Holy Week Journey to the Cross Palm Sunday: Jesus entered as King; God prepared His sacrifice.
Monday: Jesus cleanses the temple; God prepares those who will accept His sacrifice.
Tuesday: Jesus teaches in the temple for the last time; God sends His invitation of sacrifice.
Wednesday: Judas betrays; God waits for the responses to the invitation.
Holy Thursday: Jesus offers His body & blood at the Last Supper: God offers His sacrifice.
Good Friday: Jesus dies on the cross; God accepts His sacrifice.
Holy Saturday: Jesus takes the saints from Hades to Paradise; God receives His saints.
Easter Sunday: Jesus is risen! God give us eternal life in Jesus - the purest treasure.
A Holy Week reflection . . . .
“Dr Paul Brand was working among leprosy patients in India. There he preached a sermon, one of the best known and best loved. Brand was one of the few who would touch or closely approach a person with Hanson’s disease (leprosy)—townspeople quarantined them. Brand slipped in late to a patient’s gathering, sitting on the mat on the edge of an open courtyard. The air was heavy with combined odors of crowding bodies, poverty, stale spices, and treated bandages. The patients insisted on a few words from Dr. Brand, and he reluctantly agreed. He stood for a moment, empty of ideas, looking at the patients before him. His eyes were drawn to their hands, dozens of them, most pulled inward in the familiar ‘leprosy claw-hand,’ some with no fingers, some with a few stumps. Many patients sat on their hands or otherwise hid them from view.
‘I am a hand surgeon,’ he began, and waited for translation into Hindi. ‘So when I meet people, I can’t help looking at their hands. The palmist claims he can tell your future by looking at your hands. I can tell your past. For instance, I can tell what your trade has been by the position of the calluses and the condition of the nails. I can tell a lot about your character; I love hands.’ He paused and looked at the eager faces. ‘How I would have loved to meet Jesus and study his hands! But knowing what he was like, I can almost picture them, feel them.’
He paused again, then wondered aloud what it would have been like to meet Christ and study his hands. Dr. Brand traced the hands of Christ, beginning with infancy when his hands were small, helpless, futilely grasping. Then came the hands of the boy Jesus, clumsily holding a brush or stylus, trying to form letters of the alphabet. Then the hands of Christ the carpenter—rough, gnarled, with broken fingernails and bruises from working with saw and hammer. Then there were the hands of Christ the physician, the healer. Compassion and sensitivity seemed to radiate from them, so much so that when he touched people they could feel something of the divine spirit coming through. Christ touched the blind, the diseased, the needy. ‘Then,’ continued Dr. Brand,’ there were his crucified hands. It hurts me to think of a nail driven through the center of my hand, because I know what goes on there, the tremendous complex of tendons and nerves and blood vessels and muscles. It’s impossible to drive a spike through its center without crippling it. The thought of those hands being crippled reminds me of what Christ was prepared to endure. In that act he identified himself with all the deformed and crippled human beings in the world. Not only was he able to endure poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired, but—clawed hands with the cripple.’ The effect on the listening patients, all social outcasts, was electrifying. Jesus—a cripple, with a claw-hand like theirs? Brand continued, ‘And then there were his resurrected hands. One of the things I find most astounding is that, though we think of the future life as something perfected, when Christ appeared to his disciples he said, Come look at my hands, and he invited Thomas to put his finger into the print of the nail. Why did he want to keep the wounds of his humanity? Wasn’t it because he wanted to carry back  with him an eternal reminder of the sufferings of those on earth? He carried the marks of suffering so he could continue to understand the needs of those suffering. He wanted to be forever one with us.’
As he finished, Paul Brand was again conscious of hands as they were lifted, all over the courtyard, palm to palm in the Indian gesture of respect, namaste. The hands were the same stumps, the same missing fingers and crooked arches. Yet no one tried to hide them. They were held high, close to the face, in respect for Brand, but also with a new pride and dignity. God’s own response to the suffering made theirs easier.” (Philip Yancey; “Jesus’ Remembers”)
 
With Pope Francis’ invitation: “Holy Week is a privileged time when we are called to draw near to Jesus: friendship with him is shown in times of difficulty.”
God Bless, Fr. Tim