A different Holy Week
Despite the claims of Christmas, Holy Week and Easter have always been the central moments of the Christian year. It's the week we come back again to the moment when the Creator of the world, in the person of Jesus Christ, entered the heart of the darkness of that world to rescue and redeem it - the ultimate snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat. It's also the time we remember what it means to be followers of this man. At one point Jesus used a particularly stark image to say what that means. He said we were to 'take up our cross' and follow him. For centuries, Christians have puzzled over what that involves, but at the time, it was a dramatic picture. Urban dwellers in Roman provinces were used to the sight of condemned criminals carrying the means of their own looming deaths on their backs before undergoing the ultimate punishment. I have been thinking of how I 'take up my cross and follow Jesus' during Holy Week this year. During that dramatic fi...