Monday of Holy Week – Tom

 

This Holy Week we commemorate the words and actions of Jesus’ final days before his resurrection. Today, we read that Pilate symbolically washed his hands of any responsibility in Jesus’ death: “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24)

 

Just as Pilate did not want to get involved, so we too in our contemporary society often choose not to  “[stand] up for what is good and right and true in God’s sight.”

 

What do we as Christians believe is “true in God’s sight”? Jesus provided the answer succinctly in The Great Commandment:

 

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  Matthew 22:34-39

 

Loving God means following Him not only in our beliefs but also in our actions. This includes the many important choices we can make this very day to live out the Great Commandment: Addressing racial justice (loving our neighbor), environmental justice (loving God’s creation), and welcoming the stranger (persons fleeing from oppression and violence). In other words, loving not just people like us, but also those who are “different” from us –  a different skin color, a different economic background, a different nationality, i.e., all God’s children.

 

This, I believe, is the lesson we are taught in witnessing and responding to Pilate’s actions. Rather than not getting involved and doing the right thing, today we can choose to practice the love that God shows us through the life, death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ, loving what God loves, which is everything and everyone.

 

Worth thinking about this week and always.

 

Thanks be to God.

 

– Tom Smyth, EFM Alumnus