Sharing Love, Seeking Justice: Tuesday in Holy Week

April 15, 2025

Welcome to our 2025 series of Holy Week devotionals, a gift from New Brunswick Theological Seminary, eight days of devotions leading to the Feast of the Resurrection.

Tuesday in Holy Week

Waiting in Patience

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away!
The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. Isaiah 49:1, NRSV

For you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.
I have been sustained by you ever since I was born;
from my mother’s womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.
I have become a portent to many; but you are my refuge and my strength.
But I shall always wait in patience, and shall praise you more and more. Psalm 71:5-7, 14

Jesus said to them, ‘The light is with you for a little longer.
Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you.
If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.
While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.’ John 12:35-36

In Lent in general, and in Holy Week in particular, we are obliged to walk with Jesus through the trials, tribulations, self-denials, and humiliations all while contemplating the morbid reality of his ultimate suffering in betrayal, isolation, crucifixion, and death. And yet, this Holy Tuesday the appointed scriptures resonate with the greatest other certainty of human life: birth. And amid the solemn observance of Holy Week we are reminded of how utterly one we are with God, not only in death, but in life, from even before our very births, and through knowing Christ are born even into eternal life.

Having a precious infant daughter at home, as I reflect on the words of Isaiah, the Psalmist, and John, what stands out most to me are the references to childbirth. Our family truly had to “wait in patience” (Psalm 71: 14) as our baby was not born until eleven days after her “due date.” We were reminded of God’s time is often different that our own. I welcome the reassurance of Psalm 71:6: “Upon you I have leaned ever since I was born, from the womb of my mother you, you took me out, my praise shall be always in you.” We must indeed praise God, more and more. Lent and Holy Week can bring an acute darkness and dampened mood, but Jesus admonishes us to believe in the light, “so that we may become children of light” (John 12:36).

My hope this Holy Tuesday is that all mothers and their little ones may fully know you, and fully know and feel that they are loved by you as well as welcomed into the world as members of the human family, the body of Christ, and not be stymied by labels of alien, migrant, outsider, or Other, for God “is the source of our life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

– T. Patrick Milas
   Director of Gardner A. Sage Library
   Assistant Professor of Theological Bibliography and Research

Prayer:
              Knowing God became truly human in the person of Jesus,
              and that his mother experienced
              all of the bodily changes and pangs of childbirth that mothers do,
              we pray that mothers who have hoped and prayed for their expectancy
              may continue to be comforted by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
              May we all abide with Jesus this day,
              and abide in his wisdom,
              that despite the trials of Lent,
              we may truly glory in the righteousness, the sanctification, and the redemption
              that Easter will soon surely bring anew!
              Amen.