Every culture has a calendar. Every modern individual has a date-book. We know what we are supposed to do tomorrow or next Friday. But there is also a larger calendar determined by the movements of the earth in its rotation around the sun, of the ever-recurring lunar cycles, of the seasons of sowing and harvest to which our ancestors were accustomed. They marked the days of the week and the weekly Sabbath that marks the completion of Creation. The turning of the seasons and the agricultural cycles were marked by feasts where the Jews were to present themselves in the Temple. Chief among these was Passover, which marked the first-fruits of spring and the deliverance of Israel from bondage.
The early Christians also marked and hallowed time according to their Jewish roots. The feast of Passover comes to be associated with the death and resurrection of Christ, “the first fruits of them who have fallen asleep.” The night of Saturday into the first day of the week, the day of the Resurrection and new creation, comes to be sanctified among all other days of the week, especially at the time of Passover, where Christ passes from death to life. That particular vigil, or time of expectation for the dawn of Easter morning, became the time par excellence for the initiation of neophytes into the Christian faith and for the celebration of the passage from Christ’s death into life. Thus the vigil of Easter became the most important liturgy of the Christian year.
Early Christian pilgrims visited the Holy Land, where the church lived in close proximity the sites associated with Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection. In Jerusalem the events of Christ’s Passion became associated with the sites where its events took place. Thus the days of the vigil were broken up to correspond to the days and events of Holy Week–Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the vigil of Easter. This custom was transmitted to the West, and the current pattern of Holy Week liturgies arose.
Holy Week, especially the three days between Maundy Thursday and Easter, invites us to enter more deeply into the Paschal mystery that is at the core of the Christian faith. Holy Week calls us to sanctify time in an ancient pattern that derives from the Hebrew Scriptures and is brought to fulfillment in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. It is more than a remembrance. It is a projection forward in time and a yearly renewal of the history of salvation beginning with creation and fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ.
PALM SUNDAY
The liturgy of Palm Sunday offers us the sharpest contrasts between Christ acclaimed as Messiah and Christ who empties himself even unto death, as expressed in this Sunday’s Epistle and the verse chanted just before the Passion Gospel. The liturgy begins with an account of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and a procession re-enacting that entry. But immediately the focus shifts to the Passion. This year’s music highlights those contrasts. In procession we sing Psalm 118 - “On this day the Lord has acted.” while acclaiming “Hosanna in the highest.” The choir sings simple and innocent settings by Schubert of the processional anthems “Hosanna to the Son of David” and “When the Lord entered the Holy City.” We enter the church Singing “All Glory laud and honor” only to be confronted with the Passion narrative.
The reading of the Passion is surrounded by the hymn “O Sacred head sore wounded” to provide us with some response, inadequate though it might be, to the narrative of the passion. Music during the Liturgy of the Eucharist this year includes “Ich will dich mein Herze schenken” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, affording us an emotional response and reflection on the readings we have heard. The communion motet is Franz Liszt’s setting of the last stanza of the hymn “Vexilla Regis.” The text is a hymn of praise to the Cross, and ends with the haunting phrase “Ave Crux”. If one phrase we utter this morning best sums up the spirit of the liturgy of Palm Sunday, it is in the offertory hymn, where we sing, “Sometimes they strew his way and loud hosannas sing …”.
MAUNDY THURSDAY
The liturgy of Maundy Thursday is also a multi-faceted and dramatic celebration. The primary emphasis is the institution of the Eucharist, wherein the Passion and Resurrection are continually projected forward in time. Of equal importance is the theme of servanthood and humility, seen in Jesus’s washing of the disciples’ feet. This rite of foot-washing gives us our common English name for the holy day. “Maundy” is an anglicized version of the Latin word Mandatum, from the moment in John’s gospel when Jesus after washing their feet says to his disciples, “a new commandment I give to you,” (John 13:34). Taking up this text, the anthem at our Maundy Thursday foot-washing bids us to love one another, even as Christ loved us. The theme of Christian charity, as shown in the celebration of the Eucharist, is extended in the Offertory anthem, “Ubi Caritas.” “Where there are charity and love, God is also there.” During the Communion the choir sings four verses of Thomas Aquinas’s hymn to the Holy Eucharist in a setting from the Spanish composer Victoria’s music for the complete Roman offices of Holy Week. At the end of the Eucharist, ornaments are removed and the church is prepared for Good Friday. Traditionally Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“) is sung during this ceremony. At Trinity we have sung instead a chapter from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (“See how desolate stands the city”) and a very beautiful chant of the text “Behold, we have seen him without form or comeliness,” both parts of the office of Tenebrae.
A NOTE ON MUSICAL LANGUAGE
David Hurd, erstwhile director of music at the General Theological Seminary in New York, wrote that Gregorian Chant is the vernacular music of the western liturgy. We often replace it with other music, but there it is in its stark and perfect beauty, giving voice to the prayer and worship of the western church for more than a thousand years. Perhaps you sing it without knowing it, as when you respond to the presider or chant the Lord’s Prayer. During Holy Week especially we fall back on this basic resource, since its simple expressive melodic lines perfectly translate the meaning of the texts.
GOOD FRIDAY
The congregation gathers in a denuded church. The liturgy of this day is simple and in a way stripped to the bones, any other response to the day’s events being inadequate. The great psalm of the Passion, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” is chanted between the Hebrew Scriptures and the long and theologically complex Epistle to the Hebrews. The response to the Epistle is Felice Anerio’s beautiful setting of the Holy Week text par excellence, “Christ became obedient for us even unto death.” The Passion according to John is then chanted by three lectors, one taking the part of the narrator, another the part of Jesus and the third the part of the other characters, each chanting at a different pitch level and a different speed. The use of the chant removes from the reading of the Passion the common sound of human speech and allows us to hear the account as the Church has heard it for more than a millennium. When the lectors have arrived at the death of Jesus, a silence is kept. The presider continues the narrative using a special tone, the “Planctus” or weeping tone, which from the Middle Ages was associated with religious poetry of lamentation. It is as though the austere chant of the rest of the narrative is insufficient to express the sorrow felt at this moment of the liturgy. The echoes of the planctus tone are heard again in the “Exultet” of the Easter Vigil, but this time turned to rejoicing. Following the sermon, the congregation joins in singing the great Lutheran Chorale “Ah! Holy Jesus,” where each individual assumes his or her responsibility in the suffering of Christ. The presider then bids us to prayer for the church and for the world in the “Solemn Collects” of Good Friday. It is a day where we perhaps forego our individual petitions and focus on a larger picture. A cross is then brought into the church, as the choir chants, “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world,” to which we respond, “O come let us adore him.” Other anthems in praise of the cross are sung, after which the “Reproaches” are chanted. The text rehearses the themes of salvation history, themes which we will again encounter in the Easter Vigil. But on Good Friday we admit our ingratitude for what has been done for us. As in other very solemn moments of the liturgy, the text has recourse to the Greek, as the choir sings “Agios o Theos,” meaning “Holy God.” Then the great hymn “Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle,” a panegyric to the Cross, is sung. We permit ourselves to think that the wood of the Cross is after all a plant, a living, growing organism. We ask the Tree, a powerful Biblical symbol since the Garden of Eden, to relax its rigor to receive the weight of the Savior. The liturgy then concludes with a collect and the singing of the Spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord,” providing us with a moment of simple and personal reflection upon the events of the day.
THE EASTER VIGIL
The Great Vigil of Easter marks a transition from death to life and gives the community the opportunity to relive the History of Salvation from the story of Creation and God’s first sanctification of time (the Sabbath) through the Resurrection. The Easter Vigil, the earliest of Christian liturgies, is also the time for Baptisms of those who have undergone their preparation during the season of Lent. It was the moment where the texts of the creed and the Lord’s Prayer (the traditio) were handed over to the new members of the community, and the newly baptized participated in their first Eucharist. The Liturgy begins with the lighting of the new fire, from which the Paschal candle is lit. The “Exultet,” which praises of Paschal Candle and what it represents, is then sung. So special is this moment that the congregation is invited to prayer in the same words that invite us to participation in the Eucharist. (“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”) In the Middle Ages, the Exultet even bid the congregation to give thanks for the bees who had made the wax from which the candle was formed! The present tense used in the prayer recalls the deliverance at the Red Sea and the Resurrection, making all these acts present across time as we commemorate them. (“This is the night …”) The liturgy continues with readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. Originally thirteen in number, they filled the entire night with the stories of salvation history. Each reading is followed by a psalm or other meditative response, and then by a collect prayed by the presider. Of these responses, perhaps the most touching is Psalm 42, sung after the lesson from Ezekiel bidding the thirsty to come to the waters. The choir sings, “As the deer thirsts for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.” The choir will sing the deservedly famous and beautiful setting by Palestrina, in which the Gregorian chant for this Psalm of the Easter Vigil forms the basis of a chaste yet expressive setting of the text. If there are candidates for Baptism, they are baptized here. Otherwise the congregation renews its Baptismal promises, after which the church is lit entirely and the presider proclaims “Alleluia! The Lord is risen”. Alleluias, suppressed since the beginning of Lent, fill the church. Bells, silent since Maundy Thursday, are rung and a festal celebration of the Eucharist takes place.
THE FESTIVE EUCHARIST OF EASTER MORNING
A solemn procession through the church is made during the singing of the hymn “Hail thee, festival day.” On this morning we permit ourselves to pull out all the stops and celebrate the joy of the Resurrection. The liturgy is filled with Alleluias. A festive Mass by Mozart is sung by the choir with orchestra. But once again the underlying musical language of the liturgy, the Gregorian chant, is used for the Psalm, the Alleluia, the Preface, the Lord’s Prayer, the Breaking of the Bread and the Easter dismissal, thus uniting our liturgy with the song of the faithful throughout the ages. The same is true of the Gregorian antiphon chanted by the choir during the sprinkling with baptismal water: “I saw water flowing forth from the temple…”
If you have gotten to the end of this prolix explanation of the Holy Week liturgies, you should know that it only begins to touch on the rich symbolism of the week’s acts and texts. It is an invitation to deeply meditate on what you sing, say and do during these ancient rites.
Yours,
JS
Trinity Church (Episcopal)
301. N. Chester Rd.
Swarthmore, PA 19081
The early Christians also marked and hallowed time according to their Jewish roots. The feast of Passover comes to be associated with the death and resurrection of Christ, “the first fruits of them who have fallen asleep.” The night of Saturday into the first day of the week, the day of the Resurrection and new creation, comes to be sanctified among all other days of the week, especially at the time of Passover, where Christ passes from death to life. That particular vigil, or time of expectation for the dawn of Easter morning, became the time par excellence for the initiation of neophytes into the Christian faith and for the celebration of the passage from Christ’s death into life. Thus the vigil of Easter became the most important liturgy of the Christian year.
Early Christian pilgrims visited the Holy Land, where the church lived in close proximity the sites associated with Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection. In Jerusalem the events of Christ’s Passion became associated with the sites where its events took place. Thus the days of the vigil were broken up to correspond to the days and events of Holy Week–Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the vigil of Easter. This custom was transmitted to the West, and the current pattern of Holy Week liturgies arose.
Holy Week, especially the three days between Maundy Thursday and Easter, invites us to enter more deeply into the Paschal mystery that is at the core of the Christian faith. Holy Week calls us to sanctify time in an ancient pattern that derives from the Hebrew Scriptures and is brought to fulfillment in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. It is more than a remembrance. It is a projection forward in time and a yearly renewal of the history of salvation beginning with creation and fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ.
PALM SUNDAY
The liturgy of Palm Sunday offers us the sharpest contrasts between Christ acclaimed as Messiah and Christ who empties himself even unto death, as expressed in this Sunday’s Epistle and the verse chanted just before the Passion Gospel. The liturgy begins with an account of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and a procession re-enacting that entry. But immediately the focus shifts to the Passion. This year’s music highlights those contrasts. In procession we sing Psalm 118 - “On this day the Lord has acted.” while acclaiming “Hosanna in the highest.” The choir sings simple and innocent settings by Schubert of the processional anthems “Hosanna to the Son of David” and “When the Lord entered the Holy City.” We enter the church Singing “All Glory laud and honor” only to be confronted with the Passion narrative.
The reading of the Passion is surrounded by the hymn “O Sacred head sore wounded” to provide us with some response, inadequate though it might be, to the narrative of the passion. Music during the Liturgy of the Eucharist this year includes “Ich will dich mein Herze schenken” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, affording us an emotional response and reflection on the readings we have heard. The communion motet is Franz Liszt’s setting of the last stanza of the hymn “Vexilla Regis.” The text is a hymn of praise to the Cross, and ends with the haunting phrase “Ave Crux”. If one phrase we utter this morning best sums up the spirit of the liturgy of Palm Sunday, it is in the offertory hymn, where we sing, “Sometimes they strew his way and loud hosannas sing …”.
MAUNDY THURSDAY
The liturgy of Maundy Thursday is also a multi-faceted and dramatic celebration. The primary emphasis is the institution of the Eucharist, wherein the Passion and Resurrection are continually projected forward in time. Of equal importance is the theme of servanthood and humility, seen in Jesus’s washing of the disciples’ feet. This rite of foot-washing gives us our common English name for the holy day. “Maundy” is an anglicized version of the Latin word Mandatum, from the moment in John’s gospel when Jesus after washing their feet says to his disciples, “a new commandment I give to you,” (John 13:34). Taking up this text, the anthem at our Maundy Thursday foot-washing bids us to love one another, even as Christ loved us. The theme of Christian charity, as shown in the celebration of the Eucharist, is extended in the Offertory anthem, “Ubi Caritas.” “Where there are charity and love, God is also there.” During the Communion the choir sings four verses of Thomas Aquinas’s hymn to the Holy Eucharist in a setting from the Spanish composer Victoria’s music for the complete Roman offices of Holy Week. At the end of the Eucharist, ornaments are removed and the church is prepared for Good Friday. Traditionally Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“) is sung during this ceremony. At Trinity we have sung instead a chapter from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (“See how desolate stands the city”) and a very beautiful chant of the text “Behold, we have seen him without form or comeliness,” both parts of the office of Tenebrae.
A NOTE ON MUSICAL LANGUAGE
David Hurd, erstwhile director of music at the General Theological Seminary in New York, wrote that Gregorian Chant is the vernacular music of the western liturgy. We often replace it with other music, but there it is in its stark and perfect beauty, giving voice to the prayer and worship of the western church for more than a thousand years. Perhaps you sing it without knowing it, as when you respond to the presider or chant the Lord’s Prayer. During Holy Week especially we fall back on this basic resource, since its simple expressive melodic lines perfectly translate the meaning of the texts.
GOOD FRIDAY
The congregation gathers in a denuded church. The liturgy of this day is simple and in a way stripped to the bones, any other response to the day’s events being inadequate. The great psalm of the Passion, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” is chanted between the Hebrew Scriptures and the long and theologically complex Epistle to the Hebrews. The response to the Epistle is Felice Anerio’s beautiful setting of the Holy Week text par excellence, “Christ became obedient for us even unto death.” The Passion according to John is then chanted by three lectors, one taking the part of the narrator, another the part of Jesus and the third the part of the other characters, each chanting at a different pitch level and a different speed. The use of the chant removes from the reading of the Passion the common sound of human speech and allows us to hear the account as the Church has heard it for more than a millennium. When the lectors have arrived at the death of Jesus, a silence is kept. The presider continues the narrative using a special tone, the “Planctus” or weeping tone, which from the Middle Ages was associated with religious poetry of lamentation. It is as though the austere chant of the rest of the narrative is insufficient to express the sorrow felt at this moment of the liturgy. The echoes of the planctus tone are heard again in the “Exultet” of the Easter Vigil, but this time turned to rejoicing. Following the sermon, the congregation joins in singing the great Lutheran Chorale “Ah! Holy Jesus,” where each individual assumes his or her responsibility in the suffering of Christ. The presider then bids us to prayer for the church and for the world in the “Solemn Collects” of Good Friday. It is a day where we perhaps forego our individual petitions and focus on a larger picture. A cross is then brought into the church, as the choir chants, “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world,” to which we respond, “O come let us adore him.” Other anthems in praise of the cross are sung, after which the “Reproaches” are chanted. The text rehearses the themes of salvation history, themes which we will again encounter in the Easter Vigil. But on Good Friday we admit our ingratitude for what has been done for us. As in other very solemn moments of the liturgy, the text has recourse to the Greek, as the choir sings “Agios o Theos,” meaning “Holy God.” Then the great hymn “Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle,” a panegyric to the Cross, is sung. We permit ourselves to think that the wood of the Cross is after all a plant, a living, growing organism. We ask the Tree, a powerful Biblical symbol since the Garden of Eden, to relax its rigor to receive the weight of the Savior. The liturgy then concludes with a collect and the singing of the Spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord,” providing us with a moment of simple and personal reflection upon the events of the day.
THE EASTER VIGIL
The Great Vigil of Easter marks a transition from death to life and gives the community the opportunity to relive the History of Salvation from the story of Creation and God’s first sanctification of time (the Sabbath) through the Resurrection. The Easter Vigil, the earliest of Christian liturgies, is also the time for Baptisms of those who have undergone their preparation during the season of Lent. It was the moment where the texts of the creed and the Lord’s Prayer (the traditio) were handed over to the new members of the community, and the newly baptized participated in their first Eucharist. The Liturgy begins with the lighting of the new fire, from which the Paschal candle is lit. The “Exultet,” which praises of Paschal Candle and what it represents, is then sung. So special is this moment that the congregation is invited to prayer in the same words that invite us to participation in the Eucharist. (“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”) In the Middle Ages, the Exultet even bid the congregation to give thanks for the bees who had made the wax from which the candle was formed! The present tense used in the prayer recalls the deliverance at the Red Sea and the Resurrection, making all these acts present across time as we commemorate them. (“This is the night …”) The liturgy continues with readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. Originally thirteen in number, they filled the entire night with the stories of salvation history. Each reading is followed by a psalm or other meditative response, and then by a collect prayed by the presider. Of these responses, perhaps the most touching is Psalm 42, sung after the lesson from Ezekiel bidding the thirsty to come to the waters. The choir sings, “As the deer thirsts for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.” The choir will sing the deservedly famous and beautiful setting by Palestrina, in which the Gregorian chant for this Psalm of the Easter Vigil forms the basis of a chaste yet expressive setting of the text. If there are candidates for Baptism, they are baptized here. Otherwise the congregation renews its Baptismal promises, after which the church is lit entirely and the presider proclaims “Alleluia! The Lord is risen”. Alleluias, suppressed since the beginning of Lent, fill the church. Bells, silent since Maundy Thursday, are rung and a festal celebration of the Eucharist takes place.
THE FESTIVE EUCHARIST OF EASTER MORNING
A solemn procession through the church is made during the singing of the hymn “Hail thee, festival day.” On this morning we permit ourselves to pull out all the stops and celebrate the joy of the Resurrection. The liturgy is filled with Alleluias. A festive Mass by Mozart is sung by the choir with orchestra. But once again the underlying musical language of the liturgy, the Gregorian chant, is used for the Psalm, the Alleluia, the Preface, the Lord’s Prayer, the Breaking of the Bread and the Easter dismissal, thus uniting our liturgy with the song of the faithful throughout the ages. The same is true of the Gregorian antiphon chanted by the choir during the sprinkling with baptismal water: “I saw water flowing forth from the temple…”
If you have gotten to the end of this prolix explanation of the Holy Week liturgies, you should know that it only begins to touch on the rich symbolism of the week’s acts and texts. It is an invitation to deeply meditate on what you sing, say and do during these ancient rites.
Yours,
JS
Trinity Church (Episcopal)
301. N. Chester Rd.
Swarthmore, PA 19081