Why the Cross?: Meditations for Holy Week

Holy Week is an almost entirely private event in our culture. Apart from Palm Sunday and Easter there are no public holidays, no processions, no pageantry, often not even Church services to mark the last days of Christ on earth. There may be some evening worship, mostly poorly attended, to guide us through His passion. But this is a week that deserves our focused attention even if we are busy and find no time to attend church. Why the Cross? is a collection of meditations, beginning with Palm Sunday, resting briefly on every day's events, reaching into Good Friday with reflections on the Seven Last Words of Christ on the cross, and moving on to the stillness of Holy Saturday and finding its climax in the celebration of Easter. This is a book superbly suited to the needs of those who want to understand His passion for abundant life, who wish to go beyond the facile phrases of pulpit lingo, who suspect that He did not come to die but to live that we might have life. This journey through Holy Week dwells on the various representations of the cross in art history. It encourages the readers not just to think about that cross, but to make it and take it up and follow Him who gave His life on it.

Georg Retzlaff has been a priest and teacher in the church for almost forty years. Educated in Europe, he earned his Doctor of Theology degree in Church History from the University of Bern, Switzerland, and taught at colleges and universities in the USA, Liberia, and Tanzania before returning to parish ministry. His previous books and articles were published in Germany and Switzerland, with two recent publications at Authorhouse. Retzlaff has a passion for teaching and preaching on all levels, academic as well as congregational. He is presently serving as rector of an Episcopal parish in South Carolina.