If you were to ask most Christians about salvation, I suspect that few would connect it with the actual liturgies of Holy Week and Easter. For many Christians, salvation is about God and me. Only infrequently do I hear many Christians talking about God and us, of recognizing that our salvation is tied up with the salvation of the entire world and the redemption of all creation. But a careful look at the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter would reveal both the corporate nature of salvation and the essential connection between these particular liturgies and our own participation in the salvation of the world.
It has much more to do than with mere showing up, although showing up is where we start. In the holiest services of the Church year, events of past years are re-presented to us in the present moment. Our memory is deepened. It’s the memory of anamnesis, a very ancient way of remembering seen in the Jewish tradition at the Passover seder meal and carried into the Christian tradition. God’s people gather not simply to recollect events of the past but to participate in them. And so the beautiful spiritual queries, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” And the answer is a resounding YES!
The theological movement from Palm Sunday to Easter Day is profound and absolutely necessary for us to enact each year so as not to lose a corporate memory of our salvation. And yet, by participating in these liturgies, our memories are shaped and formed as they’re brought into conversation with who we are each year as people who have changed since last Holy Week. In the liturgies of Holy Week—all of them, not just Easter Day—God is saving us.
On Palm Sunday, we start with a disconcerting juxtaposition of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, greeted with “hosannas” and then a brutal crucifixion on a cross outside the city walls. We in the congregation are the crowd who welcome him with cheap hosannas and then call for his crucifixion in the next breath. Why, many ask, do we start Holy Week with one account of the passion and then hear another one on Good Friday? One answer is that our lives are a constant whiplash between professing faith in Christ and denying him all the same. All of us are as fickle as the crowds in the Gospel Passion accounts. And on Palm Sunday, we’re reminded of the chasm created between us and God by our sins (although God, of course, is never far from us). We begin Holy Week with this uncomfortable tension between wanting to follow Christ, saying we will, and then falling short.
But by Maundy Thursday, we find our Lord commanding us in the great command (mandatum) to follow his example and serve others in his Name, just as he became a servant for our sake. Love one another as I love you, Jesus said. And in that loving of others, in that self-sacrificial service of all humanity, we identify more closely with our Lord. As we receive his Body and Blood at the Eucharist (in commemoration of that first Eucharist in the Upper Room), we receive his inestimable gift, remembering that he gives it freely to us although we constantly deny him.
And so, by Good Friday, at the foot of the cross with Jesus, hearing St. John’s account of Jesus’s Passion, we’re not in the same place as we were on Palm Sunday. We have participated in the washing of feet, in the partaking of the Eucharist, and shortly thereafter witnessed the stripping of the altar, a brutal reminder of how gift and betrayal are closely linked in Jesus’s Passion. As Jesus willingly goes to the cross in John’s Gospel (in utter control of his destiny in obedience to the Father), we find ourselves closer to him than we were on Palm Sunday. So close, in fact, that we step into the intercessory role as a priestly people prepared for us by Jesus the Great High Priest himself. We offer the great Solemn Collects for the salvation of the world, and then we prostrate ourselves before a cross, kissing the feet of Jesus hanging on the wood.
After the emptiness and silence of Holy Saturday, as Jesus’s body lies in the tomb, we gather in the dark, on the eve of the third day, and everything is made new. New light is kindled in a fire, and by the light of the Paschal Candle, kindled from that same fire, we hear the stories of our faith told, as if around a campfire. We journey to the font with four adults who will receive the sacrament of new birth in Holy Baptism. We go with them under the waters, dying to an old way of life and rising to a new one. And then, our family has expanded, it has grown by four. We’re soon at the foot of the altar in the dark, hearing the first proclamation of Easter, and suddenly, all the lights in the church come on, the organ sounds for the first time since Maundy Thursday, and Easter is here once again. Bread and wine are consecrated anew, and we have crossed the Red Sea from slavery into freedom.
I hope you can see the way in which our participation in these liturgies is part of how God saves us. It’s very difficult to get a fulsome sense of this if you only show up on Easter Day. And so, I heartily encourage you to make an effort to attend all the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter. If there’s any week in which you might consider taking a few hours off in the middle of the day, please think about doing so on Good Friday. After a long workday on Maundy Thursday, please make a point of coming to Mass at 7 p.m. If you have children, please give a thought to introducing them to these liturgies. The moving drama and ritual can impress themselves on people of all ages, even without prior knowledge of the complexities of the liturgies.
This is the week of weeks, the holiest time of the Christian year. Wherever you are—with whatever suffering you’re experiencing and with whatever joy you’re living—the liturgies meet you, and God meets you in these liturgies. Sorrow and joy are inseparable in the Easter mystery. Easter Day doesn’t stamp out your pain; it gives new meaning to your pain. The final word is the hope of the resurrection, which comes to us not on the other side of pain but in the midst of it.
I leave you with the opening words from the Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter, the occasion on which Abolfazl Baloochiyan, Hassan Baloochiyan, Melika Balouchiyan, and Emma Simpson will become members of the Church, our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Dear friends in Christ: On this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life, the Church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer. For this is the Passover of the Lord, in which, by hearing his Word and celebrating his Sacraments, we share in his victory over death. (BCP, p. 285)
Beloved in Christ, may this week of weeks be a blessing for you, and may you experience something of the mystery of your own salvation as all of us "share in [Christ’s] victory over death.”
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle
[My reflections on the liturgies of Holy Week and the soteriology behind them is drawn from James Farwell’s book This Is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week, New York: T & T Clark, 2005.]