This year Holy Week includes St. Patrick's Day.  That doesn't always happen, but Easter is early this year.  St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is the subject of a good deal of discussion in Thomas Cahill's Volume one of the Hinges of History series.  That volume is HOW THE IRISH SAVED WESTERN CIVILIZATION.  I have read this book and find Cahill a compelling historian who does art, music, and other cultural things well.  Ireland, long a downtrodden part of the British Commonwealth, has been coming into its own in recent years.  With the hideous war in Northern Ireland over for now, people can be about the business of living for positive reasons now rather than for negatives.  The insurgency idea is what happened in Northern Ireland, and it is now what has taken place in Iraq, bedeviling our military efforts there to rebuild Iraq after Saddam Hussein.  You know, it is easy to be negative and very hard to be positive.  Jesus knew all about that.

Holy Week is about the Passion of our Lord.  He was betrayed by his own disciples into the hands of the high priest and the Temple crowd.  Then they held their kangaroo court with trumped up charges.  They sent Jesus to Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, who knew that Jesus had done nothing to deserve death.  Pilate was faced with a hostile Jewish crowd which was screaming for Jesus to be crucified; so, Pilate gave in and let them have their way.  In the end, the brutality of the crucifixion will remind you of the brutality of the wars in Northern Ireland.  God, of course, intervened in Jesus' case and raised HIm from the dead on the third day.  That is the foundation of our Christian faith.  Might we say that God was somewhere in the works as the long and bitter conflict in Northern Ireland came to an end?  Prosperity has come to the people of that part of the world, really for the first time in modern memory.  Many of us have Irish  roots; therefore, that is important to us.  All of us who are Christian are related to Jesus of Nazareth.  It matters very much to us that God intervened and raised Him from the dead.  Can you imagine a world  without a resurrected Christ?  We would not have a Holy Week; we would not have an Easter.  What a disaster that would be!  But thanks be to God--He has intervened apparently in both instances.  We are greatly blessed because of it.  Where do you think He is at work today?