Category : Holy Week

Another prayer for the day from Harold Riley

O Lord Jesus Christ, who on this day didst wash thy disciples’ feet, leaving us an example of humble service: Grant that our souls may be washed from all defilement, and that we fail not to serve thee in the least of thy brethren; who livest and reignest for ever and ever.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

A Prayer for the day from Prayers for the Christian Year

O Lord Jesus Christ, enthroned in the majesty of heaven, who, when thou camest forth from God, didst make thyself as one that serveth: We adore thee because thou didst lay aside the garment of thy glory, and gird thyself with lowest humility, and minister to thy disciples, washing their feet. Teach us to know what thou hast done and to follow thine example; deliver us from pride, jealousy and ambition, and make us ready to be subject one to another, and with lowliness to serve one another for thy sake, O Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

Prayers for the Christian Year (SCM, 1964)

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

From the Morning Bible Readings

And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the passover?” And he sent two of his disciples, and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the householder, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I am to eat the passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.” And the disciples set out and went to the city, and found it as he had told them; and they prepared the passover.

And when it was evening he came with the twelve. And as they were at table eating, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” They began to be sorrowful, and to say to him one after another, “Is it I?” He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me. For the Son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.”

And as they were eating, he took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

–Mark 14:12-25

Posted in Holy Week, Theology: Scripture

Another Prayer for Today from the American Prayerbook

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts whereby thou hast given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

A Prayer for the day from A. McCheane

O Lord, who didst spend this day in quiet retreat at Bethany, in preparation for thy coming passion: Help us ever to live mindful of our end; that when thou shalt call us to pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil, for thou art with us, who didst die that we might live with thee for ever.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

Kendall Harmon’s 2024 Palm Sunday Sermon: Do we See what is Really Happening right in front of us on this day (Mark 11:1-11)?

You may listen directly here
or you may download it on spotify there.

Posted in * Anglican - Episcopal, * By Kendall, * South Carolina, Christology, History, Holy Week, Ministry of the Ordained, Parish Ministry, Preaching / Homiletics, Sermons & Teachings, Theology, Theology: Scripture

A Prayer for the day from the American Prayer Book

Lord God, whose blessed Son, our Saviour, gave his back to the smiters, and hid not his face from shame: Grant us grace to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full assurance of the glory that shall be revealed; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

Still Another Prayer for the day from the American BCP

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

Another Prayer for the day from A. McCheane

O Lord, who by thy word didst cause the barren fig tree to wither from the roots: Suffer us not by our fruitlessness to incur thy condemnation; but grant us grace to repent and obey thee while yet there is time; for thy mercy’s sake.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

(CT) Ruth Jackson–Why Every Day This Week Is Holy

As a child, my twin and I would often stage elaborate bake-offs during the school holidays. One year, I made an Easter cake with three chocolate crosses and a crown of thorns. I drowned these elements in large pools of jammy blood.

Sure, it was gratuitously gruesome—and I’m not surprised my sister’s saccharine fluffy chick cupcakes were the favored choice. But from an early age, I have shirked the propensity to avoid the grittiness of Easter. To me, its bloodiness is the very reason the Cross brings so much hope.

Many Christians around the world will celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend to commemorate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Some 2,000 years ago, crowds of Jews laid out palm branches on public streets to welcome their “Messiah”—the conquering king who they believed would overthrow the Roman government and liberate them from its hostile occupation.

While many oppressed people today still desperately need this kind of physical deliverance, Jesus’ journey did not end there. Instead, his road to Jerusalem culminated in the Cross, which brought an entirely different kind of liberation.

Read it all.

Posted in Holy Week, Theology

A Prayer for the day from James M Todd

O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst cleanse the temple courts, and didst teach, saying, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations: Cleanse thy Church, we beseech thee, of all evil, and so sanctify it by thy saving grace, that in all the world thy people may offer unto thee true and acceptable worship; for thy name’s sake.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

A Prayer for the day from the ACNA Prayerbook

Almighty and everlasting God, in your tender love for us you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon himself our nature, and to suffer death upon the Cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and come to share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

John Stott on the relationship between Good Friday and Easter

“We need to be clear about the nature of the relation between the death and resurrection of Jesus, and careful not to ascribe saving efficacy to both equally…It is by the blood of Jesus that God’s wrath against sin was propitiated, and by the same blood of Jesus that we have been redeemed, justified, and reconciled. For it was by his death, and not his resurrection that our sins were dealt with…Nowhere in the New Testament is it written that ‘Christ rose for our sins’…Of course, the resurrection is essential to confirm the efficacy of his death…But we must insist that Christ’s work of sin-bearing was finished on the cross, that the victory over the devil, sin and death was won there, and that what the resurrection did was to vindicate the Jesus whom men had rejected, to declare with power that he is the Son of God, and publicly to confirm that his sin-bearing death had been effective for the forgiveness of sins. If he had not been raised, our faith and our preaching would be futile, since his person and work would not have received the divine endorsement. This is the implication of Romans 4:25, which at first sight seems to teach that Christ’s resurrection is the means of our justification: ‘He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.’ Charles Cranfield explains: ‘What was necessitated by our sins was, in the first place, Christ’s atoning death, and yet, had his death not been followed by his resurrection, it would not have been God’s mighty deed for our justification.’ In addition, because of the resurrection it is a living Christ who bestows on us the salvation he has won for us on the cross, who enables us by his Spirit not only to share in the merit of his death but also to live in the power of his resurrection, and who promises us that on the last day we too will have resurrection bodies.

“James Denney expresses the relation between Jesus’ death and resurrection this way: ‘There can be no salvation from sin unless there is a living Saviour: this explains the emphasis laid by the apostle on the resurrection. But the living One can be a Saviour only because he has died: this explains the emphasis laid on the cross. The Christian believes in a living Lord, or he could not believe at all; but he believes in a living Lord who dies an atoning death, for no other can hold the faith of a soul under the doom of sin.’”

–John R W Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downer’s Grove, InterVaristy Press, 2006), pp,237-238

Posted in Christology, Easter, Eschatology, Holy Week, Theology: Scripture

Easter Night

All night had shout of men, and cry
Of woeful women filled His way;
Until that noon of sombre sky
On Friday, clamour and display
Smote Him; no solitude had He,
No silence, since Gethsemane.

Public was Death; but Power, but Might,
But Life again, but Victory,
Were hushed within the dead of night,
The shutter’d dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone.

–Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

Posted in Holy Week, Poetry & Literature

Joel Garver on the 20th century’s greatest Theologian of Holy Saturday

From here:

Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday is probably one of his most intriguing contributions since he interprets it as moving beyond the active self-surrender of Good Friday into the absolute helplessness of sin and the abandonment and lostness of death.

In the Old Testament one of the greatest threats of God’s wrath was His threat of abandonment, to leave His people desolate, to be utterly rejected of God. It is this that Jesus experienced upon the Cross and in His descent into the lifeless passivity and God-forsakenness of the grave. By His free entrance into the helplessness of sin, Christ was reduced to what Balthasar calls a “cadaver-obedience” revealing and experience the full horror of sin. As Peter himself preached at Pentecost (Acts 2:23-24; 32-33):

[Jesus] being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you, by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death; who God raised up, having abolished the birth pangs of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it…This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, He pour out this which you now see and hear.

We ought to pause and note the passivity that is expressed here. Christ experienced what God was doing through Him by His purpose and foreknowledge. Jesus was truly dead and fully encompassed within and held by the pains of death and needed God to abolish them. He was freed from death by God, not simply by God’s whim, but because for God it was impossible that death should hold Christ. Christ Himself receives the Holy Spirit from the Father in order that He might pour out that Spirit. Balthasar writes:

Jesus was truly dead, because he really became a man as we are, a son of Adam, and therefore, despite what one can sometimes read in certain theological works, he did not use the so-called “brief” time of his death for all manner of “activities” in the world beyond. In the same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead…Each human being lies in his own tomb. And with this condition Jesus is in complete solidarity.

According to Balthasar, this death was also the experience, for a time, of utter God-forsakenness—that is hell. Hell, then, is a Christological concept which is defined in terms of Christ’s experience on the Cross. This is also the assurance that we never need fear rejection by the Father if we are in Christ, since Christ has experienced hell in our place.

–S. Joel Garver on Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988)

Posted in Church History, Holy Week, Theology

A Canticle from the Holy Saturday liturgy

In the midst of life we are in death.
We grow and wither as quickly as flowers;
we disappear like shadows.
To whom can we go for help, but to you, Lord God,
though you are rightly displeased because of our sins?
And yet, Lord God Almighty,
most holy and most merciful Saviour,
deliver us from the bitterness of eternal death.
You know the secrets of our hearts;
mercifully hear us, most worthy judge eternal;
keep us, at our last hour,
in the consolation of your love.

You, O Lord, are gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
As kind as a father is to his children,
so kind is the Lord to those who honour him.
For you know what we are made of;
you remember that we are dust.
As for us, our life is like grass.
We grow and flourish like a wildflower;
then the wind blows on it, and it is gone
no-one sees it again.
But for those who honour the Lord, his love lasts forever,
and his goodness endures for all generations.

Posted in Holy Week, Liturgy, Music, Worship

Upon our Saviour’s Tomb, wherein never man was laid.

HOW life and death in Thee
Agree !
Thou hadst a virgin womb
And tomb.
A Joseph did betroth
Them both.

–Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)

Posted in Holy Week, Poetry & Literature

Still Another Prayer for Holy Saturday

O God of the living,
on this day your Son our Savior
descended to the place of the dead:
Look with kindness on all of us who wait in hope
for liberation from the corruption of sin and death,
and give us a share in the glory of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

Another Prayer for Holy Saturday

O God, whose loving kindness is infinite, mercifully hear our prayers; and grant that as in this life we are united in the mystical body of thy Church, and in death are laid in holy ground with the sure hope of resurrection; so at the last day we may rise to the life immortal, and be numbered with thy saints in glory everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

God knows our Dying From the Inside

Jesus dies. His lifeless body is taken down from the cross. Painters and sculptors have strained their every nerve to portray the sorrow of Mary holding her lifeless son in her arms, as mothers today in Baghdad hold with the same anguish the bodies of their children. On Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, God is dead, entering into the nothingness of human dying. The source of all being, the One who framed the vastness and the microscopic patterning of the Universe, the delicacy of petals and the scent of thyme, the musician’s melodies and the lover’s heart, is one with us in our mortality. In Jesus, God knows our dying from the inside.

–The Rt. Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Rowell

Posted in Christology, Death / Burial / Funerals, Holy Week

In the End A Sort of Quietness

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been, if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you, you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.

–C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Posted in Holy Week, Poetry & Literature, Theology

The Transition

Holy Saturday is a neglected day in parish life. Few people attend the Services. Popular piety usually reduces Holy Week to one day Holy Friday. This day is quickly replaced by another Easter Sunday. Christ is dead and then suddenly alive. Great sorrow is suddenly replaced by great joy. In such a scheme Holy Saturday is lost.

In the understanding of the Church, sorrow is not replaced by joy; it is transformed into joy. This distinction indicates that it is precisely within death the Christ continues to effect triumph.

–Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983)

Posted in Church History, Holy Week, Parish Ministry, Theology

Jesus Christ was Buried

“By the grace of God” Jesus tasted death “for every one”. In his plan of salvation, God ordained that his Son should not only “die for our sins” but should also “taste death”, experience the condition of death, the separation of his soul from his body, between the time he expired on the cross and the time he was raised from the dead. The state of the dead Christ is the mystery of the tomb and the descent into hell. It is the mystery of Holy Saturday, when Christ, lying in the tomb, reveals God’s great sabbath rest after the fulfillment of man’s salvation, which brings peace to the whole universe.

–The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, para. 624

Posted in Death / Burial / Funerals, Holy Week, Theology

Music for Holy Saturday–Spiegel im Spiegel for Cello and Piano (Arvo Pärt)

Posted in Holy Week, Liturgy, Music, Worship

A Prayer for Holy Saturday

O God, whose loving kindness is infinite, mercifully hear our prayers; and grant that as in this life we are united in the mystical body of thy Church, and in death are laid in holy ground with the sure hope of resurrection; so at the last day we may rise to the life immortal, and be numbered with thy saints in glory everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted in Holy Week, Spirituality/Prayer

From the Morning Scripture Readings

So then, there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God; for whoever enters God’s rest also ceases from his labors as God did from his.

–Hebrews 4:10-11

Posted in Holy Week, Theology: Scripture

Christians around the world mark Good Friday in 2023- in pictures

look through them all.

Posted in Globalization, Holy Week, Liturgy, Music, Worship, Other Churches

Bp Chris Warner with some Reflections on Good Friday 2023

In her book, The Crucifixion, Fleming Rutledge writes:

“Susan Sontag, who suffered for years from the cancer that eventually killed her, wrote this: ‘It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.’ Here in a few words is a fundamental insight with which to view the crucifixion. If Jesus’ demise is construed merely as a death – even as a painful, tortured death – the crucial point will be lost. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last word in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point…”

This is deeply disturbing to me as I reflect on these words during this Holy Week and in light of Paul’s description of the cross as being, “the wisdom and power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-24) How can the degradation of the cross be both God’s wisdom and power? Paul answers by saying that while, “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, to us who are being saved it is the power of God…For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach (a crucified Savior) to save those who believe.”

The Gospel is that on the cross Jesus, the Son of God, willingly, voluntarily, and purposefully absorbed all the diabolical hatred of every human heart who has ever lived, including yours and mine.

Read it all.

Posted in Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), Christology, Holy Week

Jürgen Moltmann for Good Friday

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”

–Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), p, 414

Posted in Christology, Holy Week

Johnny Cash & The Carter Family for Good Friday- Were You There (1960)

Posted in Christology, Holy Week, Liturgy, Music, Worship