A young woman was hosting a dinner party for her friends with a pot roast being the centerpiece of the menu that evening. One of her friends enjoyed it so much that she asked for the recipe, and the young woman wrote it down for her. Upon looking over the recipe, her friend inquired, “Why do you cut both ends off the roast before it is prepared and put in the pan?” The young woman replied, “I don’t know, but that is what my mother always did when she cooked this.”
The next day the young woman called her mom and the memory came up. She decided to ask, “Mom, when we make the pot roast, why do we cut off and discard the ends before we set it in the pan and season it?” Her mom quickly replied, “That is how your grandma always did it and I learned the recipe from her.”
Now the young woman was really curious, so she called her elderly grandma and asked her the same question: “Grandma, I often make the pot roast recipe that I learned from mom and she learned from you. Why do you cut the ends off the roast before you prepare it?” The grandmother thought for a while, since it had been years since she made the roast herself, and then replied, “I cut them off because the roast was always bigger than the pan I had back then. I had to cut the ends off to make it fit.”
As a congregation and as Christianity in general, we are about to embark on a journey that comes up every year – something called “Holy Week”. There is work and preparation that goes into these services and the celebrations around this week, which might cause us to ask a simple set of questions: Why? What is the point of Holy Week?
Answers like “it’s tradition” are unsatisfying and unfulfilling. Tradition is not bad, but tradition for the sake of itself is just cutting off the ends of the roast. Rather, our celebration of Holy Week is not meant to be tradition for its own sake. Instead, we gather together knowing that there is power in the experience of Holy Week. That power is found in walking with Jesus through the most important moments of His life for us. That power is found in gathering together and setting aside our own time so that we may experience His time in these services. That power is found in seeing each of those moments as saturated by love that formed the reason for Jesus’ sacrifice for us.
May your Holy Week this year be one that is more than just cutting off the ends of a roast.