Entering the Drama

Staple diets are, by necessity, quite plain: bread and butter, rice and beans. These are the simple and strengthening sustenance of daily life, enabling us to survive and grow. Much of the Church’s life throughout the year might be said to be similar – it is necessarily ‘ordinary’.

Holy Week, though, is one of those times when ordinary goes out the window, when we taste and savour the bitterness and gall, when we enter human devastation, when we get caught up in drama and tension, and everything feels distinctly off. We are invited into a story that flits between intimate friendship and pained betrayal, between expectant joy and the dark depths of hopelessness.

We, of course, know the end of the story; but no-one reads a novel just for the ending. So from Palm Sunday, through the daily Eucharists of Holy Week, to the sudden brief joy of Maundy Thursday which ends in collapse, to the painful waiting and watching of Good Friday, and the day of emptiness that follows, we resolve to enter that unfolding drama. It is a complex drama in which somehow God himself is sold and maimed and killed; a drama that tests all involved, and will indeed test us; a drama by which somehow we believe death and sin are defeated, even at and by the very point where they seem to have won.

This Holy Week, don’t bother with life-as-usual, don’t bother with ordinary: come and walk through a story that has changed the world, and still can.

The Revd James Crockford

Assistant Priest