Preaching the Arc of Holy week to Easter (A guest post)
Melinda Quivik is an ordained ELCA pastor who has served churches in three states, including a UCC/Presbyterian congregation in Michigan. A former professor of liturgy and preaching and past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, she is now the Editor-in-Chief of Liturgy, a mentor with Backstory Preaching, and a liturgical and homiletical scholar whose books include Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays (2023), Leading Worship Matters (2017), Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (2009), and other publications. She has written the Scholar's View in Sundays & Seasons: Preaching for several years.
Why do we observe Holy Week?
Why Palm/Passion Sunday and the Three Days: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil?
It is so much work. Can’t we just skip the death and go from Palm Sunday to the happiness of the Resurrection?
No.
This week is the center not only of our faith but our very lives.
It embeds in us the fundamental events of our people.
It opens a window into what lies beneath and behind the foundation itself.
Palm/Passion Sunday
Palm/Passion Sunday sets up the importance of the week. It gives us two conflicting images attend to at one time:
First is YAY, Jesus! who is riding into Jerusalem on a donkey flanked by waving palm fronds. . .
AND. . .
Second is OH NO! he’s being killed on a cross outside the city walls in a field of criminals.
We cry “Hosanna!” to Jesus (“Save Us!”—the real meaning of Hosanna!) and then in an eyeblink scream, “Crucify him!”
Did we forget that we wanted him to be our savior?
Or did we fall back into agreeing with Pontius Pilate and the conniving religious leaders?
The Sermon
The sermon might help us look at ourselves in the light of our joy (waving palms) at Jesus’ return to Jerusalem to be handed over (Oh No!).
We do not pretend that we are re-enacting a historical event.
We are not making the experience of Jesus’ final week happen again.
We remember last year’s procession with palms, see it again this year, and know it will come around again next year.
We re-member the heart of our faith that comes to us all at once in the past, present, and future.
We spend this week immersing ourselves in the complexity of being humans for whom God is love.
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday calls us to confession of sin, and we hear the words of forgiveness that ends our Lenten self-examination.
Because Jesus washed the disciples’ feet and told us that we should do the same for others, we do it.
A church cantor who led a small children’s choir told me that one year when he and the children walked into the sanctuary to practice the hymns for Maundy Thursday, when the children saw the bowls and towels laid out, they clapped their hands:
“Oh goodie! Foot washing!”
Children love DOING something in worship.
A Sunday School teacher washes and dries the feet of a teenager.
The church custodian washes the feet of the church council president.
The 4-year-old washes the pastor’s feet and dries them.
Some are squeamish about feet, but everyone has them. They hold us up. They deserve our tenderness. Letting our own feet be bare for someone else to see, and taking someone else’s feet into our hands changes us. It frees us to be servants.
The Sermon
The sermon might help us ponder what Jesus’ servanthood shows us about God’s love for all people and Earth. How are we to live as forgiven people? How is the world changed when everyone is a servant?
Then we hear the words Jesus said over the bread and wine, defining the bread as himself. “This is my body… this is my blood… Do this…”
We eat bread that is both bread and Jesus’ body. We live into a complex of meaning. Two things at once in one substance that cannot be… but is.
We carefully and ritually strip the sanctuary so that it is as bare as possible.
We leave in silence.
Good Friday
Good Friday is about the cross and prayer for the world.
Reading the Passion story might be done in a dramatic way, but only from John’s Gospel, not an amalgam in the vein of Mel Gibson’s fraught movie.
At the moment when Jesus breathed his last, we might stop and honor the event.
The Sermon
The sermon is not omitted just because the scripture reading is long. We gather because we need to hear how the story of Jesus’ death is a mirror in which we can read our worth.
We pray for everyone in the whole world. The Bidding Prayer form gives time for silent prayer for the church in every place—for leaders, for Christians, for the Jewish people who were the first to hear the word of God, for people of other faiths, people who have not identified themselves with faith, for Earth itself, for leaders of the nations, for those who are sick in any way, for those who are impoverished or imprisoned, and for the people it is easy to forget.
We spend this “good” Friday acknowledging that without this day in which God’s own son is killed we would not know the resurrection. This good day has no substitute.
Easter Vigil
At the Vigil of Easter on the Saturday night before the resurrection, we begin with a fire.
When I served a parish in eastern Montana, the farmers built a bonfire, the primal fire, in a field next to the church so that we could stand around its light and warmth to hear the first biblical story of the night: the Creation.
We listened to the crackle of the wood, watched the sparks fly up. We were ready with a bucket or two of water in case some spark landed in dry grass.
It never did. It was early spring and Earth was damp.
Then we sat together in darkness with candles and listened to stories from the Bible that tell us who we are—people whose planet and all the stars were borne from God’s word.
In this moment, we are waiting outside Jesus’ tomb. We are holding vigil.
We hear about how we became a people:
saved from a flood
commanded to stop human sacrifice
rescued from slavery
knit together of dry bones
swallowed by a whale and coughed onto the land
protected in a fiery furnace
We are reminded year after year of our ancestry so that we continually live into the privilege of being beloved.
The Sermon
The sermon comes after the Gospel reading that brings all the Old Testment stories into the person of Jesus who gave us his body and blood to remember him.
The preacher tells us that we are heirs to the mystery of the empty tomb. We live each day in awe of this stunning, world-shattering, un-natural proclamation.
We eat together and rejoice.
We enter the day of Resurrection on Sunday morning having already glimpsed the light because we have explored the dark.
And if we have observed the full Vigil, we have already rejoiced at the Resurrection as a denouement, a time at the end of a fiction narrative when all the pieces have come together to make clear the meaning of it all.
Easter Sunday/Resurrection
Easter Sunday/Resurrection Day, when celebrated after the full Vigil of Easter, takes on the role of an epilogue in a story. The denouement on Saturday evening at the end of the Vigil has drawn together into a final meaning all the threads of the story of God with God’s people.
This epilogue becomes a return to Sunday worship, now a window into how the characters (worshippers) have been altered by the events of Jesus’ Passion.
Easter Sunday brings the gathering into the reality of life in community with a Risen Lord.
It is an expected pattern of Gathering, Word read and preached, Meal shared of bread and wine, and Sending that carries out into the world the power of God’s love.
The Sermon
The sermon will likely focus on the Gospel reading from John 20 with the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener.
If the congregation observed the Vigil, the Gospel reading for Sunday morning may be taken from the other Gospel books in keeping with the liturgical calendar.
The day is one of unmitigated joy and reassurance, that despite the trials of this life, God is able to amaze us in ways we cannot imagine.
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