April 2009
10 posts
1 tag
Holy Week Experience: EASTER SUNDAY!!!!
Happy Easter!
I want to start this post in an unlikely place… a garden. More specifically, we find ourselves in the Garden of Eden. It is where this whole week gets its meaning and significance. Without the events of this garden, today means very little because it is in this garden we lost our relationship with God. It is also in this garden where God speaks to Adam and Eve and...
Holy Week Experience: Holy Saturday
Holy Saturday is a relatively quiet day.
The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the...
Holy Week Experience: Good Friday
Good Friday is widely recognized as the day Jesus died. Many of you know the story. We have some good narrative to cover today, so please take your time and reflect on it.
Early in the AM: Jesus is taken to the Sanhedrin for trial. It is a well-known and documented fact that they wanted him dead, but the tricky part of the situation is that Jerusalem was under Roman authority… and by...
Holy Week Experience: Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday is also known as Easter Triduum (3 days before Easter). This is a rather eventful day in the life of Christ… and therefore the life of the Church. Maundy comes from the Old English vernacular (latin = mandatum) and is taken from John 13, “A new commandment (instruction/teaching) I give unto you, That you love one another; as I have loved you.”
Big comment: Not...
Holy Week Experience: Spy Wednesday
Today in Holy Week we come to what is known as Spy Wednesday… or the day of the betrayal by Judas for 30 pieces of silver. It is also the day Mary brings perfume and pours it over Jesus’ feet.
Matthew 26: 6-11 - While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he...
Holy Week Experience: Plot-Thickening Tuesday
Plot Thickening Tuesday. Today Jesus gets in a scuffle with the Pharisees. They are trying to trap Him because he is shaking up their religious world. He has already won the hearts of the people and cleared the temple of the moneychangers and their share of the market. They are not happy because naturally they get a cut of the profits sold in the temple areas. Bet you didn’t think of that one...
Holy Week Experience: Zeal Monday
Zeal Monday (as I call it) is commonly remembered as the day Jesus clears the temple. Check out the text from Mark:
The next day, when they had come out from Bethany, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came to see if perhaps he might find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. Jesus told it, “May no one...
Holy Week Experience: Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday is the commemoration of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as king and promised Messiah. A key point in this part of the narrative is the timing. We find ourselves in the approaching the Passover Feast, which is a remembrance of the miraculous exodus from Egypt where the Israelites were ‘passed over’ by the angel of death – the final straw breaking the heart of Pharaoh and triggering the...
Holy Week Experience: Intro
Narrative. If you look at the way people understand life, it all goes back to the interpretation of narrative. When I think of the most memorable speeches, sermons, books, etc. that I have experienced, the common link is that there were high impact narrative stories behind them. Liturgically the church has employed narrative in the church year. Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and...