The Drama of Holy Week
The wide variety of worship styles of Christianity in the United States is astounding. Catholic priests consecrate the Holy Eucharist in their dazzling vestments, surrounded by paintings of saints and important moments from the Bible with the altar and cross at the center of things. Free Evangelical ministers speak forty-minute long, passionate sermons from stages with a modern praise band behind them, eager to reinforce the message with music they got from Christian radio stations. Small town protestants informally gather to do much the same things we have done for years, taking comfort in tradition without necessarily being ruled by it.
We could look at this wide variety of practices and find wisdom in the entirety of it. We could be inspired by Christians who worship differently from us and try to see things from their perspective, appreciating how meaningful their worship is to them. Unfortunately, humans are sinful. Instead of listening and learning wisdom from others, we often cast judgments against them. We look at praise band worship and say, “This is just entertainment. I don’t want to go to a concert. I want to go to Church! Where is Jesus in all this?” Or we look at the very formal Orthodox worship community and say, “That would make me uncomfortable. There are too many rules. It’s too strict there.” Meanwhile, others look at Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians in small town churches across the midwest and think, “Well their worship is awfully stodgy.”
While we can easily point to sin as the reason we pull apart from one another, there is a fundamental question that underlies these disagreements that is worth exploring. Are we supposed to feel worship, or is worship a matter of faith and intellect? Is simply trusting God to be present enough, or should we tangibly experience the tingling of inspiration, when our souls feel lighter and our hearts skip a beat as we are caught up in the effervescent joy of worshiping in the presence of God?
Rural Nebraska Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists are often far removed from the pietist movements from Protestant history. Being passionate in worship isn’t really important. We may have special music from time to time, but we’re never rising from our seats with our hands above our heads crying, “Hallelujah” in the middle of the service. At least, we won’t do that if the bulletin doesn’t explicitly call for it. Church isn’t about feeling or experiencing. Church is about hearing the Word of God proclaimed and participating in the liturgy around it. Unfortunately, sometimes participating in the liturgy looks like “going through the motions” of worship, and hearing God’s Word proclaimed is desperately trying not to fall asleep during the sermon.
As we approach Holy Week, perhaps it is worth pondering what we lose when we drop the affect, the experiential sacred, replacing it with boring, intellectual acceptance of basic theological declarations. More so than any time in the church year, Holy Week is a time when even the most boring of worship communities can participate in something dramatic. On Palm Sunday we celebrate the joy of our victorious king entering the city, but a dark cloud hangs over the celebration as our eyes look forward to the world-changing mysterious act of God that will follow. Thursday we speak of love for each other, love so strong that we would follow Christ’s example and die. Without really ending the service, we proceed into Good Friday, when Jesus goes to the cross and dies the death of a criminal. On Good Friday we experience the despair and hopelessness of the disciples. We see the betrayal and isolation of Jesus. We look at things with confusion and sadness. Where will we go now? Who can we turn to when God has been killed? How can life go on when the voice that forged Creation lies dead in a tomb and speaks no more? We look back on the ministry of Jesus and see it all crushed by the oppressive boots of Roman authority and the religious establishment. The underdog lost hard here. Violence won against peace. Death prevailed against life. We leave the Good Friday service in silence. We can use that silence to ponder, to dress up the sorrow in theological reflection, but maybe for this one day of the year, we can simply feel. We can simply sit in our sorrow and silence, asking, “Why?” without answering for ourselves.
That mournful sorrow turns to an empty, hollow, silence on Saturday. Jesus is dead and we are still left reeling from what we have seen. We avoid skipping ahead to Easter until it is time, but on Saturday we can ponder what a world without God looks like. We can imagine a cruel and heartless place where oppression, violence, and betrayal have the last word, and good people die for nothing.
Finally, having waited in silence and sorrow, we emerge on Easter Sunday with hopeful surprise. Something amazing has happened that defies all logic. God has worked a miracle that defied our expectations. Christ has returned from the grave, alive and shining in glory. The victory that death thought it had won, has been swallowed up. God sprung a trap, raising Jesus from the dead to save us from our sins and also to expose the futility of the violence used against him. Even the Roman empire, with all its dominating power, could not keep Jesus in the grave. Nothing can overpower God’s love, life, and power. But God’s power is a different thing than we so often see in the world.
I don’t know if everyone experiences this as well, but Good Friday is a service whose weight I feel. I am sad for a while after the service, sad and tired. It’s certainly not a pleasant feeling, but it is actually important to not skip to the joy of Easter. Some churches skip Maundy Thursday and Good Friday entirely, going from Palm Sunday to Easter, covering the experience with the mere knowledge of what happened. But there is a problem with that. We need to feel the melancholy love and dread of Maundy Thursday. We need to feel the despair, terror, and sorrow of Good Friday. We need to sit in stunned silence and fear on Holy Saturday before the ecstatic joy of Easter arrives. It isn’t enough to just know, because knowing facts isn’t really understanding it. The fact is, Jesus felt those things. The disciples felt those things. And the poor and suffering of today continue to feel oppression, betrayal, and despair, even as they are mixed with the self-sacrificial love of community. Understanding the facts of the story doesn’t mean we really know the meaning of Holy Week. Only when we step into the emotional landscape of those days, do they actually take on meaning in our lives. When we hurt with Jesus and weep with the disciples, we feel them hurting and weeping with us in our worst times. This isn’t about being entertained, getting emotional like we are watching some dramatic movie. This is about letting go of the barriers we put up between ourselves and Jesus, and feeling with Christ in relationship. This Holy Week, we can put aside the formal rules of ordered worship and let these days hurt us, let these days heal us, and let these days carry us back nearly two thousand years to look upon God’s saving act in sorrow and death, and after three days of silence, glorious life.
