The Tribune

By Rev Canon S

Sebastian Campbell

THIS is Holy Week; the holiest of weeks in the calendar, having started with Palm Sunday – Jesus’s triumphant entry into hostile Jerusalem. Today is observed as Maundy Thursday. A day of celebration. We commemorated three commands given by Jesus today:

1. Love one another

2. Break bread and share the cup in Holy Communion

3. Be humble (wash the feet of one another)

It is most appropriate to be in church tonight and relive this great drama of Maundy Thursday. Good Friday is a day of tragedy. What an irony! Out of tragedy good comes forth; salvation is won. On Holy Saturday Jesus goes into the world of the dead, preaching to the souls gone on before. “He descended into hell”, we proclaim in the creeds.

All this brings us now, to the queen of feasts – Easter.

The Easter season is the oldest on the Christian calendar. It encompasses the amazing events of Christ’s resurrection, ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Whitsunday). These are seen, now as then, as a unit, each complementing the others; all essential to the total revelation of Christ’s mission. They came to be called “The Great 50 Days.”

The season’s English name, Easter, is derived from Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of spring,who gave her name to what then corresponded to the month of April.

The whole season of Easter is a festival season. There is evidence that in its early years the church did not kneel at any time through the Easter season. All the Sundays are part of the season and hence are called Sundays of Easter.

Easter is the earliest of the three great Christian feast days; the others being Christmas and Pentecost. Originally Easter eve and Easter day together were called the Pascha, and the worship consisted of a Vigil of scripture readings, psalms and prayers lasting from sundown until dawn, when converts were baptised and communion was celebrated. Pascha was a celebration of the crucifixion and the resurrection as a whole because the early Christians saw the two inseparable. They commemorated not so much the events themselves, but the intrinsic significance of the events – salvation and eternal life with God. They saw their redemption and their reentry into God’s Kingdom. At the same time, the emphasis on the crucifixion and resurrection observance began to shift to the historic events themselves, a process aided by the evolution of the season of Lent. By the late fourth century, Good Friday became firmly established as the memorial of the crucifixion, thus splitting the original Pascha theme and leaving the resurrection theme only for Easter Day.

The Paschal mystery is expressed effectively in the events of these incredible days: Christ’s crucifixion saved us, redeemed us, atoned for our sins once and for all, and reconciled us with God: Christ’s resurrection vanquished sin and death and marked the beginning of the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Although the mystery defies our complete comprehension, to Christians it is very real. It is, in fact, the heart of our faith. It is regrettable that sometimes, as we divide Lent and Holy Week and Good Friday from Easter, the essential unity of the crucifixion and the resurrection also tends to be broken. We must always remember that the latter completes the former.

The resurrection throws the magnificent light of understanding over Christ’s life and death. And so accomplishes our salvation, which was begun with the incarnation and sealed by the crucifixion. Without the resurrection, not any of these would have meaning. Without the resurrection, Jesus would have been only another dead prophet. No wonder this event and the mystery it revealed assumed so important a position in the life of the Church. Little time elapsed before Christians habitually observed Sunday as the Lord’s Day, because a Sunday had been the first day of their new life, their new beginning. That is why they set it apart and made it an occasion for coming together to celebrate the mystery and to partake of the bread and wine by which Christ’s presence was made known.