Holy Week
We are all aware of the great events of the end of Holy Week; the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, Jesus’ lying in the tomb, the Resurrection. We celebrate them all with elaborate liturgies (or in the case of the lying in the tomb, we celebrate no liturgy at all, which makes an equally strong point). But what about the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week? These are the days that tend to get overlooked. They don’t have special names, for a start (apart from being ‘Holy’). Are they just a ‘breather’ after the lengthy reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday? Are they a way of limbering up for the great events ahead? Or what?
Holy Monday and Tuesday are highly significant. On the Monday Jesus entered the Temple and drove out the traders. This was Jesus’ way of symbolising the coming of a completely new order. The arthritic Temple sacrifice system (which was the context of the buying, selling and money-changing) was about to collapse. It is the equivalent of the tearing of the separation-curtain in the Temple at the death of Jesus, recorded in Matthew, Mark and Luke. God and humans are no longer apart. Christ has brought them together. Holy Monday is our ‘Unification Day’.
Holy Tuesday is the day of some of Jesus’ most radical teaching. He will not tell his opponents the source of his teaching authority, for he realises they are unable to recognise real authority (rather than their own). According to John’s Gospel, Jesus had already said: “Before ever Abraham was, I AM” (a clear statement of his divinity). On the Tuesday, a fig tree which he cursed for not bearing figs out of season (!) withers away. This seemingly spiteful incident is a way of showing that Jesus does not follow expectations. He is not a tree; his results come at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. Also on the Tuesday he seems to commend a widow for putting all her savings in the Temple treasury, but in fact he is primarily condemning a heartless system which callously ‘swallowed the property of widows’. Religion must bear fruit in love, in season or out of season. Holy Tuesday is ‘Fruitfulness Day’.
It is true that the Mass Gospels on these days focus on other things – on Monday, the anointing of Jesus’ feet in the evening meal with Martha, Mary and Lazarus at Bethany.
However, we can see from these significant days how Judas Iscariot, who had presumed that Jesus would fulfil certain pre-conceptions about him, found a different – and for him disappointing and dangerous – Jesus. Preferring certainties to provocation, Judas decided in his exasperation to help rid the world of the Christ. Thus the story can proceed as we know it…
We now come to those days which contain the heart of the ‘Paschal Mystery’. In many other languages, the word for the festival we call ‘Easter’ comes from the word for ‘Passover’ (or in Slavic languages ‘Great Night’, referring to the climax of the Passover event). Unfortunately our word ‘Easter’ comes from Anglo-Saxon ‘eostre’, the name of a pagan goddess, which doesn’t help at all, and gives no idea of ‘passing over’.
For Christians, the Jewish feast of Passover, celebrating the Jews’ liberation from Egypt in a ritual meal centred on the lamb, has been transformed into the celebration of Christ, the Lamb of God, who offered himself, dying and being raised to life, to liberate us from the effects of sin – the frustration of incompleteness, of ‘non-being’ – and lead us not to a geographical but to a spiritual Promised Land.
At the heart of the ‘Mystery’ is the three-day period known as the Holy Triduum, This forms one religious action separated into three days:-
- Holy Thursday Christ invites his disciples to his Passover Last Supper, teaches them the new commandment of his love, serves them by washing their feet, and lays the ground for the Holy Eucharist, which will be ratified by his death and resurrection; he then prays at Gethsemane on the eve of his Passion.
- Good Friday Christ freely surrenders himself in death in his love for the world.
- Holy Saturday Christ lies in the tomb but is raised by the Holy Spirit from his Father. Death cannot defeat the totality of his loving obedience. The EASTER VIGIL, the crux of the whole Christian year, brings Christ’s renewal home to us through the elements: light and water. This is the fulfilment of all the prophecies.