Holy Week Reflections

Holy Week is my favorite week of the church year. It’s a week that engages us in deep ways — if we respond to the invitation. It’s also a week that is easy for many people to just skip over and treat like any other week. That’s their loss though. The invitation is there for people to participate in all that this week offers. But it’s just that — an invitation.

The core of what this week is about is love after all. And love is invitational. I’m reminded of what love is in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“Love never ends.”

(1 Corinthians 13:1–8a)

And of course this description that Paul writes is also a description of who God is since God is love.