Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 30 March 2026
Holy Week in a bleeding Holy Land
Yesterday was Palm Sunday. In ordinary times, this celebration is one of the most exuberant and exhilarating manifestations of the Church of Jerusalem. Thousands of Christians march in procession from Bethphage to the Old City of Jerusalem, singing and dancing, retracing Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. This is one of the rare occasions when all the different groups of Catholics in the Holy Land come together: Palestinians from Galilee and the West Bank, Hebrew speakers, migrant workers from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, asylum seekers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Ukraine, pilgrims from the four corners of the globe and expatriate residents in the Holy Land, many of them men and women religious. The crowd descends the Mount of Olives, moving as one colourful and joyful body, slowly advancing towards the Church of Saint Anne in the Old City. There, our Patriarch blesses the crowds, exhorting them to enter Holy Week, following Jesus.
However, this year, because of the ongoing war, there are no grand celebrations. The procession was cancelled. All the Holy Places are closed to the public. Muslims were unable to mark Ramadan in the Haram al-Sharif and they too had to celebrate Id al-Fitr at home. Jews will not be able to visit the Western Wall for Passover, which begins on Wednesday night. And for us, the Chrism Mass, usually a solemn and magnificent celebration, bringing together over one hundred priests, celebrated before the empty tomb in the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulchre) on Holy Thursday, has been postponed. The candle-lit procession from Gethsemane to the place where Christ was imprisoned will not wind its way through the streets and the hymns will not be heard on Holy Thursday night. Christians will gather in small community celebrations, listening out for air raid sirens, and beseeching God for an end to this devastating war, and the suffering and destruction it has brought in its wake.
In a certain sense, this year’s marking of Holy Week might be profoundly appropriate in our broken world. Like the first disciples living in an atmosphere of fear, we too will be experiencing the events of Holy Week in anxiety and trepidation, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal of Judas, the hidden celebration of the Last Supper, the prayer in Gethsemane, the arrest and interrogation of Jesus, the passion and crucifixion on Good Friday, the laying in the tomb, and the silence of Holy Saturday. Like those first disciples, we are burdened by difficult questions about what is happening, where are we headed, and where can we find hope? Will good triumph over evil, life over death, light over darkness? As the bombardments and wails of the mourning for the dead and the wounded rent apart our region, the heavens seem sealed and God is silent. Where is God? Our Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa suggested an answer, “God is among those who are dying, who are suffering, who are in pain, who are oppressed in various ways, throughout the Middle East.” (1) In his Palm Sunday address in Saint Peter’s, Pope Leo forcefully proclaimed that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).” (2).
While the violence continues unabated, the challenge will be to celebrate the resurrection of Christ on Easter. This celebration too will be hidden and prayerful. But how can we prepare ourselves to experience the reality of the empty tomb and the transformative joy of the Risen Christ in our present circumstances? Here too, we are called to remember those first disciples. Their encounters with the Risen Christ transformed their being even though the world remained shrouded in darkness. The two disciples walking away from Jerusalem in despair, tell the stranger they do not recognize, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Lk. 24:21). “We had hoped!” Their despair is resounding. They are walking away, convinced that evil has triumphed. And then the stranger responds, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (Lk. 24:25).
As they walk with him, and then sit at table as he breaks the bread, they are transformed as they realize that the one who had been crucified is risen from the dead. They know that they must become proclaimers of the good news that death has been conquered, that life is victorious. This will be our challenge too: to encounter Him and to be transformed by the faithfulness of our God in the power of the resurrection!
As Jesus’s people do at Passover, recalling God’s saving power, so Jesus does as he opens the Scriptures for his disciples. They later recall, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Lk. 24:32). The memory of God’s words and acts in the past provide a glimmer of hope. Darkness and death, violence and evil, might have their day, but that day surely cannot last… It is in recalling the acts of God through our shared story that we can identify the One who loves us and carries us. Psalm 105 begins, “O give thanks to the LORD, call on God’s name, make known God’s deeds among the peoples. Sing to God, sing praises to God; tell of all God’s wonderful works. Glory in God’s holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice. Seek the LORD and God’s strength; seek God’s presence continually. Remember the wonderful works God has done, God’s miracles, and the judgments God uttered” (Ps. 105:1-5). In a particular way, it is in meditating upon the acts that God has done, the verbs that punctuate the Scriptures, that we can trace a portrait of the One who is faithful even in the midst of great travail.
In experiencing the Risen Christ walking alongside us in this valley of tears, in listening to his rereading of the Scriptures, we too might become what we are called to be: witnesses to the resurrection, proclaimers of the good news that life is victorious over death. Bishop Christian Carelassere in Rumbek in South Sudan named some examples of these witnesses, “the catechist who continues to gather children under a tree; (…) the mother who teaches forgiveness when hatred is easier; (…) the priest who refuses to run away when his people are afraid; (…) the youth who choose not to carry a gun.” (3) Thus we too might be the leaven in the dough, the leaven of the evangelical promise of life even where death still reigns.
(1) See Cardinal Pizzaballa’s full comments here:
Cardinal Pizzaballa was blocked by the Israeli police as he went to celebrate Palm Sunday in the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulchre) even though he went unaccompanied. See statement here:
https://lpj.org/en/news/joint-press-release-the-latin-patriarchate-of-jerusalem-and-the-custo
(2) See Pope Leo’s homily here:
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2026/documents/20260329-palme.html
(3) See Bishop Carelassere’s full poem here: