In transition: Preaching Tuesday of Holy Week

When I was preparing to preach today, I thought that like Peter I've had three chances to preach these readings — for books of Lenten reflections in 2018, 2020 and the one coming out in the fall for 2027.  And when I look back at the reflections I wrote I feel like I've fumbled them a bit, not quite recognizing the weight of what is moving in this liturgy. But as St. Benedict was apparently wont to say, "every day we begin again." So here I try again to capture a little bit of the unfathomably holy space we are sitting in today.

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I sometimes wonder if we think that the Monday, Tuesday and even Wednesday of Holy Week are sort of a holding pattern, where we are just marking time between Palm Sunday’s intensity and the solemnity of the one long liturgy that is the Triduum. (And also some time for rehearsing and decorating and perhaps juggling our regular jobs).

Even if these days are just holding space, space, as musicians know, matters. Rests give shape to music as much as the notes.

But I hear more than a rest marker in the Gospel for today. Today’s pericope from John is a bit of a jumble. It  comes after the account of the washing of the feet and before the Farewell Discourse which will occupy the next three chapters. It’s a narrative transition, setting up the betrayal by Judas, and Peter’s betrayal, too. The choice of this Gospel for today scrambles the timeline a bit. Yesterday’s installment was a flashback — we were clearly outside Jerusalem with Mary and Martha and the anointing with aromatic oils. Today we have skipped past the washing of the feet which we will return to on Thursday. Tomorrow we will see Judas’ betrayal through Matthew’s eyes, positioned, it seems, well before the entrance to Jerusalem.

Praying with this Gospel the last few days, it occurred to me that today is the pivotal moment, the moment at which we are staggering at the edge of catastrophe, the moment when we tumble over the edge into chaos and confusion, into passion, death and resurrection. 

In chemical reactions, there's something called a transition state. It’s a tipping point, a fleeting moment in the course of a chemical change. Move a fraction backward and you return to whence you came, unchanged. But move a fraction forward and you tumble inexorably to completion, transformed — transfigured. From that point on there is no turning back, even if at first little has seem to be changed.

What John recounts in today’s Gospel feels like a transition state. Once Jesus hands Judas that morsel, once Judas picks it up and leaves the room, there is no turning back, even as the disciples don’t yet see what is coming. Peter surely does not. But at this moment, it is all set in train.

This is when theory becomes practice.

I was reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this weekend and I ran across these lines.

"Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet."

God is not toying with Judas, or with us. For this fleeting moment we stand at a point where we can see Jesus’ life and death laid before us, where we can see all of salvation history spread out like a banquet, where we can see the choices. Jesus' choice. Judas’ choice. Peter’s choice. Our choice. Today. May we have the courage to choose the unfathomably holy, in solemn, deliberate earnest. 

Made in solemn incomprehensible earnest

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 270)

I spent the afternoon wandering though poets. Marilyn Nelson. Marie Howe. I walked Tinker's Creek with Annie Dillard. It was like binging on an incredible box of chocolates. So rich, so many flavors, each one a grace, and all together -- too much.

...only able to endure it by being no one and so/specifically myself I thought I'd die/from being loved like that. (Marie Howe, Annunciation)

Yesterday I picked up the notes I had made when I was 50, on the 30-day retreat making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. I didn't find what I was looking for, quite. But maybe I have now. #4thWeek

The world is wilder than that...more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 268)

Tinker's Creek was my mother's, which I found on the shelf when we cleaned out my parent's house. There was a page marked toward the end, the back cover tucked in. So anxious was I to find the last chapter today, I unthinkingly pulled it out. Now I have no idea where the marker was left. Nor why. Was it something I would want to return to? Or just as far as she got before someone blasted in the door from school, from a wild and extravagant and bright day? My mother was 42 when Tinker's Creek was published. Would this young woman have advice for my much older self? I want to weep at my inattention.

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time...The gaps in the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap...and unlock a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 269)

I remember bundling up on a bitter January day to sit on Brace's Rock just off the retreat house at Eastern Point, somewhere in the first week of the Exercises. Cowering from the wind in a cleft of rock, hoping to catch a glimpse of God from the outside.

I have spent the afternoon. 

 

Stalking my calling

 

I was not stalking my calling, but hunting up a poem, when I stumbled across my copy of "Living like Weasels" from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. (I'm doing a brief reading at commencement in May, and was looking for my copy of this poem by astronomer Becky Elson, which I love, but is it too dark for commencement?)

If you haven't read it, it reads like a bloodthirsty take on Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day. The one with the line about "your one wild and precious life." (And which I am definitely not reading at commencement.)

The whole weasel essay is a joy, science and language and imagery all tangled together like the wild roses and poison ivy around Hollins Pond. Or snapped into a single whole like Dillard's mind and the weasel's. 

She opens with the story of an eagle found with the dry skull of a weasel clamped onto its neck, driven by its predatory instincts to bite even as it became prey. To do as it must, to do as it was meant to do — bite — even in extremis.

Dillard closes the essay by mulling  about vocation. "We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse...I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft..." 

In these last few weeks of teaching I seem to be stalking my calling again, looking for the tender spot, for the pulse point, and the willingness to seize it, letting it grasp me as I grasp it. To do — to be — as I was meant to be.

The world is full of marvels…and things that sting.

The world is full of marvels. I saw Portuguese men o’war (is that really the right plural, surely it isn’t “Portuguese man o’wars”?) on the beach over spring break. Or I am almost sure that’s what the translucent balloons dotting the shoreline were. (I had somehow imagined them to be much larger, based on some real life account I had read when I was a kid.) I was sure enough that I didn’t touch them. Men o’war or not, I have a healthy aversion to jellyfish. I’ve been stung before.

So I was surprised to find they aren’t jellyfish at all, but siphonophores. They aren’t a single individual but a colony of clones, genetically identical but each individual manifesting a different function. A marvel indeed.  

Of all things, it made me think of the passage in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 12:12): we are one body in Christ, though each of us manifests that differently in service to the whole. What would a homily framed around stinging groups of clones and Paul's letter look like? or better yet, sound like? I'm doing an 8 week course in preaching, so homilies are on my mind.

It also brought to mind Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”

But perhaps be cautious about what you touch?

To Be Seen

To Be Seen

The neurologist pulled her chair around to face me. Then she gently told me that the difficulties I had been having writing equations on the blackboard and tying my shoes were not arthritis but the result of an incurable, progressive neurological disease. Oh.

I left her office feeling curiously relieved—grateful for the small mercies she offered to ease the symptoms, but thankful above all because she had so clearly seen my affliction. So often our sufferings go unseen by those around us. We fear, perhaps, that God does not see our struggles either.

But from the opening antiphon to the Gospel, all of today’s readings promise us otherwise. We are seen, we are known, and, even in the face of mortal danger, we are held close by God, who Isaiah tells us delights—exults!—in his people.

Unlike the heart-stricken father in John’s Gospel, I do not come to God these days seeking a miracle, or even signs and wonders. I come to see. And I come yearning to be seen.

St. Augustine said of the Eucharist: See who you are, become what you see. So I stand before the altar and see Christ lifted on the cross, suffering and fearing he was abandoned. I see who I am, suffering and afraid of what the future might hold—and know I am not alone. I hold out my hands and realize that I am seen in return, called forth from the depths of the netherworld, bound not only to the cross, but promised life. I am seen in my affliction. That is miracle enough, so I believe.

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a wife and mother, a professor of chemistry, and an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory. She is author of Prayer: Biblical Wisdom for Seeking God in the Little Rock Scripture Study Alive in the Word series. michellefrancldonnay.com. 

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This reflection appeared in the March 2026 issue of Give Us This Day and is used with permission.

The reflection had its roots in the Entrance Antiphon: "As for me, I trust in the Lord. Let me be glad and rejoice in your mercy, for you have seen my affliction." The psalm for the day is the one that I could not stop running through my head the terrible night that Tom died. The dance of tears and joy, of fear and trust. And I kept thinking in the Gospel about the long walk home that the father in the Gospel had, not knowing whether his son lived, had his miracle been granted? Would he still have believed if his son had died?