When we journey with Jesus this week, let the humble one on a donkey remind us to reject the logic of empire and hold fast to the other way, making our witness public, living our lives as a prayer.

When we journey with Jesus this week, let the cross remind us that there is no brutality or repression, no betrayal or abandonment—nothing in the horrors of this world—that our God does not know, that our God does not feel. In the depths of our personal grief and pain, in breadth of the world’s sorrow, God has been, is and will be with us. We are never alone.

When we journey with Jesus this week, let the empty tomb remind us that neither hate nor cruelty, not violence, not even death, reign supreme. Those who wage terror are not king. The kin-dom of God, the beloved community rises in the midst of struggle. Because Christ is Risen, true transformation is always possible.

Words: Jennifer Henry
2026

Holy Week Reflection

This year as I journey into this story of betrayal and suffering, of God broken among us, by us, of the power of divine solidarity, I am holding in my heart the refugees and migrants of this world–those fleeing in fear, those deported, detained or disappeared, those wrenched from family, those abandoned to political whims, those made some kind of perverse example to show absolute power. Human callousness and cruelty towards displaced, uprooted, migrant or undocumented persons seems at a fevered pitch.

What you do to these, you do to me…says the One who himself was undocumented, a refugee who fled in the night, says the One whose absolute empathy, whose emptying of power, meant his death.

May this story, this year, transform the coldest and hardest of hearts, uproot systems of tyranny and hate …The Easter promise pulls us from the future. May we journey towards it in compassion, and in profound hope.

Words: Jennifer Henry (2025)

This Holy Week pain is agonizingly real. Betrayal, repression, and murder feel ever present.  We war, rage and grieve. This Holy Week…may we feel as deeply the coming of dawn, rising of peoples, transformation of the impossible, and hopes burst into peace.  Holy One, make resurrection real in our crucified world, we pray. AMEN.

Words and image: Jennifer Henry

March 2024