The worldview significance of Holy Week

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

This week is the most important for Christians around the world: Holy Week, when we celebrate the death and burial of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection, the historical fact upon which the faith stands or falls.

This week, John Stonestreet and I talked about the worldview significance of Holy Week events. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, his disciples abandoned him when he refused to fight against the soldiers. The disciples’ actions demonstrate a temptation Christians still face today—to make Jesus in their own image.

“We want a Jesus who is just really there to make us healthy and happy give us our ‘best life now’ or something like that,” Stonestreet said. “[Holy Week] reminds us that Jesus comes on His own terms. … Jesus is who He is. And it’s much more important that we take seriously who He has revealed Himself to be rather than trying to squeeze Him down into something that’s palatable or something that makes us happy.”

At a time when the American evangelical church is struggling to choose between speaking truth and acting out love for others, Holy Week reminds Christians they can’t have truth without love, and vice versa.

“You’re not speaking truth unless you’re doing it in love, and you’re not loving people unless you’re willing to actually say the truth,” Stonestreet said. “And that’s actually embodied in Jesus’ words and actions that we are to commemorate in the Last Supper.”

Jesus’ death on the cross is a reminder that only God can fix sin, and Jesus’ resurrection proves that it has been fixed for good, Stonestreet said:

“It gives us this stable place to place our trust and hope for the future. And so it’s just as important today as ever to reclaim the reality of the resurrection of Christ, which we remember Sunday morning when we look at each other in the church and we say to each other, ‘He has risen. He has risen indeed.’ That’s not just an esoteric statement. It’s not just a statement of wishful thinking. It is the truth of the human story. Nothing that happens from here on out will ever put Jesus Christ back in the tomb. And so the redemption of Jesus Christ and our reconciliation to God, and the potential reconciliation we have toward each other, is secure because of that event.”

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