frees the dead, our ancestors, and transforms death from an ending into a new gateway: “Even though death will come, it can’t hold me or those who I love who have died. God has turned death into a doorway that leads home.”
- All this leads to Easter. We focus on a cross, a symbol of state-sponsored terror for all who did not submit to a global empire. We transform that scary symbol into a sign of hope, sacrifice, love, renewal and resurrection. Your fears and worries aren’t the end. Wait, there’s more.
Holy Week came at Passover, which was celebrated in the home
As it was in the beginning, Easter 2020 will be celebrated within homes, small immediate family rather than extended family or community. This is how Passover was celebrated during the first Holy Week, when a few women found the answers in an empty tomb (while the world, including the Apostles, stayed at home).
Passovers were celebrated, not in church but home, a family meal. Our Church would similarly begin with a meal. Mothers were comforters, offering unconditional love. Fathers were there to teach children why we do what we do: “once we were slaves — we are slaves no more.’’
So it is again.
What you are called to do
“Our task, right now, until the Lord comes back and puts everything together… is to be instruments in His Hands, using all the gifts that He gave us, all the natural and supernatural gifts so as to transform, re-create the world that we live in, starting in my own sphere of influence, my own center of influence,’’ Riccardo says.
The difference between weekend recreation and Sunday re-creation
“Easter is about the beginning of re-creation,’’ he adds. “It’s not just God showing off, ‘Hey, look what I could do if I wanted to but I rarely do.’ No, Easter’s the beginning of the re-creation of our human race and of the Universe and it won’t be fully completed, to be sure, until Jesus returns in glory.
“But in the meantime, you and I, whether you’re a nurse or a doctor or a teacher or you work in the grocery store or you’re a stay-at-home dad or you’re an engineer or you’re an attorney — No matter what you are, our task is to use the gifts God’s given us to try to bring our own sphere of influence into harmony, wherever we’re working, with God’s original intent, to make it more like what He intended it to be.’’
Pray for our priest friends recovering from this virus
The pandemic’s biggest hot spots in America are New York, New Jersey and Detroit, Michigan (in that order). Those spots are intensely hot and at least two of our priest friends have the dreaded virus:
- Monsignor Chuck Kosanke, Father Riccardo’s “landlord’’ in Detroit, is former rector of the Polish Seminary.
- Father Miroslaw Krol, Monsignor Chuck’s former lieutenant, is now chancellor of Orchard Lake.
Both are in home quarantine so we pray for their speedy recovery. Please say this prayer for our people and for the whole wide world:
Heavenly Father! We come to you today to pray for the rapid healing of our friends and shepherds, Father Krol and Monsignor Kosanke. The Book of Job says you give us as much as we can bear so you must have a special place in your heart for your Polish saints and holy people! And for all Polish people.
Through our blessed mother, you saved our beloved St. John Paul the Great from an assassin’s bullets and enabled him to win the Cold War. We come to you today to pray that you will similarly help Father Krol and Monsignor Kosanke to bear and overcome this cross they bear as You helped John Paul in 1981.
Help them use this experience to become even greater leaders and servants of God in this 2020 war on sickness. Make them pencils in your hands. Come Holy Spirit. Come now. Come as You Will. Come Jesus. We trust in you and call on you through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to heal our priests and help them to use this pain as a badge of honor showing your confidence in them. Amen.
This Holy Week 2020 is like the first Holy Week: a time of crisis, uncertainty, a time of great emotions, a time of fear and a time of death. But death was transformed.
This Easter is like the first Easter: Quiet, behind closed doors
But like that first Easter, it is a time of a new beginning, preparing for a resurrection and renewal when we will take a world that is broken, hushed and stopped and start it all over again. We can and will begin the world again anew.
Like caterpillars entering a cocoon to become butterflies, we can and will learn something from our isolated time alone indoors. We can and will take what we have learned with us back into the whole wide world.
You are like a diamond, created by God — but we all fell into the muck
Jesus lowered Himself to our level, “becoming sin itself’’ to share our humanity then went further down. Human beings are like diamonds that fell to the bottom of the deepest muck, Bishop Robert Barron says.
“God could have pronounced forgiveness from on high but descended down into the sin and death itself to pull us out,’’ Barron says.
For modern people, today’s greatest sin is probably not pride but sloth: indifference toward things of the spirit, argued Karl Barth, one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the past century. Our great sin, Barron says, is “refusing to accept the forgiveness of God.’’
That he might explode evil from within? Barron explains Holy Week and Christ’s death and resurrection:
“Jesus is the Divine Light inserted into the darkness. What’s Easter? The explosion of the light from within the darkness, breaking its power…That He might transform it from within.’’
“God has turned death into a doorway that leads home.’’ — Father John Riccardo.