How to Prepare Your Heart for Holy Week This Year

No plague has ever altered the truth of redemption, and this novel virus doesn’t change the reality that Holy Week and Easter reveal.

On a warm June day in 1956, a boat sped across a lake in upstate New York. Striking a rogue wave, the impact threw a man and a young girl out of the boat into the water. The man held the girl up above the water as the boat circled back. But while the girl was being pulled to safety, the man sank into the waters. On that day, Dawson Trotman, founder of The Navigators, drowned while rescuing a girl whose name he did not know.

Evangelicals still recall this act of unselfish heroism.

On 9/11 in New York City, the heroes were the first responders. Today in New York City—and in towns and urban centers across our world—the heroic healthcare workers serve the masses infected from COVID-19, often at great risk and selfless sacrifice.

In uncertain times, acts of heroism bolster our faith and give us hope.

Holy Week comes just in time this year— we need this week and the message it brings. This week, Christians around the globe remember the sacrifice of Jesus. The stories of heroism inspire us, but the truth of Easter does even more: it transforms.

Holy Week is different this year because of the aggressive spread of a global pandemic. No plague has ever altered the truth of redemption, and this novel virus doesn’t change the reality that Holy Week and Easter reveal.

The practical ways we observe this season will be different—video venues, in-home communion for some, cancelled Easter egg hunts—but the unchanging truth of Easter remains unaffected by the virus. In fact, maybe even more this year it offers us renewed hope in the middle of this pandemic.

Holy Week reveals contrasts: crucifixion and resurrection, death and life, sin and salvation, sorrow and hope. How can we best prepare to remember the Paschal ...