Holy Week 2025: Hope for a Wounded World

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of what Christians call “Holy Week.”
It’s a journey—through celebration, betrayal, silence, suffering, and, ultimately, resurrection. A week that tells the story of Jesus’ final days, but also holds an invitation into the full range of human experience.

In this ancient narrative, we encounter joy and grief, courage and fear, love and injustice. It’s the macrocosm of the microcosm—a mirror for our own lives. It reflects our personal paths through birth and death, love and loss, and the slow transformation that comes not by avoiding pain but by experiencing it.

Holy Week invites us not to escape the harshness of our world, but to move more deeply into it. To walk the path Jesus walked. To see clearly the systems of power, the fragility of our humanity, and the hope that resurrection brings—not as a denial of suffering, but as its holy transformation.

A Peaceful Protest

Palm Sunday is often celebrated with children waving palm branches and shouting, “Hosanna! God save us!” in churches across the world. But what they’re celebrating is a protest—not a violent revolution, but a subversive act. Jesus rides into Jerusalem not on a warhorse, but on a young donkey.

To his followers, this act would’ve echoed the words of the prophet Zechariah: “See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey.” (Matthew 21:5) But to the empire, this was dangerous theater. It mocked the spectacle of Roman power and pointed toward a kingdom not of domination, but of humility.

Jesus’ entry was a protest against the kind of power that crushes, manipulates, and controls. It announced a different kind of authority—one grounded in love, not fear; in compassion, not coercion; in community, not conquest.

Modern-day prophets will be revealed through sacred resistance—not just resistance—we must not fight the devil with the devil.

Holy Week begins by asking us: What kind of power do we trust? What kind of kingdom are we building?

The Path of Suffering

It doesn’t take long for the cheers of Palm Sunday to turn into betrayal, trials, and the anguish of Good Friday. The hope-filled crowd disappears. Leaders condemn. And Jesus, who came to love and liberate, is crucified by a system that could not bear the truth he carried.

Anne Lamott, with her usual blend of humor and raw honesty, once said, “We want resurrection without the crucifixion. Change without surrender.”

And she’s right. We’d all prefer transformation without pain. But Holy Week doesn’t allow for shortcuts. The path to new life asks us to show up fully—to walk with Jesus through betrayal, injustice, suffering, and silence, and to participate in our own resurrection and the resurrection of others.

Resurrection Does Not Erase Suffering—It Redeems It

Our culture loves a good shortcut—instant coffee, same-day delivery, spiritual bypassing. But Holy Week insists on the long way around.

Jesus doesn’t dodge pain—he enters it. And the risen Christ still bears scars. They’re not hidden. They’re holy.

“Resurrection isn’t a magic trick; 
it is the holy reweaving of what has been torn apart.”

It’s not denial—it’s defiant hope. It says to every hurting soul: Yes, this happened. And yes, there is more life still to come.

This is good news for all of us who carry grief, for all of us who live with pain that doesn’t go away, for all of us trying to find hope in a wounded world. Easter is not naïve. It is not blind to the world’s brutality. It is the deepest kind of courage—the hope that dares to stand in the graveyard and say, “Even here, life will rise again.”

Who Tells the Story?

When we look at the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, it’s not the powerful or the popular who remain at the center. It’s the weeping women. It’s the outsiders. The foreigner who carried his cross. The women who anointed him. The ones who stayed at the foot of the cross. The ones who showed up at the tomb. It’s Mary Magdalene as an apostle to the apostles.

They weren’t making speeches, writing tweets, Substacks, or giving public sermons. But they told the story—with tears, with touch, with presence. It’s scandalous and holy.

They were the ones who understood: this wasn’t just the death of a man. This was the death of a system—a way of relating to God and to one another rooted in hierarchy, fear, and control.

Jesus, the man who is God, came to end a human way of relating to the divine—one distorted by sin.

Sin as Broken Relationship

Philosopher and theologian Martin Buber once offered an interpretation of Creation in Genesis and John 1:1: “In the beginning was the relationship.”

This is where we start: with connection, with belonging, with love.

And sin, according to Fr. Andy Hamilton, is the breaking of that relationship:

“Because respect is the natural expression of love, sin is always a failure to love.”

Not just personal moral failure, but rupture—between people, between humanity and God, and between humanity and creation.

Sin shows up in the systems we create: in racism, patriarchy, greed, religious arrogance, fear, and neglect. In all the ways we choose separation over solidarity, power over presence, self-protection over love.

And Jesus entered into that world—our world—not to escape it, but to heal it from within.

He knew what would happen. That the same forces that killed the prophets would come for him. That systems built on fear cannot bear the presence of unarmed love.

And still, he came. And still, he loved.

We Need the Paschal Mystery in 2025

This year, more than ever, we need the pattern of death, burial, and resurrection. We need the Paschal Mystery.

We are living through ecological collapse, political division, mass displacement, and collective burnout. We are more connected than ever and yet lonelier than we’ve ever been. Our systems are strained. Our relationships are ruptured. Our souls are exhausted.

Holy Week does not offer easy answers. But it does offer a path.

It asks us to see the truth of where we are. To name what needs to die. To bury what no longer serves life. And to  co-create, even in the dark, and trust that God is at work. That new life will emerge.

This is not a promise of quick fixes. It’s the deeper work of transformation—of becoming what Henri Nouwen called “wounded healers” in a world that is both beautiful and broken.

Becoming Wounded Healers

Jesus is not just our Savior—he is our pattern, our model, our way.

He shows us that healing comes not through dominance but through vulnerability. That courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to act in love anyway. That resurrection is not for the perfect, but for those willing to face the truth about themselves.

We are invited to face our own sin patterns—our habits of separation and self-protection—and put them to death.

And then, to rise. Not as unscarred people, but as people who carry their wounds with grace. Who can sit with others in pain. Who know the valley of the shadow and walk with others through it.

We rise as those who have walked the way of Holy Week. Who know what betrayal feels like. Who have sat in silence. Who have buried dreams. And to quote Maya Angelou, “Still I (we) rise.”

We rise not to escape the world’s pain, but to enter it more fully—with eyes open, hearts tender, and hands ready to heal.

The Invitation of Easter

So what does Easter mean for us this year?

• It means we are not alone in our suffering.
• It means every system built on fear will one day fall.
• It means the marginalized tell the truth—and we listen.
• It means love enters our fear, grief, rage and transforms it.
• It means we rise and participate in the healing of our world.
• It means that death never has the last word.

And it means that we, too, are called to live this rhythm:
To protest with our palms.
To share our strength and weakness.
To weep with those who mourn.
To confront what must die.
And to trust in a resurrection, while we wait for it.

Civil rights leader Howard Thurman wrote:

“This is what Easter means in the experience of the [human] race. This is the resurrection! It is the announcement that life cannot ultimately be conquered by death… that there is strength added when the labors increase, that multiplied peace matches multiplied trials, that life is bottomed by the glad surprise. Take courage, therefore: When we have exhausted our store of endurance, when our strength has failed ere the day is half done, when we reach the end of our hoarded resources, our Father’s full giving is only begun!”

Let’s pray together—

Oh, Resurrected One,
May we have the audacious courage to walk this path.
May the glad surprise and the work of resurrection be within us and between us—this Holy Week, Easter 2025, and always.

With faith, hope, and especially love,
Scott and Clare

Revs. Clare and Scott Loughrige
Co-Lead Pastors Crossroads Church and Ministries
Co-Authors Spiritual Rhythms for the Enneagram:  A Handbook for Harmony and Transformation (InterVarsity Press)

PS: Friends, we are more devoted than ever to bring the Healing Space and the Harmony of the Triune God to you and our world!