Holy Week

Holy Monday….Our Lord Jesus demonstrates genuine faith in God and affirms his Messianic destiny in the Cursing of the Fig Tree and the Cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem
Holy Tuesday…Our Lord Jesus taught from early morning until late at night…When the sun had set his earthly teaching was done….He left us the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and the Parable of the Talents, advising eternal vigilance for the Children of God….
Holy Wednesday….This is the day the Sanhedrin met to plot the destruction of our beloved Lord Jesus….This is the day when Mary, at the home of Simon the Leper in Bethany, washed his hands and feet in precious oil out of pure love ….and the disciples did not like it….This is the day Judas Iscariot, the Dagger man, betrayed him for 30 pieces of silver….This is Spy Wednesday, spy in this sense meaning ambush and treachery….
Holy Thursday….also known as Maundy Thursday, Holy and Great Thursday, Covenant Thursday and the Thursday of Mysteries….This is the day of the Maundy, the Washing of the Feet and Our Lord’s Last Supper….The Maundy, or Mandatum in Latin, is Our Lord’s new commandment that he gave to us, ” that you love one another, even as I loved you”….
Holy Friday….also known as God Friday, or Good Friday as it has become, and Black Friday. This is the day that our beloved Lord Jesus was betrayed by the Temple hierarchy and then the mob or crowd (ochlos in Greek) as the great theologian Pope Benedict has said, not the Jewish people as a whole, and crucified by the Roman authorities…Several years ago my friend Dr Paisley bought for me in the Voltaire and Rousseau Bookshop in Glasgow, W Stroud’s book “A Treatise on the Ph…ysical Cause of the Death of Christ” 1847. He asked me for my opinion as he often did .As a physician myself I have had a lifetime interest in the death of the greatest of all physicians, Jesus Christ. I believe he suffered greatly under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried….The suffering was immense, with extreme flagellation, so that he was in hypovolemic shock and already in very poor condition when he was crucified…He would have had pericardial effusion of fluid compressing his heart, so that the soldier’s spear piercing his atrium would have indeed brought forth blood and water…This proves the authenticity of the gospels, as indeed the authenticity of his resurrection was proved by the former anti-Christian Saul of Tarsus who met the living Jesus following the crucifixion….
Holy Saturday….or Holy Sabbath (Sabbatum Sanctum in Latin) or Great Sabbath….This is the day when the body of Our Lord Jesus lay in the tomb, while, according to the Apostle’s Creed his spirit entered the Dark Realms, called Hell in the Old English usage. Here he liberated the souls of the righteous since the beginning of the world of conscience and left the souls of the damned. In medieval times this was called the “Harrowing of Hell”…Some therefore call it Black Saturday and others Joyous Saturday in celebration of Our Lord’s victory over the Dark Realms of the Dead.
Holy Sunday….The Lord’s Day…This is the day that the Lord hath given….This is the day Our Lord Jesus rose again from the dead….He had undergone a rapid and profound physical transformation, so that his closest friend, Mary Magdalene, the first to see him, did not at first recognise him….nor did the disciples on the road to Emmaus….Tissue regeneration, the morphogenic process which demonstrates the phenotypic plasticity of traits, is an everyday miracle in all living creatures, including humans, but this was something very special indeed….Jesus ate and drank with his disciples but Thomas, the twin, doubted that it was he, until Jesus demonstrated his wounds , and he doubted no more….
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