Monday of Holy Week - Meditating on Matthew's Passion

            The days between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday are usually busy days for congregations. Pastors are usually hard at work writing sermons. Altar guild members go over their checklists for the week. Church secretaries enlist help for all of the bulletins to be run. Other volunteers are recruited to assist in the additional services with everything from greeting and ushering to special music or operating the sound system. However, there has been an underappreciated and underutilized tradition of reading and meditating on the Passion readings from Matthew, Mark and Luke on these forgotten days of Holy Week. 

            There is no better use of one’s time during this busy Monday than to sit and read Matthew chapters 26-27 in one sitting.  Take a few moments before this day draws to a close and read Matthew’s Passion account.  There is so much to absorb that you will find that in your entire lifetime you will never fully grasp and comprehend this Word of life.  John Kleinig writes of the blessing of meditation on the Word of God, “The heart of the disciple is the seedbed of God’s Word.  By itself, the heart cannot produce a harvest.  The power to produce the harvest comes from the Word.  So the purpose of meditation is to let God’s Word produce a bumper crop in and through those who receive it.  But mediation disciples take in God’s Word and keep it in their hearts.  The life giving Word changes the barren hearts of hearers into fertile fields.  The Word increases receptivity of their hearts.  The more the hearts of Christ’s disciples listen to the Word and ponder on it, the more fruitful they become.” 

            While farmers are anxious to begin the planting in the fields, we know that there is always time for us to be blessed by the seed of God’s Word (rain or shine, hot or cold, spring, fall, summer or winter).  So take a few moments today to read and meditate on our Lord’s Passion as recounted by St. Matthew.  Walter Wangerin Jr. writes, “When we genuinely remember the death we deserve to die, we will be moved to rememberthe death the Lord in fact did die – because his tok the place of ours.  Ah, children, we wil year to hear the Gospel story again and again, ever seeing therein our death in his and rejoicing that we will therefore know a rising like his as well.   May God bless your reading and meditating on our Lord’s Passion throughout this Holy Week.