Holy Wednesday 2022

Holy Week, when done well in a church, provides the congregation with a week-long retreat that blends together our faith with our work and personal lives. Beginning with Palm Sunday, and concluding with the final Evensong of Easter Day, we have the opportunity to intentionally come to the church every day to be formed in the mysteries of our salvation.

No doubt everyone here is busy. Some of you have day jobs, some of you have parents under your care, some of you are in the middle of moving your home. We all have cares of the world that can easily occupy all of time. Sometimes it feels as if the time we can give to the church are the scraps that fall from the table; Jesus gets the leftovers of our busy days.

But hopefully when Holy Week comes, we are able to set aside the time to put God first during this week of weeks - to expend the extra energy on coming to worship, to expend the extra energy to dwell in God, to make our confession, to attend the liturgies of the Sacred Triduum, and at the end, to feast extravagantly when Easter arrives.

I have been watching with a particular interest how in many urban centers, various pilgrim churches, many of them great Anglo-Catholic shrines and some cathedrals, are hosting a multitude of spiritual riches during Holy Week. Not only are there the great three liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil, but there are Tenebrae services, evensongs, and musical concerts that are spiritual meditations. Some churches bring in special holy week preachers, who through the course of the week preach a series of sermons to the congregation, guiding the flock through a spiritual retreat over the course of seven days. Now with the wonders of livestreaming, one can be in Honolulu and benefit from these resourced churches providing great liturgy during this most holy week of the year.

It is all absolutely wonderful. It takes the faith of the people seriously. It gives thef people real substance for the deepening of the faith. It is exactly what the church should be trying to do when Holy Week comes. However, having seen such spiritual richness being offered in various cities, I was shocked to see how another church, in order to get people to come for Easter Day, was offering a cash prize raffle. Can you imagine offering a cash prize to a lucky winner on Easter Day? Where does one put that within the liturgy? After the Lamb of God? After the Veneration of the Cross? Do we say, “alleluia, Christ is risen, and the lucky winner is!”

Yet that church will probably be packed, because people will want to win the cash purse. Meanwhile, those churches that are offering deep reflections on the Passion of Christ all week long will have plenty of space for visitors. I must admit that when I heard about a church giving away a cash purse on Easter, I immediately thought about the purse that Judas kept for the disciples. Scripture has an amazing way of shining a bright light on the shallowness of our gimmicks in the church.

We are reminded that when Jesus faced his passion, he was ultimately abandoned. He faced complete dereliction. Only a little band of disciples remained, and they had to stay far off. Jesus was completely rejected when he did his most important work. Isn’t this so often the case? When the faithful do the most authentic work in the Name of Jesus Christ, people often disappear. Crowds diminish; flocks scatter. There are rarely cash purses for those who are the most faithful. This Holy Week we see how the disciples will scatter during our Lord’s greatest time of need, and we all know how we are prone to scatter when the world needs an authentic Christian witness the most. We know from Christian history that the martyrs never received a cash prize before being martyred.

Still, the good news is that we are all here, and it did not require a cheap raffle promotion. You came for what the church colloquially calls “Spy Wednesday.” If you came today, chances are you will be coming every day for the remainder of the week, and before today you came for some of the first three days of this week of weeks. The seeds of discipleship produce such faithful fruit for Jesus Christ.

We are not here because we are self-righteous, and we are not here because we are expecting personal glory. We are here for opposite reasons. We know that we are sinners in need of the school of Jesus Christ; we know that we need the church and her medicine of Sacraments. We need Jesus Christ. We are all Judas; we are all spies; we are all abandoners; we all seek to change for the better – to be better disciples of Jesus Christ. We are here because we are trying to keep vigil at the cross and to be present when our Lord experiences complete isolation and dereliction. We want intimacy with Christ when Christ receives absolute rejection from the world. While the parties rage on Kapahulu Avenue, and while the world vacations in Waikiki, we are here seeking Christ.

Yesterday in the sermon I mentioned how Judas and Peter both betrayed Jesus Christ, but their final paths ended up very differently. Judas betrayed Jesus, and it led him on a path that resulted in complete despair and tragedy ending with suicide. Peter betrayed Jesus, but he also knew that he needed Jesus, and that he needed the community of the disciples after the resurrection. Peter knew the vital importance of coming to the church that was being born from the resurrection – the church that is a school for sinners who wish to follow Jesus.

It is certainly a commitment to be a part of the church during Holy Week, or for that matter, any other week of the year. It is a great commitment to follow Christ and his school for sinners. But then again, we also know that without all of this, without Holy Week, without the church, without each other, without the mass, without the Sacraments, we are on a path leading to death. How ironic it is that this week we gather to celebrate a death, and how ironic it is that this week we gather to take a deep look at our sins and brokenness. Who would have thought that such deep reflection, and such a commitment to worship, and such a devotion to a shepherd who dies on a cross, would ultimately save us from death, giving us new life.

Father Paul Lillie +