From the Rector
Dear Friends in Christ,
With Palm Sunday (in two weeks) we will enter Holy Week, which is the central focal point of the Christian calendar. Each year there are various elements added that enhance the beauty of each of the liturgies.
For example, the hauntingly beautiful setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere, by Allegri is sung at Tenebrae on Wednesday night, accompanied by the flickering of candlelight. We hear the Reproaches sung on Good Friday, and the stunning Christus Vincit at the Easter Vigil. Whether it is music, movement, art, or sermons, everything points toward the central mystery that unfolds this week—everything points toward Christ offering his all for the sake of love.
This series of liturgies (really just one liturgy now celebrated over three days) plus Palm Sunday form the heart (the crux even—meaning the Cross) of the Christian life and year.
The heart of the Christian faith is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We see in Jesus the full glory of God’s own life and the full development of human dignity. Every story of the Gospels adds to this fullness; the events we commemorate during Holy Week bring us to the heart of the story.
What we see requires a response. It is quite possible to look at Jesus and find nothing to attract us or even reasons to scoff. It is possible to find something compelling, and still to finally turn away. There are those who follow if only at a distance and there are, in every generation, those who can stand by the cross and who will arrive early at the Empty Tomb. Holy Week exposes us to the story each year and requires from us, those who name ourselves Christians, a response.
The way the story is told has changed and taken on the language of many cultures and is infused with the skills of artists and enriched with an unimaginable weight of prayer over the ages. These are the most ancient of our liturgies and we seek to enter them with an awareness of the deep significance, history, and mystery of which we are inheritors.
The earliest celebration of Holy Week (also called the Triduum) was one event. It began in the night that ended with the dawn of Easter day. During that long night the church told the key stories of Scripture, kept vigil, and prayed as new converts were baptized into Christ’s death and rejoiced as they joined with them in sharing the bread and wine—the body and blood of Christ by which the risen Lord sustains his people and binds them together as one body.
After the period of persecutions had ended, in the Church in Jerusalem, it became a custom for the various events of Jesus’ last days to be remembered with prayers, hymns, and ceremonies in the places where they occurred. A Spanish nun, Egeria, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem about the year 400AD. She returned inspired by what she had seen and the customs of the church in Jerusalem spread through western Europe. Rites were developed that re-enacted the events of the week. The full range of human creativity exploded in poetry and music, painting and statuary, to impress the story on the hearts and minds of Christians.
In the 16th century, as our particular Anglican tradition was being forged and fought over in England, the customs were sharply curtailed and simplified (this coincided with events like the sacking of the monasteries of England and the destruction of much sacred art).
Over the last four centuries, the Anglican tradition has recaptured much of what was lost while never losing the insight that it is hearing and responding to the story, and not the ceremonies themselves—that is central. The ceremonies vary from the exuberance of Palm Sunday’s procession (complete with children using palm fronds for sword fights at coffee hour) to the silence of the watch at the Altar of Repose from just after the Maundy Thursday liturgy, to the next day’s Good Friday solemnities.
Some, like the basic shape of the Vigil, come from the earliest days of the Church. During Holy Week, we draw upon thousands of years and countless cultures as we follow the way of the cross, pray with Jesus in his agony, and announce the good news of the resurrection.
More is going on in even the simplest Eucharist than we could name or describe; and with certainty the liturgies of Holy Week are even deeper and more multifaceted. These rites are powerful; the yearly repetition creates deep memories and shapes our imagination. It is a demanding week, requiring attention and effort to participate fully. If we answer Jesus’ call to “watch with me,” God will work through word and action to accomplish in us his own purposes.
On Ash Wednesday we were invited to the observance of a Holy Lent—may we complete that observance by entering with joy, reverence, awe, and wonder the mysteries of Holy Week.
As you plan your weeks ahead, I hope that you will make space for these liturgies. I pray that we will not take for granted what it means to be together for them once again—to once more be welcomed to enter with joy together into the contemplation of these mighty acts by which we are made one with, in, through, and for Christ.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert