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HOLY WEEK AT CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
HOLY WEEK - The eight days that comprise our Holy Week and Easter observance are the high point of the Christian year. From age to age Christians have greeted this Feast of feasts like no other event in world history. Easter, after all, is the completion of a great mystery, and opened up humankind's understanding of God's relationship to us for all time. We refrain from calling the eighth day of the observance Easter Sunday, and call it instead Easter Day to show that we understand it to be the eighth day of the week: a new thing, the beginning of a new era, time out of time.
The Christian celebration of Easter is closely related to our Jewish forebears' observance of Pasch, or Passover. The French translation of Easter is, in fact, Pacques, and the Spanish is Pascua, both of which are linguistically related to Hebrew Pasch. The Jewish Passover commemorates the deliverance of our ancestors the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea to freedom and autonomy. The exodus from Egypt set up a patter of God's deliverance and redemption of God's people from bondage to new life.
For Christians, Jesus Christ by his life and ministry, death and resurrection, leads us on this same pilgrimage: a "passing over" from death to life. Christ passed over from death to life so that all people might pass over from death and bondage to eternal life in God. Born into a world of relationships fraught with sin and brokenness, we pass through waters, not of the Red Sea, but of baptism.
Easter is chiefly a baptismal liturgy, a recognition that in baptism we die with Christ and are raised with Christ. In baptism we are brought into communion with those who have made the same radical allegiance to abundant life. The eight days that mark Holy Week and Easter Day are a liturgical drama that moves us through the pattern we affirm with God's gift: Christ's life, message, passion, death, and resurrection.
The liturgies of Holy Week and Easter are much more than dramatic representation; rather, they are the means whereby we are united with the mysteries of Christ. We gather to tell the stories of creation, deliverance, and redemption and to weave them together with our own stories, so that our life is placed within the context of Christ's larger life. We gather to baptize and to contemplate our own baptism and its relationship to Christ's death and resurrection. We gather to receive Holy Communion, participating in the Great Feast that unites the human with the divine.
PALM SUNDAY - We begin this day by celebrating Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. We gather in the street where palm fronds are blessed and distributed as we re-enact the festive procession described in the gospels. But underneath the celebration is the tension of knowing that Jesus will not be the victorious political king the people had expected.
Palm Sunday begins Holy Week by abruptly shifting mood. The church is adorned in the red of the blood of martyrs. The Passion story (the story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion) is read with the congregation reading the part of the crowd. The congregation, who before sang sweet hosannas, now calls "Crucify him!" It is in this drama that the tone is set for the liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and ultimately the Great Vigil of Easter.
MAUNDY THURSDAY (7:30PM) - On the evening that precedes the events of Good Friday, we commemorate the last meal Jesus shared with his friends in the Upper Room. At that meal, Jesus gave them and us two lasting gifts. First, Jesus gave us the sacrament of the Eucharist, an everlasting means whereby we are made on in the Body of Christ. The second gift he gave was a practical example by which we are to love one another: he washed the disciples' feet.
"Maundy" is an English corruption of the Latin mandatum, which means "commandment." It reminds us of the commandment of Jesus, "Love one another as I have loved you." Many parishes observe foot washing part of the liturgy of Maundy Thursday. Maundy Thursday cannot be celebrated apart from the observance of Good Friday, for the Last Supper and the Cross of Christ are mystically one. After the people have received the bread and wine of our Savior's Last Supper, the clergy and acolytes strip the sanctuary and entire chancel of any adornment and leave it bare. As the altar represents the Body of Christ, we remember the arrest, trial, stripping and torture endured by Jesus on the way to his death. As the altar is stripped, the people recite Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus may have used during his execution.
THE ALTAR OF REPOSE - The Episcopal Church maintains the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Good Friday is the only day of the entire year that it is not appropriate to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. Because of this requirement, the leftover bread and wine that were consecrated at the Maundy Thursday liturgy, known as the reserved sacrament, are put in special vessels and kept in a place outside the main church, called the Altar of Repose.
As the main altar is stripped on Maundy Thursday, the Deacon processed with the consecrated bread and wine to a special altar that has been prepared to receive the sacrament. reminiscent of the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed in the company of his disciples before his arrest, this Altar of Repose is a place where the faithful can reflect on their own discipleship in preparation for Easter. A silent vigil is kept by those who wish to remain at the Altar of Repose until Good Friday.
GOOD FRIDAY (5:30pm) - Good Friday marks the lowest point of the Christian Year. We mourn the death of Jesus and contemplate the world's rejection of his message and ministry. Yet Good Friday is called "good" because God takes an instrument of death, the cross, and turns it into a means of victory over death. The Good Friday liturgy is stark and simple. The Passion narrative from the gospel of John is read, followed by the Solemn Collects, a prayerful remembrance of all who dwell on the earth.
The Veneration of the Cross is an act of devotion that began in the fourth century. A cross is brought forward into the sight of the people. The faithful contemplate in stillness the physical sign which bore our Savior. During the veneration the choir sings an anthem whose text is a meditation on the power of the symbol of the cross for us.
The liturgy concludes with a Confession of Sin, the Lord's Prayer, and distribution of Holy Communion from the reserved sacrament, followed by a final collect. The people depart in silence, leaving the church bleak and bare as was Jesus' tomb. Christians need not despair as the first disciples did, but can wait in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.
THE GREAT VIGIL OF EASTER (7:30pm) - The Great Vigil of Easter is the climax of the year. It is the end and the beginning. The early church had no special commemoration of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday apart from the celebration of the Resurrection. All of these separate historical events were enacted at the Christian Passover on Holy Saturday night. And so the entire truth of our redemption is totally contained in this one liturgy.
We begin at the beginning. As God invoked the coming of the Light at the dawn of time, so we begin by lighting the new fire. We kindle a fire outside in the darkness and light the Paschal candle, representing the Light of Christ, the true light of the world, through whom all things were made.
The Paschal candle is borne into the dark church where we gather to hear the ancient stories of God's faithful redemption of his people time and again throughout history. After the stories of God's people are told, we graft into the ancient stories our own stories as we baptize new Christians and remember and renew our own baptismal covenant through the waters of life. The newly baptized persons are a powerful symbol in the Easter liturgy of our own "Passover" from death into life.
And then we wait. Tonight is the eve of the Eighth Day, the dawn of a new creation. We have watched, and we have listened. We have baptized and have seen the new light. Now it is time to celebrate God's new plan for us.
The ministers put on their best vestments, the altar is vested and adorned with glorious cloth and flowers and brightly polished silver and brass. Bells ring, the organ plays, and the redeemed people of God make a joyful noise, singing "Glory to God in the highest..." And we celebrate Eucharist, the most blessed of feasts. We participate in the banquet of the Risen One who points us to abundant life. The fast of Lent is ended. Thanks be to God.
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