Good Friday is a special gift to us. This is the day when we can move more intimately into God’s presence and find in our own experience just what relief god gives us when our resources are spent and we feel God forsaken as Jesus did at Calvary. The only place for us to go in such a state apart from angry resentment is to surrender into God’s hands. That’s the gift and grace to pray for on Good Friday.

Today is also a day of commitment to be a sign of God's love. God felt it worthwhile for Jesus to die in order that I might know love. My life is worth giving in the day-to-day as well as, if necessary, in death so that others may know that love.

Today - Holy Thursday - is mostly celebrated for its being the founding moment for our most familiar sacrament- the Eucharist. But what it is just as noteworthy for - and the readings take this topic as the centerpiece in the Gospel for this event - is the way Jesus focuses on service as the hallmark of Christian living and witness. Jesus' washing of the feet of his disciples tells them and us today what Jesus most wants of his disciples and of his followers today.

Our sharing Eucharist is a service -- a service to the world. We can wash its feet, and we can bring it with us as we share union with Christ. It's all one and the same.

In today’s Gospel we hear the account in John’s Gospel of the nuts and bolts of the bitter betrayal and actual abandonment of Jesus by Judas but also by his apostles. It is no less empty and tragic for how familiar it is to us many hundreds and two thousand years later. Our prayer today iso wait in that darkness and allow God to restore our faith and confidence that God’s love and power will triumph despite how desperate and dark the times and circumstances seem.

We are moving further into the depths of Holy Week and Jesus’ destiny as the savior of the world who gives his life that we all may share more in the life of God. Here we see the culmination of all that John’s Gospel has done to describe the contrast between life and death, light and dark that Jesus’ person and message embody.

We are in Holy Week which is both where we’ve been going all through Lent but also brings us to the sharp end of our time accompanying Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. It is his impending end that hovers over all the stories we hear in the Gospels this week. Coming to terms with that reality in Jesus’ life and its force and meaning for our own is the point and purpose of our prayer this week.

Today’s Gospel is, of course, the Passion narrative and it’s too long and much too complex and/or too rich to reduce to something you can make a helpful comment about in the few minutes available in this podcast. So I have taken the prayer from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians today which is today's second reading. It is the most succinct statement of the personal spiritual journey Jesus went on and which ego on as his disciples.

We mark this Holy Week with solemn joy. Death is real. But this week we know that love is even more real.

Catholics in many Asian countries have renewed their devotion to Saint Joseph for the Vatican-designated Year of St. Joseph. Human rights violations and abuses against minorities, as well as a resurgence of Covid-19, also made headlines across the region.