Last Sunday during children’s formation, I talked with the class about Holy Week and Easter. As part of our conversation, the children made Holy Week passports. We made little folded notebooks of paper. Each page of the notebooks was dedicated to a different liturgy, from Palm Sunday until Easter Day. I explained to the children that the liturgies of Holy Week are the most important of the Church year. And because they are so important, it’s as if we are going to a different country. We enter Jesus’s time. We are there with him in his suffering, death, and resurrection, and he is with us. Past, present, and future collide.
I told the children to bring their Holy Week passports to all the Holy Week liturgies. Yes, I mean all of them! They wrote down the times of the liturgies, and I said that I hoped they would attend them all (yes, even the Easter Vigil!). For each liturgy that they attend, I would stamp their passports with a Good Shepherd, Rosemont, stamp. I even offered to give them something special for each liturgy they attend. (I’m not above a bit of bribery!) But the real point I wanted to make—even if the allure of a special treat was used—was that the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter are worth attending. They are necessary to attend.
This holiest of Christian weeks begins this Sunday, The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday. That is the title given by the prayer book. Two incongruent liturgies (a passion liturgy and a palm liturgy) come together to create a theological whiplash effect, where we find ourselves retreating from acclamations of Jesus as king to call for his crucifixion in our own various betrayals. This liturgy should bring us up short. On Maundy Thursday, we move from this perceived separation from Christ, as we falter in our attempts to follow him, to begin a deeper identification with him, to take on his identity as we strive to become Christ for the world. This starts with the mandatum: to love others—even our enemies—as Christ loves us. This is embodied in the footwashing. If the footwashing makes you uncomfortable, then I hope you will have your feet washed! It should make all of us uncomfortable, because it reminds us that Christ calls us to pattern our lives on his by loving and serving others in his Name. That is a gargantuan task.
Good Friday is what the liturgist James Farwell (on whose work I draw in this theological/soteriological framing of Holy Week) calls the “soteriological fusion of identities” [see This Is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week]. By the day of Jesus’s crucifixion and death, we have moved closer to him, so close, in fact, that animated by Christ’s Spirit, we move to the place in which Jesus, the Great High Priest, has been to intercede for the world in the Solemn Collects. In these collects, we will also pray for our Jewish brothers and sisters. Holy Week has historically been a time in which they experienced great persecution by Christians, so we will pray for repentance and for the continued blessing of the Jewish people by God. This prayer of repentance is a part of drawing closer to Christ, himself a Jew.
Finally, by the Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter, we will arrive at the tomb, in the dark, before the sun rises on Easter Day. We will wait with Christ in his death, hoping for his resurrection. We will hear our family stories of faith around the campfire, a newly-lighted fire announcing that the light of Christ can’t be squelched by the darkness. We will baptize an adult, Scarlett Muller, who has been faithfully preparing for baptism since September. She will be buried with Christ in his death in the waters of Baptism, and she will rise again to new life in him. We will renew our own baptismal vows, as we remember the paschal pattern in our own lives. And then, after much waiting, we will make the first Easter proclamation for this year, and we will share in the Eucharist together, reborn in Christ’s image. Be sure to bring a bell to ring at the Easter acclamation!
I hope my brief summary of these incredible liturgies tantalizes you. I hope you will prioritize attending them all this year. Imagine that, like our children in the parish, you have your Holy Week passport. On Sunday, we will enter a different country, a different land, where eternity meets us and we meet eternity, where we catch palpable glimpses of eternal life. In each liturgy, something of the pattern of Christ’s own life will be stamped on your hearts. I do hope to see you at the liturgies next week. They are liturgies by which we participate in God’s saving acts, not at some point in the distant future alone, but here and now. May this holiest of weeks be a dying and rising for you. May you be born again in Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle