Holy Week is the holy ground we live in between life and death, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure in our world.
This is Jesus talking to his disciples before he was nailed to a cross:
32 Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. 33 I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:32-33)
The week we celebrate and remember Jesus’ death and resurrection, walking a line of holy tension that makes us consider both suffering and resurrection and honors both parts of the story, both parts of our own experience on earth.
When I think of tension, I think of a tightrope. If the rope is not stretched tight and secured strongly on both ends the rope falls and everything the rope is holding crashes. Our present state of living is in tension, on the tightrope. Presence is what is in the middle.
Holy Week is a reminder of that tight rope – that tension – His presence in life and death, suffering and healing, joy and sorrow. If they aren’t secured in Jesus, both ends of the tension, everything falls.
We live in the tension of knowing Jesus died for us. AND He rose again for us. He did both to forgive us, to save us, and to give us a resurrected life in Him. We live in the tension of remembering both the death and life of Jesus. Knowing it is finished, but we aren’t finished yet, we live in tension, praying for His Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We live in the tension, until he comes back again and takes us off the tightrope, out of the tension and into his Kingdom forever.
If we get stuck in the suffering, without the joy in Jesus, we fall. If all we feel are rainbows and butterflies, we miss the richness and purpose of how the rainbow and butterfly got to be beautiful and free.
