March 22, 2024
Palms, Passion, Confusion, and celebrating Holy Week
Jerusalem was an important location for Christian pilgrimages in the early centuries. Christians would especially flock to Jerusalem in the week prior to Easter, as the church of Jerusalem enacted the last week of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem in the places where they believed they took place. Those practices of this week in Jerusalem gave rise to what we now know as Holy Week and the Stations of the Cross. By the 300s, Holy Week was being celebrated well beyond Jerusalem and became a time of fasting, donations to the church and to the needy, and extended times of prayer.
Over the centuries since, there was a move to make the last two weeks of Lent more penitential. This resulted in the Sunday before Palm Sunday becoming “Passion Sunday,” when the gospel and other texts read that day focused on the Passion of Christ, usually the events leading up to the crucifixion, which would be followed the next week with readings about Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem before Passover. This makes little sense, however. One of my liturgy professors contended it was a Pope who instituted this change, wanting to create more “Holy Days of Obligation” for the faithful, and hopefully, increasing offerings for the church. Whatever the reason, it was part of the Catholic tradition until the reforms of the Church Year in 1969. This is when the Catholic Church went from a one-year lectionary (reading the same lessons every year) to a three-year lectionary.
In 1974, an ecumenical group of Protestant churches from around the world created the first Protestant three-year lectionary based on that 1969 lectionary. This lectionary was what was used in the Covenant Book of Worship (1981), my first Book of Worship. Yet, this lectionary included what the Catholic Church had left behind, Passion Sunday before Palm Sunday. So when I was in seminary and first in ministry, the Passion-Palm sequence was the rhythm of the last two weeks of Lent, as awkward as it was.
We now use the Revised Common Lectionary which, for the most part, is used by Catholics and Protestants around the world. It no longer contains any distinct “Passion Sundays.” However, this lectionary makes a concession that most Christians do not attend church between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, so Palm Sunday is now Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, with an opening rite “The Liturgy of the Palms” and the rest of the service “The Liturgy of the Passion.” That way people don’t go from “Hosanna” one Sunday to “Hallelujah! He Is Risen” the next without any mention of the Cross.
Except at our church.
First Covenant Church, since I have been here, has used the old lessons for Palm Sunday, with no mention of the Passion. Given that our Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services are online, I assume—rightly or wrongly—that we can pray through the story of our Lord’s last week even if we do not physically attend all of the services.
Confusing? Probably. I simply want you to know why, should it ever be brought to your attention, we are not following the current lectionary on Palm Sunday. And why? Because I find both the current and previous practices to be confusing!
The bottom line is this: please join us, in person or online, as we join those who throughout the centuries have set apart this week as holy, and pray through the story of our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, through his last meal with his disciples, his betrayal, his arrest, conviction, and execution, and to his even more triumphant Resurrection this coming Holy Week and Easter.
~ Pastor Todd
P.S. I would like to thank all you who contributed to our efforts as a church to “keep a holy Lent,” as we prayed on Ash Wednesday, by adding their prayers to our communal reading of Matthew’s gospel in the past five weeks and in the week ahead. Thank you all for allowing us to join our voices to yours as we pray for our lives to deepen in our expression of our new life in Christ.