Q&A with Pastor Andrew: Reflections on Holy Week

Before Holy Week, Rebecca Lerner, Rutgers Presbyterian's new Communications Manager, sits down with Pastor Andrew to explore the deeper meanings behind this sacred time.

‍Q: How would you explain Holy Week to someone unfamiliar with Christianity?

A: The best way is to take a person by the hand and invite them to join us. As Martin Buber suggested, these things are relational and best experienced that way. Come and join us in Holy Week, honoring these holidays, and you'll experience how similar or different they are here at Rutgers. For me, Holy Week is a multilayered mystery of hope in the midst of despair. It's multilayered because it can be individual, where we engage with it on a personal level, and it can be collective. It can be deeply spiritual, almost completely in our souls or hearts, and it can also be societal or political. The Holy Week story has all these dimensions for Christians.

Q: How do you personally connect with the story and traditions of Holy Week?

A: For Protestants, it's not just about rituals but about hearing, stepping into, and living the story. It's hearkening to a deeper dimension, similar to Pesach or liberation from Egypt. There are rituals, but the story itself is more important—stepping into it and living it out in our daily lives. Holy Week wouldn't exist without the story of Exodus liberation. It's like reframing the Exodus story for Hellenistic times. Theologically, the core is liberation, and it carries many meanings from that old story, retranslated for Hellenistic times. Now it's our task to retranslate that to our times.

Q: What core message of Holy Week resonates most deeply with you?

A: I'm more concerned with the message rather than outward appearances. For me, it's the message of the weakness of God, which is stronger than any strength of this world—the scandal of the cross. It clearly shows that empires and their brutality will not have the last word over people's lives. As Presbyterians, we don't blame Jews; we know from history and theology that it was the Roman Empire who crucified Jesus. There might be complicity or indifference, even from Jesus's disciples who were perplexed and lost in that upheaval. But crucifixion was a capital punishment by the Roman Empire. They had the monopoly of deadly violence, and they used it. What we're part of now is saying, "Not in our presence. We are not going to give in to this." It's that rebellious act of saying no, that was wrong, and you cannot count us in on this.

Q: How do you see this theological perspective relating to social justice work today?

A: It's coming from not going along with abusive power that dehumanizes people and has the ability to crush them. Even then, that power will not ultimately prevail. They will definitely not get our souls. There's a very deep tradition going back to the far movement and the stories in Maccabees, with the first emergence of concepts that later became strong within Christianity, such as resurrection. That hope for resurrection goes back to the Maccabees and the story of seven brothers murdered by a tyrant. Christians took that hope and ran with it.

Q: Are there particular Holy Week traditions or symbols that have special meaning for you?

A: As a transplant, I know some hymns, but in my soul, I sing them in my native language. One of the strongest traditions for me is the sunrise service. When I came here, they had the "sunrise" service around nine o'clock, and I said, "That's not sunrise!" Sunrise is around six.

So we started celebrating sunrise at the actual sunrise or even before. We have a very small group of people, five to ten, on our green roof, weather permitting. If not on the roof garden, we would be in our columbarium, surrounded by those who preceded us, which has another deep meaning. That's an old Christian tradition of celebrating Easter and resurrection hope in kirkyards. I love the old Reformation hymn in Czech, "Ó Slunce Spravednosti” - “Oh, Sun of Righteousness."  It is an old old hymn from the Reformation-period. This hymn appeals to me, along with that vision of the sun rising on Easter Sunday.

I sometimes joke about counting how many Hallelujah songs or how many Hallelujahs I hear on Easter Sunday because I know it's beloved by the congregation. We prepare for it by foregoing hallelujahs during Lent. I love translating and performing HALLELUJAH, explaining to the children that "Hallelujah" is Hebrew and means something like "Rejoice to the Lord with jumping."

Q: How does the Easter message of hope speak to our community's current challenges?

A: It brings us hope in the midst of despair that surrounds us right now. It's not just political—we're not a one-dimensional political church. We have our own losses of beloved members who passed away in a short sequence, and the Easter message brings us hope because as some are departing, we are seeing new families coming, almost miraculously appearing.

That's the visualization of that hope. Preparing for a baptism of one of our children—though it won't happen on Easter this year, Easter Sunday is regularly the time when the church baptizes children and new members. We can see and experience resurrection in the body of the church.

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