Enter the Story
We are now in Holy Week. But let me invite you to enter into this time—to truly enter into the story of the cross and resurrection. Our services and our actions are filled with words and rituals, and all of these words and rituals are intentionally put in place! They are present in order to help Christians today enter into the story of Jesus and the church.
One of my favorite writers and thinkers today is a man named Byung-Chul Han, and he has a lot to say on this topic. Let me share a few words from Han.
He tells us that narratives (true stories that help us understand life) help anchor us in reality. Narratives give us a ground in the world—they make sense of all the parts of life. Narratives help us make sense of what seems random and puts everything into the bigger picture. In effect, narratives turn “being in-the-world into being at-home by furnishing life with meaning, support, and orientation.”
Turning directly to the Christian story, Han writes, “Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments.”
Notice that! The Christian calendar helps orient our lives into the bigger story — the story of Jesus and the Church! These holidays are not random points on a map — they are high points and destinations that help us understand our place in the cosmos. They ground us to where we stand!
“Religious holidays are highlights and high points of a narrative [and thus high points of life]. [But] without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times—no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption. In the post-narrative world, festivities are commercialized. They become events and spectacles.”
Notice the contrast between Christian holidays and secular holidays. Christian holidays are understood as part of a whole—they are elements to the ongoing and ever enacted story of God. But secular holidays are different. They have no real significance beyond themselves. They are an excuse to sell something—‘commercialized spectacles.’
But it's not just the days on the calendar—it's also the rituals and words that fill these days with meaning. Han writes, “Rituals are also narrative practices: they are always embedded in a narrative context. As symbolic techniques for creating enclosure, they transform being in-the-world into a being at-home.”
Through calendars and rituals shaped by true narrative, we move from “being in-the world” to “being at-home.” What does that mean exactly? Think about it this way. The world is a massive place that seemingly has no boundaries. It is seemingly infinite and scary. It’s easy to get lost here. It’s easy to feel constantly anxious and placeless here. But “being at-home” is a transformation. We still inhabit the same world, but now, we see it within a new frame. There is an overarching story that helps make sense of it all. The vast and infinite world of boundless possibilities that we can so easily get lost in and overwhelmed by is transformed when we understand everything through the true narrative.
Han points out that today we are inundated by ‘information.’ No one can possibly argue with that reality. To that point, Han writes, “information is not a bearer of sense, whereas narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation. Information also dissects time into a mere sequence of present moments. A narrative, by contrast, brings forth a temporal continuum, that is, a story … [Humanity] adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor.”
Holy Week, then, is precisely what Han describes—not a delivery of information, but a narrative anchor. It is the story that transforms our being in-the-world into being at-home. Holy Week is not incidental to the Christian life. It is the story at its most concentrated.
I write all this to emphasize the importance of this week in our lives! Holy Week and Easter (more than any other season of the calendar) ground us in the story of reality. Through these services, we enter into what God has done and what God is doing in the world. Through these services, we see evil and death on full display. But we see all the more that evil and death do NOT have the final say in the story of God. Betrayal. Treachery. Injustice. Murder. These acts stick with us. They’re hard to shake off. But the calendar reminds us to keep going, the story isn’t over. Sin, brokenness, and death will be undone.
So friends, as you take part in the services this week, remember that you’re not present just to receive information. You’re not present just to fulfill churchly obligations. You’re present because you’re part of this story. So let us meaningfully enter into this week.