This is a lecture, not a sermon or a devotional address, but I want to start with two verses from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: ‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into his death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.’ (6:3-4) [cf Colossians 2:12-13; 1 Corinthians 15:17]

‘Recovering Holy Week in Liturgy and Theology’ is my broad and rather ambitious topic, and it’s one very close to my heart. It unites the core of Christian belief – the saving death and resurrection of Christ - with core elements of Christian liturgy and practice. What most Christians call ‘Holy Week’ is the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. The core of this Holy Week is the Triduum or the Great Three Days – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. 

Now the word ‘recovering’ implies that it was in some sense lost. When, and by whom? At the Protestant Reformation, when the various Protestant Churches stripped their medieval liturgical tradition of what they judged to be non-Scriptural accretions, and recast the forms of their worship. Some did so more drastically than others. The Church of England was relatively conservative and retained important elements of liturgical continuity with the past. However, many things went out the window, and in the various Books of Common Prayer the celebration of Holy Week came to vary little from any other week, other than in a handful of prayers and in the choice of Scripture readings. Here, one could say, the baby went out with the bath water. Anglicans have been seeking to recover the baby ever since, and doing so from some unlikely sources. For example, the Three Hours service on Good Friday based on the Seven Last Words of Jesus on the Cross, a service much beloved by Protestant-minded Anglicans amongst others, has its origin as a 17th Century Peruvian Jesuit devotion.

Let’s go back into the earlier centuries of the Church and sketch out a few basic patterns in liturgical history. This is going to be very, very broad-brush! The sheer complexity of liturgical history makes generalisation both difficult and hazardous. The trick is to try to discern the main outlines and trends. And as we go, let’s also keep an eye on visual representations of the Crucifixion, and on the context of baptism. This will link us among other things to the arts, which is one of the themes of these lectures. (Though I would be prepared to argue for the proposition that liturgy is itself one of the arts.)

In the first three centuries of the Church, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal, there were originally just two annual feasts: ‘the Pasch’ (what we English speakers call ‘Easter’), and ‘Pentecost’, with their roots in the Jewish feasts of Passover and Pentecost.. No Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Trinity Sunday, Saints Days, or whatever. Everything slowly evolved from these two core feasts of Easter and Pentecost.

Easter, the Pasch, which annually celebrates the Christian Passover, the death and resurrection of Christ, by which we are saved. Incidentally, it would have been better if English Christians had never adopted the word ‘Easter’; other languages retain the vital connotation of this feast as being the Christian Passover.

Now in the earliest forms of this celebration, Crucifixion and Resurrection were held together, both in liturgy and in theological understanding. In liturgy, because there was no Good Friday: the Christian Passover or Paschal Vigil began at sundown on the Saturday night and continued into the Sunday. In theological understanding, because there was then no overriding doctrine of the Atonement which separated out the Cross from the Resurrection. What was being celebrated in a single rite was the Victory of Christ over sin and death and Satan, a victory accomplished by the total event of Christ – incarnation and birth, public ministry, death and resurrection. This is what is sometimes known as the ‘Christus Victor’ model of the Atonement.

When we look for the use of the visual symbol of the Cross in the first three centuries, it’s hard to find. First, because in the pagan Roman Empire crosses were socially shameful, and Christians downplayed the public display of the fact of Christ’s crucifixion. Secondly, because Christians were not a legal body, and were often persecuted, and therefore usually owned no church buildings in which to depict the Cross of Christ anyway. And thirdly, because Crucifixion and Resurrection were still fused in their mind, in the Christus Victor model. Christians did treasure the Passion of Christ, and traced the sign of the Cross on themselves, but in a different context from what came later. So think instead of the ‘fish’ symbol, and of representations of Jesus as the ‘good shepherd’ who laid down his life for the sheep.

And Baptism? In these first three centuries this initially took place outdoors, for example in streams and rivers and ponds, then later in private houses for a variety of practical reasons. Many candidates, probably most, were adults. The mode of baptism varied, but usually involved full immersion or, more often, having the candidates stand in water and pouring water over them. Baptisteries and fonts were slow to come.

The time for baptism became focussed on Easter, after a catechumenate of several years. The origin of Lent was as the last intensive phase of that catechumenate before the Baptism, Chrismation, the Laying on of Hands and First Communion at the Christian Passover on Easter Eve. So ‘Lent’ originally was only for those en route to joining the Church. Then those within the Church, those already baptised, began accompanying the catechumens on this spiritual journey, as did excommunicated Christians en route to reinstatement – and so our Lent was born.
 
There was a sea change with Constantine, the first Christian Emperor.  Christianity became first a legal and soon the official religion. Building churches became possible, and they multiplied. Catechumens flooded into the Church, for mixed reasons. For our purposes tonight, perhaps the most important development was in the celebration of the Christian Passover. It was now possible to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and pray at the sites where the events of the last week of Christ’s life actually happened. Soon Christians were gathering to enter Jerusalem on the Sunday before the Pasch – and Palm Sunday was born. Similarly for the Friday – and the Thursday. The celebration of the totality of Christ’s redemptive work in one unitary rite was replaced by a series of rites spread out over eight days together making up ‘Holy Week’ – an historicisation of the Christian Passover. This then spread around the Christian world.

While it all held together it was a powerful package. The whole Church was annually enabled to renew its baptismal consecration in the death and resurrection of Christ in company with new Christians entering that consecration for the first time, and to do so in a series of rites which imaginatively represented the events of Christ’s final journey on earth.
1. Palm Sunday: the entry into Jerusalem and into the Temple – processions and palms and the reading of the Passion.
2. Maundy Thursday: the commemoration of the Last Supper (with its rich Jewish Passover backdrop), the footwashing, the institution of the Eucharist, the stripping of  the Church building and the prayer vigil with Jesus in the garden
3. Good Friday: the reading of the entire Passion, the solemn prayers for the whole Church, the veneration of the Cross
4. Easter Eve, the all-night Paschal Vigil service with:
– the service of Light centring on the Paschal Candle (4th Century);
–  extensive readings rehearsing the drama of God’s mighty acts in the Old Testament (1st Century);
– the baptism and confirmation of the adult catechumens (2nd Century) and the at least implicit general renewal of baptismal vows;
– the first communion in the dawning light of Easter Sunday (1st Century).
    (Here is a version of all this in a modern parish, which we’ll come back to later)

Note Well: this package varied in detail from place to place and period to period. But I think we can say that this broadly was what passed from the 4th and 5th centuries into the Medieval West, was overlaid and obscured, then largely jettisoned at the Reformation by the Reformers, and has been progressively recovered in the last century and a half, especially in the Anglican Communion, in a process helped by the Roman Catholic Church’s reform of its own liturgical practice. The Church of the East has taken a different path, retaining much of the 4th and 5th century substance, but modifying it in ways I’m not competent to trace.
 
Now what held the package together was:
1. a view of the atonement which did not exalt the Cross at the expense of the Resurrection (or vice versa). Though the two were now celebrated in different rites on different days, the theology still held them together;
2. the continuing flow of adult catechumens, candidates for baptism;
3. a view and practice of Christian initiation which held together baptism in water and chrism in oil and/or the laying on of hands.
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When these three elements changed, as they did, the package started to change shape, and indeed to come apart. 
o Atonement theology changed. (The Church Catholic by the way has never formally defined how Christ saves us; it has simply affirmed that He does – and been content to use the whole range of images and models present in the New Testament to describe this.) As we move into the Middle Ages the emphasis shifts from ‘Christus Victor’ to Christ on the Cross making ‘satisfaction’ for our sins (Anselm) and then later to ‘penal substitution’ (Evangelical Protestants) – Jesus dying instead of us, not simply on behalf of us. Thus the Crucifixion (and Good Friday with it) became centrally important in its own right, with the Resurrection (and Easter Sunday) in danger of becoming simply a proof of divinity, however reassuring. This change can be traced in the development of the Crucifix. With the end of the pagan penalty of crucifixion and the coming of church buildings came the open use of the Cross in those buildings. At first, if the Figure of Christ appeared on the Cross, it would not be a Suffering Christ but a ‘Christus Rex’ (Christ the King), a “Majesty’, a living Christ reigning upright from the Cross as priest and king. Later, in the Middle Ages, the Figure becomes the Suffering or Dead Christ hanging on the Cross, with a greater or lesser realistic depiction of that suffering. Devotion focuses increasingly on the suffering of Christ in His Sacred Humanity.
o In an at least nominally Christian society the flow of adult candidates for baptism dried up and infant baptism became the norm. The catechumenate withered, and with it the baptismal heart of the Christian Passover – because infants were baptised wherever and whenever it could expeditiously and swiftly be done, without long preparation. The corporate renewal of the basic baptismal Covenant on Easter Eve was replaced by a more individualistic devotional approach of kneeling at the foot of the crucified Christ on Good Friday, followed by attendance at Mass on Easter Day.
o Christian initiation changed. Not only did infant baptism become the norm, but baptism in water was separated out from the laying on of hands or anointing with oil by a bishop. Confirmation was born - in the West, that is - and administered separately. (The Orthodox Church retains the unitary rite, and baptises - by immersion - and anoints in the same service, at whatever age.) When we look at church architecture we find this change reflected in the physical provision for baptism. In the centuries after Constantine the space given over to baptism (the baptistery) was at first generous, sometimes a whole building as part of a cathedral complex, sometimes a separate room, and usually allowing for partial or complete immersion. While the adult catechumenate was flourishing, the baptistery played an important part in Holy Week, especially of course at the Easter Vigil. And if it was sufficiently separate, catechumens were often instructed there over the long months beforehand. Come infant baptism as the norm, and the large baptistery for immersion shrinks to a font for pouring, and the font itself begins its sad and undignified journey to becoming a bird-bath in a corner or even a moveable bowl in the vestry, brought out only when necessary.

Now medieval liturgical practice (and Holy Week with it) became a bewildering combination of faithful preservation of a half-understood tradition, imaginative development, theological variations, superstition, and majoring on minors. In an age of extensive illiteracy there was a huge gulf between the sophisticated theology of the better educated clergy and what was happening at grass-roots.

At the Reformation, the whole tangled medieval garden was attacked and weeded, and the attempt was made to conform worship to the Scriptures. There were two broad Protestant approaches to this task: one argued that unless something was actually commanded in Scripture it was to be discarded; the other argued that if it was not forbidden by Scripture it could be permitted, so long as it was spiritually edifying and did not teach false doctrine. Both distrusted images and symbols; it was an age of words - printed, read, and preached. 

Here I want to draw your attention to the difference between ‘sacraments’ and ‘sacramentals’. A ‘sacrament’ is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, a covenanted channel of grace instituted by Christ. Certainly Baptism and the Eucharist are included within this definition, possibly some or all of the other medieval ‘Seven Sacraments’- Confirmation, Confession, Marriage, Unction, Ordination. Most were retained by the Reformers in one form or another, though demoted to lesser status. A ‘sacramental’ is an outward and visible sign instituted or allowed by the Church: candles, vestments and robes, ceremonies, and the like. ‘Sacramentals’ fared badly at the hands of the Reformers, and so did Holy Week with its powerful handling of visual symbol and symbolic action. Even in the Church of England, which avoided the extremes of the iconoclastic revolution on the Continent, word triumphed over symbol. The Gospel focus was restored, but Holy Week was stripped, and its liturgical and sacramental expression impoverished. And even more important, the three main factors which had distorted Holy Week from its classic shape (the sundering of Crucifixion from Resurrection in Atonement theology, the loss of the unity of the Christian Initiation rite, and the disappearance of the catechumenate) remained untouched and continued to operate.

Since the Reformation, the Anglican Church has been on a journey of progressive recovery of Holy Week, sometimes instinctively recognising the existence of a vacuum and reaching out for this and that to fill it, sometimes more analytically and intentionally seeking to return to the classic shape.

In the 19th century the Oxford or Tractarian Movement was at first liturgically conservative, holding to the Book of Common Prayer while emphasising the sacramental life of the Church and the authority of the early Church Fathers. They took liturgy seriously, which was more than could be said for some of their contemporaries. But it was not until the Oxford Movement transmuted into the Catholic Revival that the forms of Holy Week were affected. Firstly, sacramentals and ceremonies (sometimes English medieval, sometimes contemporary Roman Catholic) flowered richly in regular Sunday worship, much to the alarm of English Protestants.  Secondly, English Anglicans began to depart from the Prayer Book liturgy, and adapt other forms especially but not only continental Roman Catholic, and also English medieval. The way was opened for a recovery of the fullness of Holy Week. Some of this perhaps was more a matter of external imitation than full theological and spiritual appropriation. But the journey was begun. More about all this next Sunday when we explore the 19th century with Jonathan Mane Wheoki.

Meanwhile the wider Church was embarking on its own broader liturgical journey in what is called the ‘Liturgical Movement’. By the wider Church I mean especially the Roman Catholic Church, but in the 20th Century it also touched the Anglican Church and mainline Protestant Churches like the Lutheran Church. The Liturgical Movement emphasised the priority of worship in the Christian life, the importance of the full participation of the baptised People of God in that worship, and a balance between Word and Sacrament. Initially focussed on the Middle Ages as the ideal, it then went further back to the foundations of liturgy in the early centuries of the Church. It was diametrically opposed to the individualism of much Christian devotion, and did much to diminish the clericalism which was distorting worship. It emphasised corporate participation in the living mystery of Christ, not lonely cerebral remembrance and reflection by oneself. In the light of all this, the Holy Week liturgy was revised by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950’s to re-affirm and ensure the Paschal mystery as the heart of the Church’s Year. Liturgical scholarship became more and more ecumenical, and mainline Churches in Western Christianity have been on a convergence course for some time now.

Liturgical revision around the Anglican world was therefore a growth industry in the latter half of the 20th century, though the pace has slowed. Our many Provinces have varied in the attention they have given to Holy Week in their new prayer books. The Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, for all the excellence of our 1989 Prayer Book, largely missed the opportunity to give us a fully developed Holy Week, though it’s somewhat better there than in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. And so NZ Anglican clergy still turn to ‘unofficial’ sources to enrich our Holy Week. Perhaps the best is in the 1984 ‘Lent, Holy Week and Easter’ service book ‘commended by the House of Bishops to the General Synod of the Church of England’.

Let’s now look all too briefly at the different elements we’ve listed.

Palm Sunday: This has been enriched with little ecclesiastical angst by the addition of a solemn procession with greenery of some sort and the handing out of palm crosses. There has however been a temptation to turn this into a service focussing on and catering primarily for children. It’s important to begin Holy Week solemnly with our eyes on the Cross, which is why we read the Passion according to one of the three Synoptic Gospels, in its entirety.
Maundy Thursday. Coming as this evening liturgy does at the end of the working week and the beginning of the Triduum, the Great Three Days, it sets the tone for the rest of the Christian Passover.
o It has two foci – the Upper Room and the Garden of Gethsemane.
o In the former the themes jostle one another, there are so many of them. The Jewish Passover as the Last Supper, recalling the Exodus and fulfilled in the Eucharist now instituted to recall the even mightier saving act of God; the New Covenant; love binding Jesus and his disciples; foot-washing - the symbol of mutual service; the shadow of the Cross; betrayal. There are two liturgical temptations: one is to celebrate a form of Jewish Passover or seder. But we are not Jews, and have no right to appropriate that service and pretend that we are, and even more importantly, to celebrate the seder is to ignore the reality of the Eucharist as our Christian Passover rite, and instead prefer the shadow to the reality.  And the second temptation is to avoid the foot-washing by substituting hand-washing or even hand-shaking or cutting it out altogether. The substitutes are banal, and the foot-washing done well can be incredibly moving and significant.
o The Garden of Gethsemane is evoked by two things: by the stripping of the altar and sanctuary and dimming or extinguishing the lights – the beginning of the process by which Jesus is stripped of freedom, companions, dignity and life. And it is evoked by the prayer vigil in the darkened church. The atmosphere in this vigil can be palpable.
Good Friday. How to shape this day has exercised the Church ever since it split Crucifixion from Resurrection in historicising the Christian Passover and spreading it out over three days.
o Clearly the Passion must be read in its entirety – and the custom has grown of this being the Passion according to John. There is a solemn objectivity about this reading which trumps even the most eloquent of sermons about the Cross of Christ.
o Confronted with the universality of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice for humanity, all-encompassing prayers for the Church Catholic and for what the old Prayer Book called ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ must be offered.
o So far, so good. But how are we to complement word with visual image? How are we to handle the visual image of the Cross? The classic way is the ‘Veneration of the Cross’ whereby a realistic wooden cross is placed up front, the Reproaches are sung, and the congregation approach and kneel before the Cross or kiss it. Not all are comfortable with this, especially the latter.
o I want now to touch on the question of when to celebrate Communion in the course of the Christian Passover. While there was only one service, embracing Death and Resurrection, and held over Saturday night and Sunday morning, there was no problem. But when that unity was broken, and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were put in place, immediately the question arose, should the Eucharist be celebrated on these days as well?

There have been three possible answers.
(1) Wait till the eve or day of Easter Sunday. i.e. no Communion at all on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.
(2) Celebrate the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday - it’s rather difficult not to, given that at the heart of Maundy Thursday is the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist - and reserve the Sacrament overnight for Communion next day, Good Friday. This has been the Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic solution.
(3) Celebrate the Eucharist not only on Maundy Thursday but on Good Friday as well. This was what was provided for in the Book of Common Prayer and practised both in the classic Anglican age of the Seventeenth Century and also by the Anglican Evangelicals of the 19th Century. Indeed, it was not unknown for there to be more acts of communion on Good Friday than on Easter Day. 

The issue has not so much been whether or not to receive Communion on Good Friday as whether or not to actually celebrate the Eucharist then. It’s difficult to mount a theological argument against receiving communion on that day. And as the English book “Lent, Holy Week, Easter” says “it would seem that on this, above all other days, it is wholly appropriate to eat the bread and drink the cup, thereby proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes.”  [cf 1 Corinthians 11:26]  I myself have come to deeply value receiving communion on Good Friday.

However, the deepest issue around receiving Communion during the Triduum, the Great Three Days, is something else: can we, should we, receive Communion on Easter Sunday if we have not been in church on Good Friday at all, and not reaffirmed our baptismal covenant on Easter Saturday night?

Which brings us to
The Easter Vigil, joining the night of Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday. There are four elements:
o The service of light, with the Easter Fire and the Paschal Candle
o The rich rehearsal from Scripture of God’s redemptive dealings with His people
o The baptismal service, focussing on the baptism and/or confirmation of adult candidates (and perhaps older children), and on our own renewal of our baptismal vows, and on our unity with all those living and departed in the Communion of Saints
o The first Eucharist of Easter – the timing of which is problematical. Indeed the timing of the whole Paschal Vigil has its challenges.

Done perfunctorily, and done without adult candidates for baptism or confirmation or renewal, this service can be visually attractive, even impressive, but somewhat emotionally distant – what Aidan Kavanagh calls ‘a three ring circus for those with ecclesiastical tastes’. Done by a congregation who know what they are doing, and with catechumens being baptised in their midst, the Easter Vigil brings us to the heart of our faith: union with the crucified and risen Christ. As Paul writes, ‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized [immersed, dipped, plunged] into Christ Jesus were baptised [immersed, dipped, plunged] into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism [immersion] into his death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.’ ‘You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him…’ [Colossians 2:12]

We in the Anglican Church have still to make the fullness of Holy Week our own. We have still to unite Crucifixion and Resurrection in our heads and our hearts; though some of us have gone some way towards recovering the unity represented by the Christus Victor model, others seem intent on denying saving power to either Crucifixion or Resurrection, whether separate or together. We have still to recover a discipline of Christian initiation which has some theological and liturgical integrity. And we have still to recover effective evangelistic outreach and an effective catechumenate by which to shape new Christians. We have a considerably richer Holy Week than our 1662 forebears, but its outward forms will only come fully alive when we are a truly missionary Church living by the power of our crucified and risen Lord.
A lecture given in the Loaves and Fishes Hall of St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington, on 2 March 2008, by the Revd Canon Peter Stuart.

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