We’ll be sharing a series of videos from Bishop Andrew Asbil through Holy Week. You’ll be able to find the videos and transcripts below.
Palm Sunday
Our week begins with a surprise. Crowds gather. Hopes rise. People wave palm branches. They’re waiting for a king, and they think they know what to expect: noise, force, triumph.
But Jesus’ arrival is different. Not on a warhorse, but on a donkey. Not surrounded by soldiers, but by fishermen, tax collectors, and friends who can’t help but follow. All of them moving steadily toward the week that lies ahead.
Nothing about this entrance fits the script for power. But love doesn’t always enter our lives in the way we expect. It doesn’t push. It doesn’t threaten. It doesn’t need to prove itself.
Palm Sunday reminds us that God meets us not with force, but with a love we long for. A love that disarms our expectations and calls us to see the world differently.
This is just the start. This day is the gateway into the holiest week of our year. This week is a pilgrimage meant to be walked step by step: the teaching, the table, the garden, the cross, the quiet of the tomb and, at last, the rising. I hope you’ll join the journey each day, letting the story shape you as it unfolds.
May we have eyes to notice the unexpected ways love still arrives – in small acts of kindness, in courage that comes from somewhere deep within us, in hope that shows up even when we thought it had run out. This is the love that meets us today.
Maundy Thursday
We come to the centre of Holy Week. It’s a night filled with tension – the city on edge, the disciples uneasy, the future uncertain. And into all of that anxiety, Jesus kneels.
On the eve of betrayal, in the shadow of violence and fear, he bends low and washes the feet of his friends. Confused and anxious, they don’t fully understand what’s happening. Still, he kneels.
This night reminds us that love isn’t abstract. Love has a shape. It looks like kneeling. Serving. It looks like taking someone else’s tired feet into your hands and treating them as precious and beautiful.
We live in an unsettled world, where conflict can rise quickly, where fear can become the loudest voice. We are told to put up walls, to look out for our own interests. And yet Jesus calls us to a different way – a love that doesn’t mirror the anxiety around us but summons us steadfastly to bend, and to serve.
Tonight, Jesus gives us the commandment at the heart of our faith: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Not as an idea, but as a practice and a posture. This commandment is not optional; it’s at the very core of our life as Christians.
We carry the images with us – the water, the basin, the towel. And we are called to kneel, too. To choose humility. To serve even when the world feels unsteady. This is the love that shapes who we are and how we are meant to live.
Good Friday
Friday brings us to the hardest part of the story. The part that, sometimes, we’d rather skip over. The part that asks us to look directly at suffering – in Jesus, in our world, and in ourselves.
We see betrayal, injustice, fear, violence. The disciples scatter, the community is fractured, the saviour of the world is stripped and mocked and hung on a tree with criminals.
Here, at the very worst of it, we see something astonishing: God looks straight into the darkest corners of our world – and into the darkest corners of ourselves – and does not turn away. God sees every wound we carry, every sin we hide, every failure we fear is beyond forgiveness. God knows us completely and chooses to redeem us.
At the cross, love endures. It holds steady when everything else fractures. It stays present when the world breaks open. It doesn’t give up. It doesn’t give in. And there is nothing – not even death – that can separate us from that love.
Good Friday is not the end of the story, but it is the depth of it. We learn just how far love will go. How much it will bear. How firmly it will stay. And as we continue our walk through Holy Week, we carry that love with us – unearned but unbroken. A love that meets us in the depths and does not let us go.
Easter
Here we are at last. After the anguish of Good Friday and the quiet depths of the tomb, Easter breaks in. When everything seemed finished, love rises in a way that reorders the cosmos.
There are no trumpets, no proclamations or edicts. Just a quiet garden in the early morning hours, a stone rolled away, the muted hush of an empty tomb. It’s in this stillness that God’s love reveals its strength – not loud, not forceful, but steady enough to upend death itself.
The same love that knelt to wash feet, the same love that endured betrayal and fear, rises when everything else has fallen. It transforms what we thought was beyond hope. It moves through locked doors, speaks peace into trembling hearts and breathes life where despair had settled. God’s love does not simply return; it renews, restores and begins the work of making all things new.
And we are invited to rise, too, not by our own strength, but because Christ Jesus has already gone ahead of us, opening a way where we saw none. We are called to live as people shaped by resurrection – people who trust that God is not done, who look for signs of redemption in unlikely places, and who carry God’s love to hearts still waiting to be transformed.
The love that rose that first Easter morning is still rising, working in and through us, and carrying us into a future that God is already shaping. This is just the beginning. Alleluia, Christ is risen!
