On Holy Thursday, we enter into the celebration of the Paschal Triduum – the great feast celebrated over three days. Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil are three parts of a single whole. We are invited to gather around a lit candle (if possible at 7.30pm, the time when Fr Alan will be celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in our empty church.) We join ourselves spiritually to Jesus Christ, the Lord, as he embarks on the journey of his passion and death.
Lent is a time for taking stock, deepening our humility and finding ourselves closer to God. Traditionally, Holy Week is a time for seeking Reconciliation and peace. The attached Family Prayer for The End of Lent will help to celebrate God’s compassion and the grace of forgiveness.
Holy Week commences with the celebration of Palm Sunday. While our usual joyful procession, with children waving giant palms, is out of the question, we enter this sacred week with a simpler ritual, and invite each participant to take a green branch from the garden to hold during the prayer.
The pure human emotion of Jesus in this Gospel attests to the love he had for Lazarus, but this human affection is nothing compared with the future promise to which the actions of Jesus towards Lazarus will lead. It is ironic that in raising Lazarus to life, Jesus is ensuring his own death at the hands of the religious authorities!
There are two main points of today’s gospel: the blind man’s journey towards faith and belief, and the contrast between the attitudes of the blind man and his interrogators. Like the Samaritan woman at the well in last week’s gospel, the blind man gradually moves from lack of faith to faith.
Focus of the Readings… This gospel is best read in conjunction with the first reading from Exodus, in which the people of Israel, liberated from slavery in Egypt, are left thirsting in the desert. God provides them with water to sustain their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
Focus on the readings. In the later part of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus warns his disciples that he must journey to Jerusalem to suffer and die and to rise again. He begins his journey towards his fate, but that journey is interrupted by this wondrous moment where he is revealed as the glorious Messiah, the beloved Son of God.
This gospel text follows immediately from the baptism of Jesus. The final words of that text come from the voice from heaven: ‘This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.’ It is interesting that his tempter, the devil, uses the words ‘If you are the Son of God…’ to introduce two of his temptations. In this way, the devil is disputing the claim from heaven and trying to force Jesus to prove his sonship.
This week’s gospel continues the theme of going beyond what is required by law, but here Jesus takes the teaching much further. More than honouring the spirit of the law over the letter of the law, Jesus advocates what must have sounded like the ravings of a mad man to his hearers: don’t just allow a person to strike you once; offer him the other cheek as well.
The central theme of this week’s Gospel reading from Matthew is built upon over the next several weeks. In this text, Matthew is reassuring his Jewish audience that Jesus has not come to replace the Law of Judaism but to bring it to fullness and completion. In this gospel, Jesus reassures his hearers that ‘not one dot, one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law.’ Instead, Jesus extends the Law of Israel and interprets it in a new way.