Psalm 31:11-15; Luke 19:37-40

The Black Hole of Holy Week

Dear friends,

It took a combining of images of giant telescopes from around the world to come up with one faint image of a black hole 55 million light years away. As small and a s faint as it is the black hole is several billion times the size of our sun. One scientist said:” We have seen what is unseeable.”  Another scientist described black holes as “the most exotic major disrupter of cosmic order.”  The journalist in the New York times called it “a smoky ring framing a one way portal to eternity.”

                Friends, now let’s switch to Palm Sunday.  It is an event we replay every year, remembering a few hours in the three years of tumultuous ministry of a man who died at 33.  It might as well be light years away, for it is so removed from experience. We do bring in some palms every year to make it vivid, but this year we underplay it, because we want to switch the focus from Palm Sunday to Holy Week. Veronica had an interesting question as we were preparing: Are we doing Palms or Passion? And I went: “what?”  She said” churches tend to jump straight from Palm Sunday to Easter.”  It’s true.  In our church we do jump from one to the other. We fly from joy to joy, from palms to the Easter egg hunt.   Some of you will attend our joint Good Friday service but we do not get the full feeling.  But in Holy Week, that week that lies between the palms and the empty grave is a black hole we are trying not to get sucked into. No mortified Jesus in the Garden in Gethsemane desperately trying to avoid His fate. No Last Supper, no Good Friday if we can help it.  So, again I want to let the palms lie where they are, kind of forget about them, let them fade, and focus on the blackness that is Holy Week.  This means we have to make a case for Holy Week.  Why is it important?

                Friends, Lent is ending. We have taken a kind of symbolic journey with Jesus, along with Jesus as He makes His way to Jerusalem. In today’s text He gets there. And there in this moment of joy as foretold by the prophet. We hear faint echoes of this is the streets of Algiers and Khartoum this week: maybe the oppression is coming to an end. It is like the Cubs winning the world series when you are from Chicago times one thousand. This is the earthly Messiah the people were hoping for. The crowd bubbles over with joy. But this is not what Jesus experiences. He senses what’s coming and He hasn’t bought into the earthly Messiah concept anyway. This is no spiritual Superbowl.  It is all an illusion. Still there is so much joy that of people would not sing with joy, Jesus says the stones would do it for them.

                Friends, but here we lose track of Jesus, we lose the trail of Jesus.  We have been following Him, but then when he needs us to go with Him the most, we go home.  We avoid he Black Hole that is about to swallow Him.

                Yet the Black Hole matters.  As the scientist says: it is a smoky ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.  You see it is in the Black that Jesus becomes fully human, to an exponential degree. He enters the Black Hole of human suffering.  It is as God being sucked into the worst of world’s creation: human cruelty, for what is worse than human cruelty. It is pain intentionally planned to hurt another human being. Nature can hurt us, illness can decimate us, animals can be violent, but there is no cruel intent. It’s just DNA and the need to stay alive.

                The power of the Christian message lies here: the portal to eternity, the road to salvation goes through suffering.  It is the black hole of Holy Week that Jesus’s vulnerability and frailty becomes one with others.  In identification and empathy Jesus becomes one with us.

                Friends, we have all known suffering and we have all seen other people suffering. Sometimes we see people suffer and it is just to must: the pain, the anxiety, the loss of dignity, the despair, the loneliness, the disruption of all that is ordered in our lives.  It all seems so senseless. So we are tempted to say:” o let’s party, let’s have fun, life is short.  Nothing wrong with that, as long as we know that in the fun does not lie our full humanity. It is a distraction from humanity.  Our full humanity emerges when we enter the black hole of other people’s suffering with them. No, you don’t have to stay there forever, as long as you don’t dance around it.

                So, you see, friends, Holy Week matters. It isn’t holy for nothing.  You don’t have to go to every religious event this week. I won’t, but we have to understand why it matters. In facing the suffering of Jesus which is human suffering at its most intense and palpable and the suffering of others, we aspire to our greatest humanity. May God give us strength. Amen.