Carrying Holy Week

It was Thursday night, after Maundy Thursday services. I listened to a voicemail from my best friend, who is also a pastor. “I don’t need anything, really. I just wanted to talk. I’m just feeling… something. I don’t know what it is.” 

‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘I know what it is. It is the weight of Holy Week.’ 

It is not exactly sadness or depression or grief or fear. It is not exactly exhaustion or stress or overwhelmed-ness or tension. It is some of all of these things. And, it is more. 

As pastor, I experience Holy Week in a different way than I ever experienced it as ‘simply’ participant. Even when I was assisting minister or intern, the Three Days were about me and God and God’s transforming work. Only as pastor did I become aware of the weight, the honor, the responsibility, the burden of carrying a congregation through these days. God calls us to stare death in the face and carry our congregations directly to that place. These people we love, we cherish, for whom we have great responsibility, we take to the edge of death and plunge into it with them.

This is heavy. It is burdensome. Not burdensome in a way I wish to cast off and be rid of – but in the way of an honored animal who has been entrusted to keep an entire family’s possessions secure as they cross a raging river. Carrying those we deeply love, we step into the waters of death; hoping, praying, trusting for a miracle. Hoping, praying, trusting that we will make it through the danger and come out on the other side, resurrected. 

We need no more faith in the story than we had before we were pastors. We need no more guidance than the story itself. We need no more promise than that which we already have received. But perhaps we need more courage. 

Because as pastors, when we step into these waters of death, we do not do so alone. We take our entire communities with us. And we pray, and we hope, and we trust that God will not only meet us there, but bring us through to the other side, where in the end we might raise up our voices in a triumphant shout: God has overcome!! 

But today, our Alleluias wait. Today, our lips move in silent, fervent prayer. Today, our hearts tremble. And today, we carry this weight as we walk, together with Christ, into death.