A Prayer Book Holy Week
'Holy Week'. It is a term not used in the Book of Common Prayer 1662. This may lead us to wonder whether the Prayer Book tradition is insufficient for the liturgical observance of this week at the heart of the Christian year. Despite this, however, the liturgical provision in the Prayer Book tradition for this week before Easter is fulsome and distinctive.
What are the characteristics of Holy Week in the Prayer Book tradition?
'Before Easter'
The Prayer Book tradition describes the Sunday to Thursday of Holy Week as days 'before Easter'. Rather than being a minimalist description, this gives rich expression to how these days are oriented towards Easter, the completion and fulfillment of the Paschal Mystery. The collect appointed in the Prayer Book tradition from the Sunday until Thursday also witnesses to this, with its petition that we "be made partakers of his resurrection". The mystery of Easter fills these days, ensuring that the Church's liturgy for Holy Week is no mere historical re-enactment, but rather a sharing in the heavenly liturgy: "And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne ... stood a Lamb as it had been slain".
In the words of the Homily of the Resurrection, for Easter Day:
Christ our Easter lamb is offered up for us.
The One who is set before us in the Passion proclaimed during Holy Week is the Easter Lamb, "offered up for us, to slay the power of sin, to deliver us from the danger thereof" (Homily of the Resurrection). To describe these days as those "before Easter" wonderfully captures this truth of the Faith, that it is always the Crucified and Risen Lord who is set before us in Word and Sacrament.
The Passion readings
The Passion readings are central to the days of Holy Week in the Prayer Book tradition. Luther had identified this as the key characteristic of the Holy Week liturgies: "that the reading of the Passion and the Gospels appointed for these times should be observed". This also ensures that Holy Week does not become a matter of historical re-enactment: the readings from the Passion draw us day by day before the mystery of the Cross.
As Sparrow notes:
The Epistles and Gospels of this week are concerning Christ's Passion, to the contemplation of which this week is dedicated.
The lengthy, weighty readings of the Passion - Matthew on Sunday, Mark on Monday, Luke on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, John on Good Friday - ensure that each of the evangelical witnesses are heard, shaping the Church's prayer and teaching during the Great Week. (Where other lectionaries are used for public worship, the Passion readings in the Prayer Book tradition provide an excellent approach to personal lectio divina during these days.)
Particular comment can be made here regarding two aspects of the Thursday before Easter, Maundy Thursday. The first is that because additional ceremonies and themes are not part of the Prayer Book tradition, the focus on the Passion is not obscured. The Epistle - 1 Corinthians 11:23ff - ensures that the recognition of the Institution of the Lord's Supper is rightly oriented towards this focus:
For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.
The second aspect is the liturgical provision related to other aspects of Maundy Thursday as seen in the Royal Maundy ceremony. The Office for the Royal Maundy ensures that the example of our Lord washing the feet of the Twelve is celebrated, while not detracting from the focus on the Passion. There is, perhaps, a lesson here for how the additional themes of Maundy Thursday can be recognised, without crowding the main liturgy of the day and obscuring the proclamation of the Passion on the Thursday before Easter. It is worth noting in this context that the ceremony of feet washing was only incorporated into the Maundy Thursday liturgy in the 12th century, and even then it took place at the conclusion of the Eucharist, after the stripping of the altar. The contemporary position of the ceremony, after the sermon in the main liturgy, only dates from 1955.
Majestic collects
The Prayer Book tradition provides majestic collects for Holy Week: that of Palm Sunday (used up to and including Thursday, albeit PECUSA 1928 differs on this point), the principal collect of Good Friday, and that for Easter Even. For Palm Sunday and Good Friday, Cranmer offered translations in dignified vernacular of, respectively, the collects from the Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries. Here, then, we are praying on these days as Christians in the Western church have prayed over many centuries in contemplation and recollection of the Lord's Passion. For Easter Even, Laud's collect in the 1637 Scottish Book was revised and improved by Cosin, providing a rich reflection on the meaning of this strange day, set forth in the appointed readings, as described as Sparrow:
This day the Gospel treats of Christ's body lay in the Grave: the Epistle, of his Souls descent into Hell.
These collects draw us into the saving Passion of the Lord, petitioning that we "should follow the example of his great humility" (Sunday-Thursday), that we would gather around the Cross as "thy family" (Good Friday), and that through penitence "we may be buried with him" (Easter Even). If the liturgies of Holy Week are not historical re-enactment, the collects also declare that neither are they mere historical recollection. Rather, in Holy Week we enter into the Paschal Mystery, to be renewed and strengthened in the life of faith and discipleship, as those signed "with the sign of the Cross".
The other Good Friday collects - for the universal Church and for those who do not believe the Gospel (mindful that Ireland 1926 and PECUSA 1928 appropriately revise this last collect, while Canada 1962 omits it) - are also rooted in the Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries. They embody a deep sense of interceding before the Cross for the Church and the world, and particularly mark the solemnity of Good Friday. (This provision of three collects - plus the Lenten collect - occurs nowhere else in the Prayer Book tradition: a significant way in which to signal solemnity.)
Why we need the Prayer Book Holy Week
Compared to both the pre-Reformation Latin rite and contemporary Anglican and Roman liturgies, Holy Week in the Prayer Book tradition has a significantly greater simplicity. However, rather than detracting from the Church's observance of these days, this greater simplicity allows for a deepened, challenging focus on the Lord's Passion. And this makes it a gift to contemporary Anglicanism.
Fleming Rutledge in The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus has referred to how much contemporary preaching on the Cross tends to be "generic" and "bland". She continues:
The question this raises is this: On the cross, was Jesus simply "showing" us something, or was something actually happening?
Not least within contemporary Anglicanism, this may be related to the positing of a supposed Eastern emphasis on the Incarnation over and against a Latin/Augustinian emphasis on the Cross. Balthasar made short shrift of this, reviewing the Greek Fathers and then declaring in Mysterium Paschale:
They make a clean sweep of that widely disseminated myth of theological textbooks, according to which, for Greek theology, over against Latin, 'redemption' was basically achieved with the Incarnation itself in relation to which the Cross was only a sort of epiphenomenon.
In such an impoverished theological context, a Prayer Book Holy Week - with its unrelenting focus on the Cross and Passion - becomes a source for theological and devotional renewal, drawing us day by day before the Crucified Lord, whose wounds are our healing.
Let us steadfastly behold Christ crucified, with the eyes of our heart - from the Homily of the Passion, for Good Friday.
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