Rector’s Invitation to Holy Week 2025.

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

I am making this video to tell you about the single most important thing that has ever happened in our parish’s history. It’s also the single most important thing to have happened in your life and my life, and in the lives of our families and community.

I am speaking of the self-offering of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God in flesh, on the Cross on Good Friday. I am speaking of his death.

This death, seen in the light of his resurrection, reveals two things to us. First, it reveals the failure of this world to be what God desires. St Luke tells us that Herod and Pilate became fast friends that day, after they had sent Jesus off to their underlings to be tortured and killed as a matter of political expediency and good management. Cruelty, fraud, and spectacle appear to win the day and to recline together in enjoyment of their success. And the world still depends on cruelty, fraud and spectacle as it careens forward.

But something else happens in this death. Seen from the vantage of faith, or his resurrection, Jesus’ death is not abject failure, but final victory and an unrestrained revelation of who God is and how God relates to us. Here love unreserved, unconstrained, love to the end, is revealed at last — and more than revealed, through the pouring of his life, his blood, on the cross, he becomes a source of love at the heart of every human life, at the center of every moment of human living, and dying.

I can put it this way: Jesus’ death is a wound put forever at the center of every human life. But out of this wound, forever at the center of us, out of the spectacle of the cross, flow love and mercy and divine joy for us.

This is the most important thing ever to happen in the history of St. Matthew’s, and the history of your life and mine. I thus invite you to take the time, to make the effort, and turn to attend on this giving of love by joining generously in our Holy Week services this year.

Come to Palm Sunday, when we walk with Jesus into Jerusalem, facing his death. Come to Maundy Thursday, when Jesus washes our feet, and institutes the love-feast of the Eucharist, and when we strip our sanctuary of all finery just as Jesus was stripped. Come to Good Friday, when we enter into a most solemn meditation on his death at the very center of our lives and the world’s existence. Finally, come to the Great Vigil of Easter or the Easter morning services to celebrate the joy rising up, our joy eternal, in his embodied Resurrection.

With prayer