Holy Week and Easter Landscape (copy of painting by Kristina Andréasson 2021)
I would like to share with you a landscape of Holy Week and Easter. Many of us know the days of Holy Week, but we might also be used to taking them one by one. But there is no Resurrection without Good Friday. The days all belong together, and as we walk through Lent with the Easter sun in sight, there is really no clear border between the different events in Holy Week.
The painting is acrylic on canvas, and picturing a landscape over Jesus’ last days and the resurrection. But also, when you look at it. When you see how it is all connected, when you see how it is hard to be at only one scene completely, when the landscape evokes all those different emotions, suddenly you may also see a landscape over life itself. You may see how the landscape over Holy Week and Easter is not only something that happened one time long ago, but it can resonate with our own lives, our own world.
Let us bring our own lives to meet the landscape. Because in that we are also reminded why we need to hear about it every new year, why the same story and message might speak to us differently from one year to another. We can ask: Where would we place ourselves this Holy Week? Much as the different scenes still belong together with unclear borders, it may be the same with us. We have different feelings and thoughts in our hearts. But yet, this year there might be a scene in front of which we would like to take a longer pause.
Jesus entering Jerusalem. We see the back of the donkey, people, young and old, gathering around him. The donkey is quite tall. But may be interesting to know: they were big in that time, not like the small ones we often see now. They were made to do a lot of work, but they were also a symbol of peace. We see how Jesus reaches his hand out to someone in the crowd. Imagine the Hosanna-cry, with its double meaning—sometimes a shout of joy, sometimes a cry for help. Whatever our Hosanna is filled with this year, Jesus reaches out to us. An image of hopeful expectation, but the clouds in the sky also tell of a little bit of worry, not knowing how things will turn out just yet. In this part of the painting we are given palm leaves to wave in joy or in cry for help.
That could fill us this Holy Week, or maybe it is more like when they are gathered around the table, a sense of fellowship and belonging in the midst of differences. We can tell in the painting that their feet have just been washed. Feet getting washed, as in: receiving more than we expect, love poured richly over our lives. Sometimes life is like that.
The Rev. Kristina Andréasson
Guest Preacher, Holy Week 2025