As this magazine appears shortly before we begin to celebrate Holy Week, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves once again of the services we hold in this most important week of the year and why we celebrate them in the way we do.
A good place to start is in Jerusalem, where Christians will be keeping this week at the same sites and in similar ways to those experienced by Egeria, a redoubtable female pilgrim from Spain who stayed there for three years between 381 and 384 AD. Our Holy Week rites are perhaps our strongest connection with an ancient heritage.
Jerusalem at the end of the fourth century was still very much in ruins. The Romans had raised it to the ground after the Jewish rebellion in AD 72, and the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt it as a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina after another Jewish uprising some sixty years later. In the centuries that followed a small Christian community survived maintaining the memory of some of the sites associated with Jesus’ life. After the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, came to power in 324 he destroyed Hadrian’s pagan temples and established Christian shrine churches on the Mount of Olives, at the sites of the agony in the garden and the Ascension, and on Golgotha, where one building covered the sites of the crucifixion and the cave of the resurrection.
For Egeria the Great Week started on the eve of Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday). A vigil service was held in a church on what was held to be the site of the Upper Room, at the end of which the priest reminded the congregation to be at Bethany at one o’clock the following day. At that service the readings recalled the meal at which Jesus is anointed with perfume as a premonition of his burial.
On the Day of Palms the people worshipped at the churches on the Mount of Olives, reading the gospel of the triumphant entry before themselves entering Jerusalem, repeating the words, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,’ and carrying palm or olive branches as they went to worship in the late evening at the Church of the Resurrection. Egeria notes that, ‘the babies and the ones too young to walk are carried on their parents shoulders,’ and also that ‘they have to go quite gently on account of the older women and men among them who might get tired.’
On Thursday they worshipped from two in the afternoon until dawn on Friday, with a break for an evening meal. They gathered in that part of Constantine’s Great Church which covered the place of the crucifixion known as the Martyrium. The first readings recalled the betrayal by Judas, and then after the candidates for baptism had been dismissed, the first Eucharist celebrated the Last Supper, and another later Eucharist was held in the part of the church known as the Anastasis, close to the cave of the Resurrection. At the end of the liturgy the archdeacon announced the time and location of the evening liturgy ending with the words, ‘There is a great effort ahead of us tonight!’ The people then hurried home for a meal before going to the Mount of Olives for the night services in the garden of the agony. Gospel readings included the account of the agony and the arrest. They then processed back into the city as day was breaking to read the account of the trial before Pilate. After which the bishop encouraged the people to go home for a rest. Those of a more energetic nature went instead to pray at the column where Christ was scourged.
On Friday morning the people returned to the courtyard in the Great Church behind the site of the crucifixion, queuing up in order to come forward and venerate a relic of the true cross, which Constantine’s mother Helena, believed she had discovered. The deacons kept careful watch on the proceedings as on one occasion, Egeria says, someone bit off a piece of the cross and stole it away. The people ‘stoop down, touch the holy Wood first with their forehead and then with their eyes and then kiss it, but no one puts out his hand to touch it.’ At noon they came together in the court yard between the covered sites of Golgotha and the tomb, for three hours of hymns and readings from the psalms, epistles and gospels, showing how these events were all part of the fulfilment of God’s plan of salvation. ‘It is impressive,’ wrote Egeria, ‘ to see the way all the people are moved by these readings and how they mourn.’ At the end of the three hours they move to the site of the tomb for the reading of Christ’s burial. The youngest and most vigorous then stay in vigil for the rest of the night. On Saturday very little happens – it is the one day of the year on which the Eucharist is not celebrated.
On the Saturday evening the catechumens were baptised and then brought to the first Eucharist of Easter celebrated in the Martyrium but with a resurrection theme. The gospel of the resurrection was then read at the tomb and a second offering made after which the people went home to sleep before a third Eucharist at dawn.
Three things are clear from this summary of what Egeria tells us. First, the Great Week is a communal celebration in which everyone, old and young alike, takes part, however exhausted they may feel (though clearly there is an awareness of and pastoral care for the effect the many services have on the people). Second, though the services take place in the appropriate settings there isn’t a sense of ‘re-enactment’ – the themes of crucifixion and resurrection are interwoven throughout and prayers take place both at the site of Golgotha and the Tomb throughout the week. And third, much of what Egeria witnessed will happen here and in churches throughout the country. We shall process with palm branches, we shall remember the first “Lord’s Supper’, we shall keep vigil to mark the agony in the garden, we shall sit before the cross on Good Friday (though not venerate it), we shall celebrate baptisms on Easter Day (though not at quite such an early hour.)
Holy week is a time for bringing a community together and concentrating our minds on the story at the heart of our faith. It is a time for going deep into ourselves exploring both pain and joy, sorrow and hope. It is a time of spiritual catharsis, a time of change and moving forward in a new direction. In a world that lives increasingly in fear of catastrophe, the story of holy week is one of ‘eucatastrophe’ as Tolkien put it, a good and holy and inspirational catastrophe in which the Son of God dies and rises again for us in whatever way we need his grace, consolation and encouragement.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker