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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2008 /  Holy Week

Published March 14, 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in the Lord:

This weekend, we begin our annual Holy Week observance. Keeping with my tradition, I would like to offer some spiritual reflections and suggestions to help us prepare for these beautiful and sacred days, the most important liturgical celebrations of the Church year.

Celebrating and experiencing the Paschal Mystery
During Holy Week, through sign and symbol, and in the way we unite our minds and hearts to Jesus Christ, we enter into the process of His dying and rising, what we call the "Paschal Mystery." We experience some aspect of this mystery each day as we die to self and strive to live for the Lord and others by works of prayer or penance. Some of us, right now, are living the Paschal Mystery in a very profound way as we endure the physical pain or psychological stress of aging or chronic illness, isolation, loneliness, separation and loss.

In the way that Christ freely suffered and died for us, He did not take away our human problems of body or spirit. Rather, He shows us the way to live and die; in fact, as He tells us in John 14, He is "the way." His passage through death to Resurrection is the means for our salvation, our only means of salvation. Something in us must die – like Christ and with Christ – if we are to know the joy of Easter and new life, and the promise of life eternal. This is our journey of Holy Week – dying and rising with and for Christ.

We will celebrate our new life in the Lord as we renew our baptismal promises during the Easter Vigil and welcome new members into our Church. The ceremonies of Holy Week provide us a profound way to share together in these saving deeds of Christ, His loving obedience to death, and rising to life so that we might truly be one with Him and one another.

Communal renewal
Our observance of Holy Week is intended to draw us closer to the Lord and one another; the services of this coming week are communal celebrations. While each of us needs to spend time privately contemplating the mystery of God's love expressed in the Death-Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we do so as a community of faith. The salvation we celebrate during Holy Week immerses us more deeply into Christ's Body, the Church. We need the support of the community and our own prayer and works of penance build up and strengthen the rest of the Body of Christ. To put this another way, while we may choose to spend time alone reading the Passion of the Lord or praying the Stations of the Cross, it is the Church's hope and expectation that we participate in the liturgical services of this week with the rest of the faithful so as to experience the full depth and meaning of the Passion, Death-Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Our liturgical celebrations are not simply recalling past events from 2,000 years ago. We believe that Christ is truly present to us in and through the sacramental celebrations of the Church: We experience in our own way the drama of the Last Supper and the Exodus meal and passage of the Jews. We stand by the cross of Christ and wait by His tomb for Resurrection. As we live through the services of Holy Week 2008, we are in communion with the Church of every time and place, experiencing anew their liberating, renewing and healing power.

As we welcome new members into the Church and rejoice in the healing and reconciliation of those who have been alienated from the Body of Christ, we are all renewed in spirit and strengthened in our faith; we, too, are "born again" in Christ. Through the celebrations of this Holy Week, therefore, we could say that the whole Church is renewed and we ourselves become more fully committed to the Lord and are aware of our loving responsibility and solidarity with and for each other. I would now like to reflect on each of the days of the coming week and their rich spiritual meaning and potential for us individually and collectively.

Palm Sunday: professing Christ as our Messiah
Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion. In most of our parishes, palms are blessed in one location and the whole congregation (or a representative group) joins the priest and ministers in a procession, a solemn entrance into the Church. The call to worship and proclamation of the Gospel for the procession remind us of our daily invitation to respond to Christ's call to discipleship, to publicly affirm that He is the Lord and center of our lives. As we bring to life the experience of the Jewish people who enthusiastically greeted Jesus entering Jerusalem, we ourselves deepen our commitment to Him and each other.

This year during Palm Sunday Mass, we will hear the Passion according to St. Matthew, a text that highlights the way the Hebrew Scriptures foreshadowed all that happened to Jesus and how the events of His suffering and death brought to fulfillment God's loving plan for our salvation. More than the other Gospels, St. Matthew stresses the unbreakable bond of love between Jesus and His Father; Jesus freely accepted suffering out of fidelity to His Father's will. Our participation in Palm Sunday services challenges us to be not simply part of a crowd greeting Jesus when convenient but being fully committed to Him and to the Heavenly Father, a commitment of love which expresses itself in fidelity to all the relationships that are significant in our lives.

Chrism Mass: celebrating our identity as "anointed ones"
Holy Thursday morning we celebrate the Chrism Mass, a unique ritual in the liturgical life of the Church, a celebration that brings together the clergy, religious and lay faithful of the Archdiocese for the blessing of the holy oils to be used at the Easter vigil and throughout the coming year. In this liturgy, the priests of the archdiocese renew their commitment to priestly service and the congregation promises to support them through their prayer and example. The oil blessed during this liturgy will be used to bring healing to the sick (Oil of the Sick) and to welcome those being received into the Church (Oil of the Catechumens). We will also consecrate the sacred chrism to be used for baptism, confirmation, and holy orders, and the blessing of new altars and churches. The blessing of these oils on Holy Thursday reminds us that we are truly Christians or "anointed ones" as we share in the Death-Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the source of all sacramental life in the Church.

Holy Thursday evening:sharing in the eucharistic meal
Holy Thursday evening, we celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper, commemorating the institution of the Holy Eucharist and the ministerial priesthood. On this evening, the Gospel of John 13 and Christ's washing of the feet of His disciples comes to life in a very dramatic way as the presider, acting in the name of the Lord, washes the feet of chosen members of the congregation. An act of humility on the part of the Lord and His minister, the washing of feet is also a reminder that no one of us can be saved on our own; we must be washed clean by our sharing in the mystery of the Lord's dying and rising.

On Holy Thursday evening, at the conclusion of the liturgy, there is a solemn procession with the Holy Eucharist and the Blessed Sacrament is placed at the altar of repose so that people might pray during the evening hours, sharing anew the experience of Christ and the disciples at the agony in the garden. The Holy Thursday evening service helps us appreciate in a new way the link between the Eucharistic meal and the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross. It would be very sad for a Christian to absent himself or herself from participating in this beautiful service; although not required by Church law, participating in the Mass of the Lord's Supper truly helps us enter into the full meaning of Christ's Death-Resurrection for us.

Good Friday: entering into Christ's selfless love for the Father and all people
Good Friday commemorates the death of the Lord; it is a fitting occasion to see our sinfulness and the brokenness of our world within the context of God's infinite mercy and compassion. We listen to the Passion from St. John's Gospel which is, from start to finish, a proclamation of the victory of Christ, a victory that unfolded even in the process of His diminishment, betrayal and denial, physical and emotional suffering. In the theology of St. John, the way Christ handed Himself over to His Passion clearly displayed His divine glory; the power of His victory was beginning to shine through His humanity. In St. John's Gospel, as Christ died on the cross, the Church was being born. Again, we can read the Passion account on our own, but it is more powerful and meaningful to hear it proclaimed, for this Gospel truly announces the public and communal character of our salvation. Part of our response to the Passion on Good Friday is the opportunity to come forward in yet another liturgical procession – slowly moving forward to kiss the feet of the crucified Lord. This humble and simple gesture affirms publicly our own personal sorrow for whatever way our own sins necessitated such suffering. Our gesture of love and tenderness toward the crucified Christ is also a concrete way of pledging a renewed commitment to greater love and compassion toward the least of our brothers and sisters.

In communion with the Church throughout the world, we experience Christ, who is still in agony until the end of time whenever and wherever there is suffering among members of His Body, the Church. An important – but often overlooked – aspect of our Good Friday service is the collection which is taken up for the needs of the Church in the Holy Land. As Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us, our generosity and loving solidarity with and for the people and shrines of the Holy Land offer a "silent witness to the Savior's life on Earth." Indeed, our communion with the crucified Lord certainly challenges us to hear and respond to His voice crying out in the urgent voices of the Christians living in the Holy Land, often in the midst of great suffering.

With humble gratitude and hopeful confidence, our Good Friday service also includes prayers of petition and reception of Holy Communion. We go forth in silence, but yet, with a certain serenity and peace, knowing that love, not death or sin, has the last word.

Holy Saturday: re-livingthe Exodus, passing from the slavery of self to freedom of loving service
Holy Saturday is the one day of the Church year when there are no services until the Vigil in the evening. We are challenged to remain quiet and still, remembering the entombment of Christ; with the Blessed Virgin, we watch and wait for the fulfillment of His promise in the Resurrection. The whole Christian life can be summarized as an experience of "vigil" – watching and waiting for the return of the Lord in glory, when our share in Christ's victory will be complete and universal.

Participating in the Easter Vigil service is an experience you will never forget; those who have participated in the past would surely attest that it truly is a defining moment for what it means to be a Christian. Through the ritual and the readings, with all their rich symbols, we move from the darkness and isolation of sin, fear and death, to a new birth into light, freedom, discovering anew our privilege of belonging to the risen Body of Christ, the Church.

Certainly, there is a sacrifice of time if you choose to participate in the Easter Vigil; most parish Easter Vigils run a good two hours or more. But the readings, the music, and the ritual itself – coupled with the intense and eager faith of those being received and welcomed into the Church – make it time well spent. It is hard to explain the power and majesty of the whole experience but if you take the opportunity of participating, I can assure you, you will not be disappointed.

The vigil begins in darkness – a reminder of our sinful condition before the coming of Christ. We kindle the Easter fire and light the Paschal Candle, recalling and re-enacting the Exodus experience of the Jewish people's journey through the desert following the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day. After the eloquent chant of the exsultet, or hymn of Easter Joy, the Church helps us put the story of Christ's Resurrection within the context of all salvation history through a series of Scripture readings which culminate in the Easter Gospel.

After the homily, the Church celebrates the mystery of Christ's Resurrection through the sacraments of initiation: baptism (or reception into the church for those already baptized), confirmation and Holy Eucharist. The full meaning of Easter and the Paschal Mystery of Christ and our sharing in it come to fulfillment as we eat His Body and drink His Blood, the meal of our redemption and foreshadowing of the eternal Passover and banquet of eternal life.

Easter Sunday and beyond: a new way of living in solidarity with Christ and His body The liturgies of Easter morning build on the joy, hope and new life that came to light through the rituals of Holy Week, most especially, the Easter Vigil. If we participate only on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, missing the services in between, we will never know the full spiritual power and meaning of the Easter liturgies. We cannot get to the victory and joy of Easter unless we go through the whole process of Lent and Holy Week itself.

Sharing in these events liturgically truly will draw you closer to the Lord and to all the other members of His Body, the Church. To the extent possible, I encourage you to make this a Holy Week by participating in these beautiful liturgies offered at the Cathedral and/or at your own home parish. No matter what your circumstances, I hope and pray the events of this week will touch your mind and heart so that by Easter, you will be able to affirm your baptismal promises with new vigor and zeal.

Finally, Easter is not just one day; liturgically, 50 days become one day, one continuous feast from Easter to Pentecost, the day we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the Church and the beginning of our ministry of evangelization. Spiritually, for the Christian, every day should be an Easter, a dying and rising with Christ and a coming to an ever deeper communion with Him through our membership in the Church. Easter should launch us on a new way of living eternity already here and now until we share fully in the victory of Christ together in the Kingdom.

For now, as we continue on our pilgrim way, may the Lord bless us all on this sacred communal journey through sin and death to resurrection and new life. In a special way, let us carry in our hearts our brothers and sisters living the Paschal Mystery as they deal with loss and suffering of body or spirit. Let us also pray with eager expectation for those about to join the Church during the Easter Vigil: May we all experience the joy of new life in Christ and the gift of His saving love which heals all brokenness and sin. Let us live and celebrate the Paschal Mystery!

Your brother in the Lord,

†Adam Cardinal Maida
Archbishop of Detroit