Holy Week Reflections: The Weight of the Cross

I visited Israel during the Christmas season, but I often think about what it would have been like to walk those streets during Holy Week. To trace the path Jesus walked to His death. To stand at Golgotha during the days when we remember what happened there.

Holy Week demands something of us. It asks us to slow down, to remember, to sit with the weight of what Jesus did. In a world of quick scrolls and instant gratification, spending a week meditating on suffering and sacrifice feels counter-cultural.

But that is exactly why we need it.

The cross was not symbolic to the people who witnessed it. It was brutal, public, shameful. The kind of death reserved for the worst criminals. And Jesus—innocent, divine, choosing to be human—submitted to it for us.

When I walked through the streets of Jerusalem, I tried to imagine Jesus walking those same paths two thousand years ago. The crowds. The noise. The weight of knowing what was coming. The love that kept Him walking anyway.

Isaiah wrote these words hundreds of years before Christ, but they capture the heart of Holy Week: He was pierced for our transgressions. Not His own—ours. The punishment that brought us peace was on Him. The exchange that makes no sense and yet is the center of everything.

This week, I am sitting with the weight of it. Not rushing to Easter joy, but letting the sorrow of Good Friday have its moment. Because you cannot fully appreciate the resurrection without feeling the death.

If you are walking through your own kind of death right now—a dream dying, a relationship ending, a hope fading—Holy Week reminds us that death is never the end of the story. But sometimes we have to walk through the darkness before we see the light.