Message of Abbot Paul - Friday 31st March 2023

This coming Sunday we will be celebrating Palm Sunday as Holy Week begins. In the U.K. it all tends to be rather minimal and low key, very sad really. So my thoughts turn towards Peru and other Latin American countries, where I spent so many exhausting but happy years celebrating Holy Week and Easter, or to Greece, where I spent several Holy Weeks and Easters as a student. Today, the Friday before Palm Sunday, the first of the great nine processions of Holy Week takes place, that of the Dolorosa, the Sorrowful Mother of Our Lord. The procession begins after an evening Mass, accompanied by a band, through the streets of Tambogrande and not end until daybreak. Then at dawn on Easter Sunday there is the procession of the Risen Christ, known as Los Encuentros, following on from the Easter Vigil that begins at 3am. The town’s entire population always seemed to be present at everything. This year Byzantine Easter is a week later than our Western Easter, so I will have the joy of celebrating Holy Week a second time, in Greece via YouTube. I fear I’m a glutton for Liturgy and popular religion when it comes to Holy Week and Easter. How I wish I could be back in Peru today, but I’ll have to make do with vivid memories and what can be found live on the Internet, although the six-hour time difference makes it difficult. Please forgive my bouts of nostalgia, but I find Holy Week a particularly bleak week to cope with in the U.K.

 

​Our Gospel for today comes once more from John, (Jn 10: 31-42), and although we’ve moved on a couple of chapters, the religious authorities are still fetching stones with which to stone Jesus. He asks them, “I have done many good works for you to see, works from my Father; for which of these are you stoning me?” But they reply, “We are not stoning you for doing a good work but for blasphemy: you are only a man and you claim to be God.” You will remember that yesterday Jesus used the Holy Name of God and applied it to himself. I AM, the name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. “Before Abraham was, I AM” Jesus argues from scripture, where in the psalms we find written, “You are gods and sons of the Most High.” (Ps 82: 6) Jesus retorts, “You say to someone the Father has consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because he says, ‘I am the son of God.’” He wants them to believe in his works, if not in him. Yet his final statement is even stronger than his first. “You will know for sure that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” If only they would take notice of his works, they too would come to this conclusion. They want to arrest him, so yet again he eludes them. He goes back to where John had been baptising, on the far side of the Jordan. For a short while, the situation calms down and Jesus is at peace. People there even come to believe in him in contrast to the religious leaders in Jerusalem. But things are coming to a head.