The journey of Holy Week is one we take each year, just as each and every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection on that first Easter Day. It is familiar, and we can ride through the narrative with the ease of that familiarity. It’s like driving the same route to work or school every day – we cease to actually notice the details, because we are on a kind of auto-pilot.
It takes something out of the ordinary to jolt us awake and into paying attention to what is around us. Sometimes it’s the incredible beauty of trees covered in frost. Other times it’s the way that the sun lights up the landscape and brings it to shining and sparkling life.
This Holy Week, I am inviting you all to try and see the story anew through the eyes of those first disciples, eyewitnesses of the events which are so very familiar to us. I wonder, what would it have been like to experience those events for real? To read the book for the first time, not knowing the ending, rather than it being a familiar story we’ve heard dozens of times before.
And, most importantly, what details suddenly stand out? What is God’s message for you this Holy Week? What new thing is God waiting to show you? I am very sure of this one thing – that if we ask for fresh insight, to see with the grace of the Holy Spirit, we will find something new we had never seen before with such piercing clarity.
Whatever Holy Week and the Day of Resurrection bring you this year, I pray that above all these holy days bring you into a closer walk with Jesus, not just this week, but in all the weeks to come.
May this week be holy and blessed for you and your families, and may you be filled with the joy of the Risen Lord this Easter.
Talisker
Richard Bavin – The Empty Tomb
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