Entering the spirit of Holy Week
With Holy Week, we mark the end of the Lenten season to enter into the most important mystery of the redemptive work of Christ, which is his passion, death and resurrection, aka the paschal mystery.
It’s like we were having a journey or a pilgrimage in Lent toward the most sacred event in our history, after which we will enjoy a period of supreme joy and peace in Easter that extends for some weeks.
It’s important that we don’t lose our spiritual bearing as we go through the Holy Week. Now we have to make some special effort to achieve this ideal, since the environment today is so paganized many people prefer to be in the beaches than in churches during Holy Week.
The Holy Week is “the” week in the Church calendar. It also should be so in the life of each one of us, believers and followers of Christ. If we go by our faith, it’s the week when we practice the most rigorous of our spirit of penance and sacrifice to match with the very passion and death of Christ on the Cross.
Why? Because we can only resurrect with Christ if we also suffer and die with him. St. Paul describes it this way in his Letter to the Romans: “If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” (6,5)
We have to be familiar with this language of our faith, and in fact make it as our own. That’s why we always need to exercise our faith, and especially as we go through the many events of Holy Week.
Our faith is not an on-and-off affair, much less, an optional element. It’s meant to be an abiding thing, the one that guides us all day. Considering it otherwise would actually be a disaster, since without faith we would just be left to our own devices. No matter how smart we are, without faith we will fail to reach our ultimate goal.
Our usual problem is that we put our faith often in the mute mode, sometimes thinking that such faith takes us away from reality. Or that it is a bother to our spontaneous desires for fun and action. Hardly anything can be farther than the truth.
Faith is the ultimate source of truth. It’s not only what we see or understand that gives us the truth. It’s what God gives us to understand, what he shows us and reveals to us that teaches us the truth. And that’s what faith is.
We need to correct this mistaken mentality about faith that sadly is spreading like wild fire especially among the young today. With a handicapped faith, we will fail to realize the eternal value of Christ’s cross, actually a good news to all of us, never a wet blanket or a nuisance.
Christ’s Cross is that indispensable element that completes and perfects the process of our creation. It’s what gives meaning and direction to our rich spiritual endowments we received in the first stage of our creation in Adam and Even, making us the image and likeness of God, and with his grace, children of his.
Christ’s Cross gathers all the sins of men from the beginning of time up to the end, making us to realize the true and objective malice of our sins that would require God to become man to save us.
With the Cross, Christ makes all our sins his own, without committing them, and dies to them so as to allow us to participate in his resurrection.
We need to have a good grasp of the situation, and avoid being held captive by a reductive if not childish understanding of the spirit of Holy Week. The Holy Week is the most exciting week of the year.
It’s when the fullness of our being gets totally engaged with the dynamics of love Christ our redeemer is offering us. It’s when we are invited to give our all to correspond to the all God gives us. It’s a dance of love involving our whole being and with cosmic dimensions and eternal effects.
This is how we have to understand the Holy Week. It’s not just one more week of the year, my dear. We have to be careful with the spiritually blind and deaf attitude that emerges in our society during Holy Week, emptying it of its true religious value.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
