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Good morning. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, marking the beginning of Holy Week when millions of Christians around the world prepare for Easter.
As Lent draws to a close, the days leading up to Easter tell a story of failure, fear and bitter conflict. From the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the howl of anguish from the cross on Good Friday, Holy Week confronts us with fickleness and betrayal, political and religious tyranny, disappointment and disillusionment, cruelty and torture. It’s a story that exposes aspects of the human condition that are difficult to accept, even as it invites reflection on the redeeming power of love.

In recent days we have witnessed yet another act of shocking and cold-blooded violence in the shootings and hostage crisis in France. At the same time, the example of gendarme Arnaud Beltrame, who died of gunshot wounds after taking the place of a woman hostage, witnesses to the ways in which humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and altruism. The violence of the gunman, the suffering of his victims and their families, and the self-sacrifice of Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame, all resonate with the themes unfolding during Holy Week.

We humans are the most brilliant and the most blundering of species. We have a disturbing capacity for cruelty and violence, but even our greatest achievements are shadowed by unintended consequences. Modernity’s dream of democracy is disintegrating into the politics of absurdity. Some of science’s most transformative inventions – from plastics to the internet – are proving to be deadly threats to our way of life. The genius that has given us the wonders of modern medicine has also given us deadly chemical weapons such as the nerve agent that has left Sergai Skripal and his daughter Yulia fighting for their lives. Our quest for domination over nature is threatening our very survival, as more and more species are pushed to the brink of extinction. Failure is everywhere.

But failure is not futility. It can become the seedbed of hope. We face so many daunting crises and catastrophes but this week, for me, brings with it a message of faith in the face of failure, hope in the face of desolation, and new life through and beyond the tyranny of torture and death. For Christians that story is suffused with divine revelation and mystery, but its call to repentance, transformation and renewal extends beyond the boundaries of the Christian faith. The way ahead is surely neither through denial nor through despair, but through a sustaining faith in the power of love, an honest acknowledgement of our failures, the courage to face the challenges that confront us, and a resolution to cherish the world that has been given to us, for ourselves and for future generations.

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