On Sunday, Palm Sunday, we will enter deeply into a different kind of time. Truth be told, the entire Church year, every Mass, every liturgy, really, takes place in both linear/human (chronos) and God’s (kairos) time. But to fully appreciate the sacred mysteries of Holy Week, we must intentionally stand with one foot in ordinary time and another in the eternity of God’s time.
The Palm Sunday liturgy can be disorienting, which is actually one of its most important characteristics. The prayer book’s name for the Palm Sunday liturgy notes the dissonance of this day: The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday. We begin with the Palm liturgy, in which we participate in Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Palms are blessed, and we process around the church with cries of Hosanna. If this seems like a charade, it’s because it is. It’s a charade because to facilely welcome Jesus with boisterous hosannas belies our sinful tendencies to push him outside the gates of our hearts. But we must enact this hypocrisy in the liturgy so that we can begin to live into that rich paradox that is the Christian life: we are sinners and yet redeemed, we welcome Jesus while we reject him. If you want to learn more about a particular soteriological understanding of the liturgies of Holy Week, I highly recommend This Is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week by James Farwell (New York: T & T International, 2005). Farwell’s premise is that the very mode of our salvation lies in our participation in the liturgies of Holy Week. And so on Palm Sunday, we will find a great dissonance between the initial hosannas of the Palm liturgy and then the whiplash effect of moving to the liturgy of the Passion, where we are in the crowd crying for Christ’s crucifixion.
As I said, Holy Week invites us into a different way of encountering time. We do not move chronologically through Holy Week in the order of the events of Jesus’s final days. We hear one Passion account (from the synoptic Gospels) on Palm Sunday, move to the washing of feet and institution of the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and then we are back at the Passion again on Good Friday (from John’s Gospel). Holy Week is not linear. If you subscribe to James Farwell’s thesis, by Good Friday we are in a very different place than on Palm Sunday. Over the course of Holy Week, we move from a perceived distance/separation from Christ in the fickleness of the Palm Sunday crowd to a “soteriological fusion of identities” on Good Friday. The pivot point seems to be Maundy Thursday, where in the footwashing we are commanded to imitate Christ’s humble servanthood when we wash the feet of others and strive to love others as he loves us. By Good Friday, we are in a place of intercession, “soteriologically fused” with Christ when we pray the Solemn Collects, as we inhabit the place prepared for us by Christ the Great High Priest.
When we arrive at the Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter, we arrive at the most important liturgy of the Church year. In the great Exsultet hymn sung before the Paschal Candle, we proclaim “This is the night.” It’s the night when God rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It’s the night when death was put to flight. It’s the night when we moved (and still move!) from death into life.
At the heart of all these liturgies is the great Paschal Mystery, which stands at the center of every Mass. In this mystery, we do not mechanically appropriate saving grace by virtue of Christ’s blood. The liturgies themselves become salvific, and we find events of the historical past being re-presented in the present, where they are truly alive, real, and saving for us. As the beautiful Spiritual asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Our resounding answer in Holy Week is YES. We were there. We are there now. And we will continue to be. . .
I hope that I have given you enough of a teaser to seriously consider attending all the liturgies of the Paschal Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter). They are the most important liturgies of the entire year. It requires a sacrifice to make the time necessary to attend them, but it’s well worth it. If you want to begin to understand the mystery of what it means to be a Christian, these liturgies will help you.
I will offer something else, too: as we hear many readings from holy Scripture over the coming week (some of which, like John’s Passion, can be difficult to bear at times), we hear them as they are situated in the liturgies themselves. Liturgy invites us to move from our heads into our hearts. Hearing Scripture liturgically is not so much about analysis as it is letting it speak to us metaphorically, poetically, and in an embodied way through ritual. I encourage you to consider all this as you participate in the Holy Week liturgies.
But perhaps the greatest news of all, is that these liturgies don’t teach us to chronologically move from suffering to relief of suffering. They defy linear time and modern metanarratives of simplistic progress. They reassure us that God meets us in the liturgies. (See more in Farwell’s book.) We don’t pass through Good Friday just to get to Easter; we find Easter even in Good Friday. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the moment of Jesus’s glorification, even in the face of suffering and death. This is God’s strange, eternal time. It offers hope to everyone who is lamenting now. In Holy Week, we lament with parents who grieve the deaths of their children massacred in schools. We lament with those who still miss their loved ones whom COVID took three years ago. We lament with those grieving recent losses. We lament with our Jewish brothers and sisters, who have experienced hatred and violence during this week for centuries, as they still face anti-Semitism. We lament with every person now who is longing for joy. We lament with all our brothers and sisters, but we see in the darkness of such suffering and trauma a candle burning as a still, small point of a newly-kindled flame. It shows an empty tomb. The flame will grow and spread throughout the church until, waiting in the darkness and encouraged by its meager light, we sing, Rejoice.
A blessed Holy Week to you.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle