Holy Week Then and Now

Detail from Giotto fresco of The Crucifixion in the Arena Chapel, Padua

So we’re now into what the Western Church calls Holy Week. It starts on Palm Sunday (last Sunday) and finishes at the end of Saturday, as Easter morning dawns. It is perhaps the greatest eight-day period in the Christian calendar, following the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

This year, two events have hit the international headlines which have particular resonance to that week. One took place a week before Good Friday, and the other the day before Palm Sunday.

To take them in reverse order: St Matthew records the crowds surrounding Jesus in the magnificent Temple buildings on the first Palm Sunday: “But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ they were indignant, and they said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read,

“Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise”?’

And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.”

Last Saturday we witnessed astonishing crowds assemble in Washington DC in front of the Capitol building. They were largely young people of school age in The March for Our Lives, protesting about the shootings which have cost so many lives in the States and calling for tighter gun control legislation. I was reminded of that first Palm Sunday when a girl aged 11 gave a three and a half minute speech to that huge crowd. Her name is Naomi Wadler. Her focus was the disproportionate number of black young people who are killed but never hit the headlines. The section that struck me was this:

“People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be eleven, and we might still be elementary school, but we know. We know life isn’t equal for everyone, and we know what is right and wrong. We also know that we stand in the shadow of the capitol, and we know that we have seven short years until we, too, have the right to vote. So I am here today to honor the words of Toni Morrison: ‘If there is a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.’ I urge everyone here and everyone who hears my voice to join me in telling the stories that aren’t told, to honor the girls, the women of color who are murdered at disproportionate rates in this nation. I urge each of you to help me write the narrative for this world and understand, so that these girls and women are never forgotten.”

Sometimes children see the truth more clearly than their “elders and betters” - whether priests or politicians, senators or Sadducees. I suspect the children weren’t among that night-time rent-a-mob who less than five days later were calling for blood. I suspect the young people in front of Capitol Hill won’t change their tune in a hurry. I hope not.

St John records the intimate conversation that Jesus had with his friends the night before he was tortured to death. Part of it was, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” And that of course is what he did next day, which is why we call it Good Friday (as Giles Fraser explained this morning on Thought for the Day).

This year exactly a week before Good Friday, we heard about a conspicuous act of bravery, in which Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame (aged 42) died on Saturday after volunteering to replace a female hostage during a terrorist attack on the Super U supermarket in Trèbes, southern France. There can be no doubt that he knew it would lead to his being shot. He had served in Iraq in 2005 and received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest award, in 2012. Last year he was named deputy commander of anti-terror police in the Aude region. There is a great tribute to him by local priest, Father Jean-Baptiste, who was preparing him and Marielle for the religious completion of their wedding. “By substituting himself for the hostages, he was probably motivated by a commitment to gallantry as an officer, because for him being a policeman meant protecting. But he knew the incredible risk that he was taking.

Photo: SkyNews

“He also knew the promise of religious marriage he made to Marielle, who is already his wife and who he loved tenderly, as I witnessed. So? Was he right to take such a risk? It seems to me that only his faith can explain the madness of this sacrifice which is today the admiration of all. He knew, as Jesus told us, that ‘There is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15.13). He knew that if his life began to belong to Marielle, it was also to God, to France, to his brothers in danger of death. I believe that only a Christian faith animated by charity could ask for this superhuman sacrifice.” (The whole account is well worth reading here.) To quote Giles Fraser, may he rest in peace and rise in glory.

For Marielle it must be like being one of the women at the foot of the cross, utterly heart-breaking. As Father Jean-Baptiste comments, “I could not marry him…, because he was unconscious. Arnaud will never now have children in life. But his astonishing heroism will, I believe, inspire many imitators, ready to give of themselves to France and her Christian joy.” I trust that Marielle will be given some glimpse of resurrection hope on Easter Day.

How much we need that light in these days when even I find the news unremittingly dark! Good lasts longer than evil; love is stronger than hate; life will defeat evil – they already have.