Were you there when they crucified my Lord? These are the opening words of the traditional Spiritual. Most people, thinking rationally and “remembering” past events as the English word “remember” suggests, would answer, “No; of course, not!” But as we begin Holy Week, and as we seek to reclaim a deeper way of remembering, the answer to the words of that Spiritual can only be, “Yes; of course, we were there!”
We were there when they nailed Jesus to the tree, when they laid him in the tomb, and when he was raised from the dead. To understand Holy Week, we must believe that we were there. During Holy Week, we enter kairos, or God’s time, which transcends human chronos time. Kairos time is a time in which remembrance is deep and participatory. Just as our Jewish friends engage in such deep remembering with the celebration of Passover, Christians do as well during this holiest of weeks. The grammar of remembrance defies the rules of the English language. Consider these words from the great Exsultet hymn in praise of the Paschal Candle, sung by the deacon at the Great Vigil of Easter: “This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.” Such a mingling of tenses makes no sense unless we were there when God did all this. And Holy Week is when we remember, deeply and in a participatory way, that we were and we are and we always will be there at the heart of salvation.
If we pay attention to St. John’s Gospel, we will see that the evangelist invites us into a view of salvation that is partially realized. Salvation meets us here in the present, as well as in the future, and it’s also in our past, too. And if this is indeed true, then when we participate in the liturgies of Holy Week (and when we participate in any of the Church’s liturgies), we are truly participating in our own salvation. And so this means that in our longing for God to save us by making us whole, reconciling us to himself and to one another, there’s nothing more important that we can do than participate in the saving liturgies of the Church. Going to church, in this sense, matters greatly.
The drama of Holy Week all begins on Palm Sunday, when we face the glaring dissonance of human sin pitted against God’s salvation in Christ. If we are bothered by the celebration of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, hailed by the fickle crowds as King, and the ensuing jeers of “Crucify him!”, then we have properly understood something of this liturgy’s purpose. It’s not meant to make sense. It’s meant to disturb us out of our complacency, as any recognition of sin should do. We hear for the first time during Holy Week an account of Jesus’s Passion, this year from Mark. Holy Week is not linear time but time in a spiral. We need to hear more than one account of Jesus’s Passion during this week to understand how salvation unfolds in the mystery of God’s time.
On Maundy Thursday, we begin to move out of our estrangement (only from our perspective, of course) from Christ through sin into fuller identification, first through the washing of feet, which embodies Christ’s command to selfless love and through sharing in the Eucharistic feast, as we remember its institution. But we are left at the end of the liturgy with a stark reminder of Christ’s abandonment in the stripping of the altar and in the lonely watch before the Blessed Sacrament as we “watch” with Christ in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing that we, like Jesus’s disciples, often struggle to watch with Christ. (Sign up here to watch after the Maundy Thursday liturgy.)
Good Friday is an oxymoron. We experience both the starkest liturgy of the Christian year (so stark, in fact, that it’s the only day where Mass is not celebrated) and also a profound identification with Christ as we move into our vocation as a priestly people. This occurs in the Solemn Collects, where we inhabit the place prepare for us by the Great High Priest, Jesus himself, interceding on behalf of the world. We hear St. John’s Passion account, and this is essential, for in it, we see that the cross is the moment of glory. Christ reigns from the tree, community is formed at the foot of the cross, and the whole world is being drawn to God the Father.
And then we finally arrive at the Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter. It is the Christian Passover. As we move out of the apophatic silence of Holy Saturday, everything becomes new: a new fire of Christ’s light, new water of baptism, and new Eucharistic bread and wine. We move from death into life. The First Mass of Easter is our first celebration of the hope of the resurrection and of what Christ has done for us. It’s the liturgy that acts out the upending of the world that occurs in the Gospel.
My understanding of the salvific character of the Holy Week liturgies is influenced largely by the scholarship of James Farwell in his book This Is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week. I commend it to you. I can’t encourage you enough to attend all the liturgies of Holy Week. The Paschal Triduum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter are one liturgy. If we long for salvation, these liturgies are essential to our Christian discipleship. If you need to take any days off from work, this is the week to do so.
Our guest preacher for the Paschal Triduum is the Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley, former Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. We will also be blessed to have a visiting deacon for the liturgies of the Triduum and Easter, the Rev. Durango Jenkins, a student at Virginia Theological Seminary, and this will allow us to celebrate these liturgies with three sacred ministers, a rare gift these days at Good Shepherd!
As we approach the saving liturgies of Holy Week, I pray that you may find the joy of God’s salvation, a salvation that can’t be separated from the suffering of our world. It’s a salvation that meets us in that suffering, and this is the good news of the Gospel, the greatest news of all.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle