Weekly Thoughts

FATHER MICHAEL’S DIARY

11 APRIL 2025

DON’T LOOK AWAY

So we reach Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week, the most intense week in the Christian year. What will it be like this year? What events in the real world: President Trump’s antics, natural disasters, wars, atrocities will provide a backdrop to our consideration of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection. Perhaps we welcome these distractions, things around us which take our minds off the grim realities the Church puts before us in these days. But if we are to observe Holy Week properly we must not allow ourselves to be distracted. We must hold our attention on our Lord and what he endured. We must die with him if we are to rise with him on Easter Day. We might prefer to focus on other things, more pleasant things: the Spring sunshine, Easter bunnies, hot cross buns and Easter eggs, roast lamb and Simnel cake rather than kangaroo courts, and summary justice and floggings and crowns of thorns to say nothing of crucifixion. 

I’ve just watched a film about the army photographic unit that filmed the relief of Belsen concentration camp in 1945. One of the men involved asked himself how could the Germans have done this? And concluded that if the Germans could have done it then anybody, given the right conditions, could. The same goes for us and our Lord’s passion we could have yelled for his crucifixion, we could have mocked him on the way to calvary, we could have watched the soldiers nailing him to the cross. We could have watched and done nothing, just as we watch suffering today: the Palestinians in Gaza, the earthquake victim in Myanmar and do nothing. 

Maybe there is nothing we can do, but we can at least do this: we can watch the suffering in our world today through the perspective of our Lord’s suffering. A prisoner tried to escape from a concentration camp but got trapped in the barbed wire, the guards then shot him and left him there to die. One of the prisoners who watched this asked where is God in all this horror and the answer came: dying on the barbed wire. “I am in agony until the end of time” says our Lord. God doesn’t allow suffering to take place, its part of the fallen world in which we live, but in Christ God shares that that suffering and so must we.

READINGS AND PRAYERS

13 APRIL – PALM SUNDAY – Luke 19.28-40 – the triumphal entry – that we may walk with Jesus in his passion

14 APRIL – Fig Monday – Matt 21.18-22 – Jesus curses the fig tree – that our faith may bear fruit

15 APRIL – Temple Tuesday Matt 24.1-8 – Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple – that our faith may hold whatever befalls us

16 APRIL – Spy Wednesday – Matt 26.3,4,14-16 – Judas agrees to betray Jesus – that we may remain faithful to our Lord

17 APRIL - MAUNDY THURSDAY – John 13.1-17, 31b-35 – the new commandment – for our clergy and ministers

18 APRIL – GOOD FRIDAY – Isaiah 52.13-53.12 – the song of the suffering servant – praise to Christ king of eternal glory

19 APRIL – HOLY SATURDAY – Matt .27.57-66 – the burial of Jesus – that we may hold fast to our faith in the resurrection