The Week that Refuses to Look Away

The Reverend Kay Dennis, Deacon

Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

Holy Week arrives not with spectacle but with a kind of steady gravity, as though time itself has slowed to allow us to see what we usually refuse to notice. It does not demand attention in the way headlines do. Instead, it gathers us—quietly, insistently— into the long, difficult story at the heart of the Christian faith: that love, when it is most faithful, is also most vulnerable.

We begin with palms— waving branches, borrowed joy, a crowd eager for deliverance. The scene is almost too familiar, and perhaps that is part of its danger. We know how quickly celebration can turn, how easily hope can be reshaped into disappointment when it does not arrive in the form we expected. The same voices that cry “Hosanna” are not so far removed from those that will later fall silent, or worse, join in the clamor for something safer, more manageable than a king who refuses to conquer.

Holy Week does not flatter us. It reveals how thin our certainties can be, how fragile our loyalties. It reminds us that we are not only the hopeful crowd at the gates—we are also the disciples who misunderstand, the friends who fall asleep, the voices that hesitate when truth becomes costly.

And yet, this week is not about our failure.

It turns, instead, on a series of gestures so quiet they might be missed if we are not paying attention. A meal shared. Bread broken. Feet washed. These are not grand acts by the standards of the world, but they carry a weight that outlasts empires. In the Gospel of John, we are told that Jesus, “knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands,” knelt down and washed the feet of his disciples. It is a startling reversal—not of power, but of how power is revealed.

Here is authority expressed not in control, but in service. Not in distance, but in nearness. It is the kind of authority that does not protect itself but gives itself away.

This is where Holy Week becomes uncomfortably close to home. For it asks us—not in theory, but in the texture of our ordinary lives—what we believe power is for. It asks what kind of community we are willing to become if we take seriously a God who kneels.

As the week unfolds, the shadows lengthen. The language grows sharper, the air heavier. We move from table to garden, from prayer to arrest, from hurried trials to public execution. There is nothing abstract about this movement. It is political and personal, public and intimate. It is, in every sense, real.

And this, too, matters. Because the cross is not an idea. It is an event—one that exposes the machinery of fear and violence that runs through every age, including our own. It shows us what happens when truth stands unprotected before power, when love refuses to defend itself by becoming what it opposes.

We may be tempted to look away. We often do.

But Holy Week will not let us.

 It asks us to remain— not as spectators, but as witnesses. To stand at the foot of the cross, not with easy explanations, but with the honesty of those who know how much of this story is still being lived out in our world.

Yet even here, the story does not end in despair. There is, beneath the grief of this week, a deeper current—a promise not yet visible, but already at work. It is the quiet assurance that what is given in love is never lost, that even in the face of death, something has been set in motion that cannot be undone.

Holy Week does not resolve quickly. It does not offer neat conclusions or easy comfort. Instead, it invites us to stay—to inhabit the tension, to carry the questions, to trust that even here, especially here, God is at work.

And perhaps that is its most urgent word for us now: not to rush past the darkness, not to explain it away, but to remain present—to one another, to the suffering of the world, and to the God who, in this week above all, refuses to remain distant.