A Covid-19 Holy Week Reflection

This week is Holy Week for Christians, and Passover in Judaism.  It is also a unique time in which we remember both of these religious observances this year, this unique time of Coronavirus or Covid-19.  How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? This is what we silently cry out this year.  There are no services, no physical gathering of the church.  How can we observe and remember this Holy time when we can’t be together?

In the Exodus story, we hear of the plight of the Hebrew people still enslaved by Pharaoh in Egypt.  The plagues have been happening and the latest one causes death.  But here’s the thing, the tradition of Passover came to be because the Jewish people remember that there was a deadly plague, they stayed in their homes, the plague passed them over, and they lived.  Stay at home and live.

Generations later, Jesus of Nazareth found himself in Jerusalem at the time of Passover.  On Maundy Thursday, Christians remember that Jesus held his last meal with his disciples, saying that he longed to share the Passover meal together, the Seder which remembers living through a deathly plague.  It is this meal which we have come to know as the sacrament of Communion, or Eucharist.

After they shared the meal, we read in sacred text that Jesus went out to the garden to pray.  He knew that he facing coming difficulty that would require all of his inner fortitude and spiritual strength.  And he said to his disciples “I am deeply grieved” (Mt. 26.38)  So in that moment, it was with a heavy heart that he lifted up his prayer “if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, your will be done.” And we know from the Good Friday narrative that the difficulty did not pass.

In some ways we might lament that this Holy Week/Passover is like no other, because we are missing the opportunity to remember together in our places of faith.  However, another way to view this week might be that we are observing this sacred week of remembrance in the midst of a challenge not faced in generations.  Perhaps we are living Passover and Holy Week like never before in our faith journeys. We are in the midst of a “plague,” which we hope will Passover, while we pray with heavy hearts that this cup might pass from us, and all the while try to prepare ourselves that we will likely need to go through the suffering of Good Friday before we arrive at the joy and relief of the new life Easter brings.

The coming days will be hard.  And yet we oddly and perhaps appropriately face these difficulties in the midst and context of Holy Week and Passover.  So our faith empowers us and invites us to believe that we can persevere all that lies before us, with the promise that death does not win.  New life awaits us on the other side of this present difficulty, and neither life nor death, nor powers, nor principalities can separate us from the love of God, who promises to go before us, behind us, hem us in, hold us in his hand, and be with us every step of the way.

In the coming days, may the meaning of Passover and Holy Week guide you.  May God keep you.  And may the promise Easter, that death itself has been defeated, hold you, inspire you, empower you and sustain you through this pandemic and always.  Amen.