Journeying with Christ this Holy Week

Through Our Lord’s passion we are faced with the profound mystery of God’s saving action, which is made present in the sacred liturgy.

On the Saturday before Palm Sunday, the ancient Roman Missal provides a prayer that can help prepare us to enter Holy Week with increased fervor:

“May this people which is consecrated to You, Lord, advance in its eagerness to serve You. The more pleasing this people becomes to You under the instruction of Your sacred liturgy, the more You will shower it with Your gifts.”

Two themes within this prayer struck me. One is seemingly obvious, the other is a bit more concealed. The former is the presentation of the sacred liturgy as a school, a means of instruction, and a true and sure means to grow in holiness. “The more pleasing this people becomes to You under the instruction of Your sacred liturgy” The later, the more concealed theme, is the placement of this particular collect on the very threshold of Holy Week. There the praying-Church asks the Lord that by conforming herself to the liturgy she will receive God’s choicest blessings.

During the Lenten season, like many of you, I try and give things up. One of the very small sacrifices I make is to set aside secular music on the radio, replacing it with audio books. Recently I completed “Great Lent, Journey to Pascha,” by the great Orthodox liturgist Alexander Schmemann. He does an outstanding job capturing the “spirit” of the liturgy and the Holy Week liturgies in particular. Schmemann writes: “Liturgical celebration is thus a re-entrance of the Church into the event, and this means not merely it’s ‘idea,’ but it’s joy or sadness, its living concrete reality.” Standing on the threshold of Holy Week, it is important to recall that the liturgy is anamnesis. That is to say, it makes present what it recalls. The services of Holy Week don’t merely recall Our Lord’s final days, but make them present, and through this presence we may participate and unite with them.

This has been made possible through Our Lord’s taking on human flesh and balancing while preserving the tension between the human and the divine. This is expressed beautifully in the Divine Praises of the Benediction service where we exclaim, “Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true man.” Moving through Holy Week we might consider the “true man,” because in the final analysis the experience of the cross is before all else a human experience. For it is through the contemplation of the cross that we learn what God means when he tells Moses, “I have seen the affliction of my people … and have heard their cry … I know their sufferings.” (cf. Ex 3:7) God knows the sufferings of humanity because he experienced the sufferings of humanity. The liturgies of Holy Week serve to deepen our understanding of the “Emmanuel” of Christmas, a God-With-Us. Through Our Lord’s passion we are faced with the profound mystery of God’s saving action, which is made present in the sacred liturgy. For it is through the paradox of God’s own godforsakeness and self-abandonment, that fallen humanity, essentially the godforsaken, might find their union with God.

May the liturgies of Holy Week allow each of us to draw close to the Lord, and prepare us to experience the joy of Eastertide with renewed faith and devotion.