The Liturgies of Holy Week

‘Liturgical acts are not unincarnated but set in the midst of real life.’ (Archbishop Romero).

‘The word became flesh’ (John 1)

The word should be fleshed out in our lives too but some services during holy week turn that flesh back into words.

The early church kept Holy Week as a very central, community celebration. However, in the course of time it was corrupted. The Roman Catholic pattern of Holy Week became weighed down with lots of little ceremonies. For example, the server carrying the cross at the head of the Palm Sunday procession round Salisbury Cathedral used to kick the great West door as part of the ceremonies. It all came from a misreading of the Latin stage directions. He was supposed to knock the door with the foot of the cross, not his own foot.

That obscurity was swept away by Cranmer whose Holy Week services in the Book of Common Prayer simply provide collects, epistles and gospels for daily communion. By the Victorian era his services were supplemented by a collection of extras: sermons, talks, devotional services, lantern slides, passion plays, choral offerings, Compline, Stations of the Cross – devotional titbits offered to individuals rather than a series of corporate acts of the whole church around the solid food of the liturgy. Similarly, Romans Catholic liturgies came to be celebrated in the early morning by the faithful few, so Stations of the Cross and ‘The Three Hours Devotion’ grew up as substitutes.

Devotional titbits service pious memory instead of present participation; listening to the words of the passion story and singing about it can be a bit of a history lesson. Hearing words can help us meditate but we need to ‘get out of our heads’; we need simple rituals to earth the story in our own lives. Symbols speak to different people in different ways according to the different stages of their faith. People are no longer so afraid of ‘high church’ arcane rituals – these rituals have been simplified so that their meaning stands out and people, even in ‘low’ churches are getting into candles, icons &c. We are a liturgical church – to use home-made para-liturgies for the central week of the Church’s life seems inconsistent.

Many denominations have revamped their liturgies for Holy Week, including the Church of England, whose ‘Lent, Holy Week, Easter: Services and Prayers’ was published in 1984. So we no longer have to borrow, as Anglo Catholics did, from the Roman Rite. We now have our own, legal services.

We use an ecumenical lectionary; we should use the liturgies which are celebrated by the vast majority of Christians during the Great Week. (not only RC, Orthodox and ‘High Church’ – the Church of Scotland, a manual for Baptist ministers and similar URC manual have given attention to the matter too)

The revised liturgies seek to recover the ceremonies made popular by the 4th Century bishop Cyril of Jerusalem which were graphically noted by a Spanish nun named Egeria in her diary.

On Palm Sunday the community met on the Mount of Olives and processed to the church in Jerusalem with palms, where they heard a dramatic reading of the Passion story from Matthew’s gospel.   So now we process, with palms, to church and hear that same gospel as part of our Sung Eucharist. Amongst the themes this service may stimulate are the welcoming of Christ into our lives yet the surprising turn of events the journey of faith can experience, the way humans have of welcoming charismatic people and then rejecting them and their demands, the way people can be popular, before they had to make tough decisions at work and make enemies. It can have a green dimension: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem can mark the rise of a popular movement for recycling, for supporting Greenpeace. The cleansing of the temple can mark the growing realisation that personal acts of recycling are not enough; global capitalism and market forces need to be tackled. The cleansing of the temple can also represent the cleansing and purging of one’s own mind of mixed motives.

In Cyril’s Jerusalem, Maundy Thursday involved footwashing, a commemoration of the last supper and a procession to and vigil through the night at the Garden of Gethsamene. We commemorate the last supper and include footwashing. At the end of we process, with the sacrament, to a side chapel, decked in flowers like a garden, where we shall have a time of vigil before striping the altars in memory of the disciples betrayal of Jesus. Meditative themes at this service might include thanksgiving for Holy Communion, for those who have served us, for friendship, for those who lie awake in despair, loneliness, desertion or in prison awaiting torture or that common experience when one feels deserted by hope, when nothing happens, when there is virtually no one to turn to. For the green dimension, the watch marks the serious realisation that it might be too late; the planet is doomed; nobody seems to have the will to change things; like the disciples, the vast majority of people cannot face up to the reality in front of their face.

On Good Friday, Egeria witnessed the dramatic reading of John’s Passion narrative, veneration of a relic of the cross and a sharing of communion. We gather, as we did the evening before, around a large cross. We hear John’s passion narrative read dramatically and then spend some time contemplating the cross and conclude with communion. In answer to a widespread feeling that communion ‘isn’t right’ on this day, the new service urges us to enter into the mystery of the passion of death of Christ as St. Paul himself described it in his first epistle to the Corinthians. (Disapproval of Holy Communion on Good Friday is based on an antiquated practice which has become sentimentalised, i.e. Wednesdays and Fridays were celebrated with the synaxis, ie. Ministry of the Word and reception from the reserved sacrament; as daily communion became frequent, this pattern was dropped but retained for Good Friday because it is usual to be more traditional on special days. It was also a deep-rooted custom not to sing hymns on Easter Sunday because hymnody was an innovation. Good Friday without communion isolates the death of Jesus from all the other saving acts and makes it a tragic event without its full context in salvation history – every liturgy celebrates the whole of redemption yet focuses on one part of it – to narrow the focus entirely on to Jesus’s death is to collude with an unhealthy protestant tendency to exalt suffering and sacrifice and downplay incarnation, resurrection, Spirit &c. Meditative themes on this day might include sacrifice, the love of material things as a way into God, political assassination, the cost of fighting evil and, ecologically, Good Friday marks to death of the planet; but there is an Easter glimmer of hope.

Fourth Century Jerusalem gave the Christian Church what, for most of its history, as been the most important service of the entire Christian year: The Easter Vigil. It focussed on fire and water, the raising of Christ to new life and our share in that through baptism. We meet to hear extracts of scripture about the great events of salvation history and share silence around the Easter candle, from whence we light individual candles to denote our wish to share in that salvation and to pass it on to others. We renew our baptismal vows and are anointed with water and oil to dedicate ourselves afresh. Themes for meditation at this vigil might include inspiration sharing insight, dying to ego-self and to conventions of society and rising to a new self.

The purpose of all this is that we should enter into the reality of Holy Week and relate it to our lives now.

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