O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in the fullness of his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A peaceful moment in the cloisters on the Wednesday of #HolyWeek pic.twitter.com/T2wy1E8Fbx
— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) April 16, 2025
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.
‘Crab Apple’
— Helen Day (@LBFlyawayhome) April 16, 2025
Trees (1963)
Artist: S R Badmin pic.twitter.com/aWETJcrlU0
O Lord our God, whose blessed Son gave his back to be whipped and did not hide his face from shame and spitting: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Scourging of Christ, Titian, 1560 #titian #mannerism pic.twitter.com/9d02HsSmu1
— Venice Art Guide (@VeniceArtGuide) September 22, 2020
O Christ, the King of glory, who didst enter the holy city in meekness to be made perfect through the suffering of death: Give us grace, we beseech thee, in all our life here to take up our cross daily and follow thee, that hereafter we may rejoice with thee in thy heavenly kingdom; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God, world without end.
Guten Morgen und einen schönen Tag euch! pic.twitter.com/FZVDJbh5IN
— Die Bergziege (@brauchtfreiheit) April 15, 2025
You may listen directly here:
Or you may download it there.
Palm Sunday stained glass window in Chester Cathedral. pic.twitter.com/4p4MkZ2jiU
— A Beautiful Culture (@ABeautifulCult1) March 24, 2024
Almighty and everlasting God,
who in your tender love towards the human race
sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
to take upon him our flesh
and to suffer death upon the cross:
grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility,
and also be made partakers of his resurrection;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Jesus' entry into Jerusalem #PalmSunday
— Ennius (@red_loeb) April 12, 2025
München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB Clm 4453; 'Evangeliary of Otto III'; c.1000 CE; Reichenau; p.94@bsb_muenchen pic.twitter.com/CSSIZi7DuL
As on this day we keep the special memory of our Redeemer’s entry into the city, so grant, O Lord, that now and ever he may triumph in our hearts. Let the King of grace and glory enter in, and let us lay ourselves and all we are in full and joyful homage before him; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
Jesus makes his entry into Jerusalem, Dovetailed tapestry weave coloured wools on linen, Northern Europe, 17th century (V&A Museum, London) #PalmSunday pic.twitter.com/4CNPIqhWvA
— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) April 13, 2025
Holy Week can sit strangely in the church year. It is the most solemn and significant of times in the church calendar, and yet, to all intents and purposes, ordinary life carries on undisturbed by it. Unlike Christmas, which bursts upon the scene in a riot of tinsel and fairy lights, demanding attention and pulling people in from the streets to enjoy carolling and mince pies, for most of the population, Holy Week passes unnoticed. Only the promise of hot cross buns and free childcare when schools are closed or a few eccentrics walking mournfully round the community on Good Friday may have any impact at all.
How, then, to engage with the non-churchgoing public? How to share the message of sacrificial love — an unpopular theme in today’s “Because I’m worth it”, “Go on, treat yourself” society? Perhaps by using the week to experiment and challenge, to offer services and events that are different from the norm, and to think carefully about all sectors of the community and explore ways in which they might become engaged, even briefly, with the drama of Holy Week and the life-changing effect of its events.
Your community might well be happily settled into a regular rhythm of services. It is to be hoped that the schedule is one that all can manage — ministry team, musicians, volunteers working within their capacity and capability, able to maintain the level of effort and energy required without collapsing with burnout. Nevertheless, we all know the dangers of complacency, of falling into a routine that becomes almost mindless in its familiarity. Holy Week offers an opportunity to try out new things in a way that is manageable (because it is only one week), understandable (it’s a special week), and unrepeatable, if necessary. If something completely new is too challenging or demanding, try and ring the changes with the established patterns, enabling your community to look with fresh eyes on familiar events.
How to engage with the non-churchgoing public
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 18, 2025
Sally Welch continues her series exploring practical ideas for Lent and Easterhttps://t.co/hUxKr4235W
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)
There's a rumour, a whisper. Something's happening. Could it be? #HolySaturday @gandkchurch @cofe pic.twitter.com/4xJz6oTEpv
— Fr Craig Huxley-Jones SCP (@FatherHux) April 15, 2017
This ultimate solidarity is the final point and the goal of that first ‘descent,’ so clearly described in the Scriptures, into a ‘lower world’ which, with Augustine, can already be characterised, by way of contrast with heaven, as infernum. Thomas Aquinas will echo Augustine here. For him, the necessity whereby Christ had to go down to Hades lies not in some insufficiency of the suffering endured on the Cross but in the fact that Christ has assumed all the defectus of sinners…Now the penalty which the sin of man brought on was not only the death of the body. It was also a penalty affected the soul, for sinning was also the soul’s work, and the soul paid the price in being deprived of the vision of God. As yet unexpiated, it followed that all human beings who lived before the coming of Christ, even the holy ancestors, descended into the infernum. And so, in order to assume the entire penalty imposed upon sinners, Christ willed not only to die, but to go down, in his soul, ad infernum. As early as the Fathers of the second century, this act of sharing constituted the term and aim of the Incarnation. The ‘terrors of death’ into which Jesus himself falls are only dispelled when the Father raises him again…He insists on his own grounding principle, namely, that only what has been endured is healed and saved.
That the Redeemer is solidarity with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality- this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ (hormemati blethesetai, Apocalypse 18, 21; John 12; Matthew 22, 13). But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity…This vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way.
––Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter [emphasis mine]
#HolySaturday “The Church is still in silence, the tabernacle is empty. Yet this is a day of the most radiant expectation – – we are in the presence of something greater than we can see.” Sr. Wendy Beckett. Jesus♥️Caritas pic.twitter.com/8UevSQ0Ckw
— Barry Naylor ن (@KaJuror) April 20, 2019
HOW life and death in Thee
Agree !
Thou hadst a virgin womb
And tomb.
A Joseph did betroth
Them both.
–Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)
Pietro Lorenzetti
(c.1280-c.1348)
Entombment
c.1320
Fresco
Lower Church,S.Francesco
Assisi#HolySaturday #HolyWeek#DonneInArte #ArtLovers pic.twitter.com/D2qtUwoQ3d— Alessandra Ciccolini (@AlessandraCicc6) April 14, 2017
In this empty hallway, there’s nothing expected of us at this moment. The work is out of our hands, and all we can do is wait, breathe, look around. People sometimes feel like this when they’ve been up all night with someone who’s seriously ill or dying, or when they’ve been through a non-stop series of enormously demanding tasks. A sort of peace, but more a sort of ‘limbo’, an in-between moment. For now, nothing more to do; tired, empty, slightly numbed, we rest for a bit, knowing that what matters is now happening somewhere else.
–Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
Burial of Christ by Carl Bloch (1834-1890) pic.twitter.com/lbjnI6ZZW9
— Eleutherius✝️🦬🇩🇪 (@Eleutherius23) April 8, 2023
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who as on this day didst rest in the sepulchre, and didst thereby sanctify the grave to be a bed of hope to thy people: Make us so to abound in sorrow for our sins, which were the cause of thy passion, that when our bodies rest in the dust, our souls may live with thee; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.
Francisco Goya was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era.
The Burial of Christ, 1772 pic.twitter.com/5fghIluzCL
— The Art Notes. (@theartnotes) December 30, 2019
“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
Holy Saturday is the ultimate time of waiting and lamenting. It’s easy to look back when you know what comes next, but Holy Saturday asks us to enter a death that seems final; without hope and without future. For the disciples, it’s the day that all stopped: when the future was… pic.twitter.com/hQK7GYAIf6
— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) March 30, 2024
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.]
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), The Corpse of Christ, c. 1582
oil on canvas
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart pic.twitter.com/lzREHchK5B— Marzena (@Marzena99557145) March 29, 2024
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)
No one wants to grieve. But today is important – God understands and grieves with us. Our Blessed Mother knows the sword pierced through the soul. And because God's sacrifice breaks apart death, we have hope in grief. May Good Friday be a reminder of God's profound love for us. pic.twitter.com/6rFXD43k9n
— Cathedral of Christ the King, Atlanta (@CathedralCTK) March 29, 2024
Grant, Lord,
that we who are baptized into the death
of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
may continually put to death our evil desires
and be buried with him;
and that through the grave and gate of death
we may pass to our joyful resurrection;
through his merits,
who died and was buried and rose again for us,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
As the Easter Triduum continues, here's the very touching Virgin and Saint John Mourning over the Body of Christ, fragment of a Lamentation of Christ, Master of Delft, c. 1500 – c. 1510. (Rijksmuseum) #GoodFriday pic.twitter.com/isAbUi0F9j
— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) March 29, 2024
Good Friday commemorated across the world – in pictures#Religion #Christianity #Catholicism #GoodFriday #AroundTheWorld #InPictures #photography #Photos
https://t.co/CdugfdS4y1— Richard Norman Poet (@ElmerPalaceSE25) March 29, 2024
Grant, O Lord, unto us, and to all thy servants, the grace of perseverance unto the end; in the power of him who for the finishing of thy work laid down his life, even thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Buen día!
"La crucifixión" 1597
-El Greco
Óleo sobre lienzo
312×169 cm
Representados la Virgen, Juan y María Magdalena.
Al pie de la Cruz, tres ángeles recogen la sangre de Cristo.
Visión nocturna del Calvario con carácter eucarístico.#Madrid Museo del Prado
Click👇 pic.twitter.com/NwwuLmIKEb— Miguel Calabria (@MiguelCalabria3) March 29, 2024
..[Jesus of Nazareth] was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”–he was God.
Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.
—Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,1949), page 4 (with special thanks to blog reader and friend WW)
The Crucifixion and Deposition of Christ #GoodFriday
Bamberg State Library Msc.Lit. 1; Sacramentary; early 11th century; Fulda; ff.61v, 68v pic.twitter.com/wl69sE0cUx— Ennius (@red_loeb) March 29, 2024
Listen to it all.
O God, the Father of mankind, who didst suffer thine only Son to be set forth as a spectacle despised, derided, and scornfully arrayed, yet in his humiliation to reveal his majesty: Draw us, we beseech thee, both to behold the Man and to worship the King, immortal, eternal, world without end.
—Daily Prayer, Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, eds. (London: Penguin Books 1959 edition of the 1941 original)
Ilustración del Evangeliario Rabbula, año 586, siríaco. La primera representación de Cristo en la cruz en un manuscrito iluminado. pic.twitter.com/Y1EqtN0Mwh
— Ruta por el Medievo (@RMedievo) March 29, 2024
Lyrics:
O sacred Head, now wounded
With grief and shame weighed down
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown
How pale thou art with anguish
With sore abuse and scorn
How does that visage languish
Which once was bright as morn
What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered
T’was all for sinners’ gain
Mine, mine was the transgression
But Thine the deadly pain
Lo, here I fall, my Savior
‘Tis I deserve Thy place
Look on me with Thy favor
Vouchsafe to me Thy grace
What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest friend
For this Thy dying sorrow
Thy pity without end
O make me Thine forever
And should I fainting be
Lord, let me never, never
Outlive my love for Thee
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne?
Mikhail Nesterov – Crucifixion, 1908 pic.twitter.com/9WOnc8qcBW
— Fr. David Abernethy ☦️ (@philokalia_min) June 25, 2021
Almighty God, who of thy great love for man didst, as at this time, give thy dearly beloved Son to die for us upon the cross: Grant us a living faith in our Redeemer, and a thankful remembrance of his death. Help us to love him better for his exceeding love to us; and grant that our sins may be put away, and nailed to the cross, and buried in his grave, that they may be remembered no more against us; through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You, because by Your holy cross, You have redeemed the world. #GoodFriday ✝️ pic.twitter.com/A8dHlyDNap
— Marlene T. Diaz (@academicknight) March 29, 2024
“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
"So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha. There they crucified him…" (Jn 19:17-18)
Christ Carrying the Cross by El Greco. pic.twitter.com/kRaQQ0t2lZ
— Christian Culture (@Christian8Pics) May 20, 2020
Alone thou goest forth, O Lord, in sacrifice to die;
is this thy sorrow nought to us who pass unheeding by?
Our sins, not thine, thou bearest, Lord; make us thy sorrow feel,
till through our pity and our shame love answers love’s appeal.
This is earth’s darkest hour, but thou dost light and life restore;
then let all praise be given thee who livest evermore.
Grant us with thee to suffer pain that, as we share this hour,
thy cross may bring us to thy joy and resurrection power [The Hymnal 1982 #164].
Albrecht Durer: Crucifixion (Woodcut), 1511 pic.twitter.com/26cqOCmzpL
— Gerard Gleeson (@gerardAgleeson) April 10, 2020
Almighty Father,
look with mercy on this your family
for which our Lord Jesus Christ was content to be betrayed
and given up into the hands of sinners
and to suffer death upon the cross;
who is alive and glorified with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Crucifixion with portraits of Henry (Henricus dux) and Matilda (Matilti ducissa). #GoodFriday
BL Lansdowne MS 381/1; 'Psalter of Henry the Lion'; between 1168-1189 CE; Germany,NW; f.10v @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/BrS6aK1sne— Ennius (@red_loeb) March 29, 2024
Isn’t it curious that the Son of God would die in this particular way? Even Paul was permitted a nice, neat slice of the sword. Why did the Son of God die in the worst possible way? That’s the point here. Crucifixion was specifically designed to be the worst of the worst. It was so bad, good Roman citizens didn’t discuss it in public. It’s very much like the way we avoid talking about death and sin. The Romans avoided talking about crucifixion because it was so horrible, so disgusting, so obscene””they used that word to describe it.
Why this method and not another? Because it corresponds to the depth of depravity caused by human rebellion against God. It shows us just how bad things really are with us. No wonder we don’t want to look at it. Yet again, the African American church has never been afraid to look at it. It gives them hope. It gives them strength. It gives them comfort.
As for the blood: It is important because it’s mentioned so much in Scripture. It’s a synecdoche, a word that stands for the whole thing. When you say “the blood of Christ,” you mean his self-offering, his death, the horror of it, the pouring out of it. It sums up the whole thing.And it’s not just a metaphor; he really did shed blood when he was scourged. He was a bloody mess. I remember one line from an article by a secular journalist. Concerning the crucifixion of Jesus, he wrote, “He must have been ghastly to behold.” That’s a great sentence.
—Fleming Rutledge in a recent Christianity Today interview (emphasis mine)
Crucifixion with the Virgin Mary, St John and St Mary Magdalene is a painting by Anthony van Dyck. He produced it in 1617-19 as the high altarpiece for the Jesuit church in Bergues near Dunkirk, during his time as an assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. It is now in the Louvre. pic.twitter.com/WuK808ICbP
— EUROPEAN ART (@EuropeanArtHIST) October 5, 2018