This week takes us from the triumphal entry of Jesus, surrounded by friends, crowds, and worshippers through the political machinations and schemings of the authorities, through to his murder on Good Friday.  It really does go from the best of times to the worst of times.

In many ways it's a very bleak week, and lots of people do feel it profoundly.  So if that's you - hang in there!

It's meant to be bleak, we are, afterall, walking with Jesus afresh through the most traumatic event in history; when the very fabric of reality was torn, and an eternal wound inflicted upon God himself.  It's a week, if taken seriously, that can profoundly change us forever.

It's tempting to shy away from the pain and suffering that lies at the heart of our faith, to focus purely on the joy, and wonder of the resurrection - but if we do, we really rob ourselves of our deepest treasure.  This week reminds us that God didn't just take on humanity for Christmas cards, and parties - but to be hung on a cross.  To bleed.  To experience separation and desertion from his friends, and from Himself.  To die.  

In 'Mysterium Paschale' Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that it is only in doing so that God, the Son, Jesus, plumbs the full depths of what it means to be human at its absolute and extreme worst.  Utterly broken, rejected, and alone - cut off even from God.  Abandoned to eternity.  

Moltmann reminds us that by the Son's being forsaken, the Father also loses his identity - this is not cosmic child abuse, it's a deliberate decision by the persons of the Trinity to share in the deepest and darkest moments of humanity - even if it means creating a wound of impossible consideration.  It is by going there that God, in a way that causes him to tear himself apart, takes hold of even that brokenness and restores it to himself - but we don't get to restoration until Easter.  For the moment we are in the presence of the most powerful, most painful, most destructive act of love the universe has ever known.  

Is it any wonder that to look that experience in the face is to feel and share the sorrow?  But perhaps in sharing and feeling the sorrow of that experience we get to look again in wonder at the God who loved us so much he would do that for us?  Perhaps even whisper, through the tears, a "thank you"?  Because this week reminds us that there is no human experience, rejection, or brokenness that remains untouched by God's love.  There is no one abandoned, forgotten about, and desolate that is beyond his power.  God loves you, no matter who you are, where you've been, or what you've done - and through his actions on that day even the worst of everything you are, or have experienced, has been redeemed.  You have been washed by his blood to stand holy and righteous in his sight.

Pause for prayer: What words are there that can do this justice? Let the silence of eternity speak.