Sunday, April 13, 2025
Palm Sunday
Experiencing Holy Week
The Rev. Mark D. Wilkinson, Rector
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The great challenge is that this liturgy is an attempt to pack all of Holy Week into just two Sundays, today and Easter morning. Unpacking all of this is an impossible task so do not fear I will not try to explain it all in the next few minutes. This is why we have Holy Week.
I was talking with a rector who said that he was doing something different for Palm Sunday and not doing they whole Passion story but bits of it and using different locations in the church to tell the story. I found myself thinking that the problem with Holy week is that it is about more than just hearing the story, it is about experiencing the story. The early church understood this very well and the early church at the start of the period after Constantine is the source of the material for our Holy Week services
The services that were reinstated in the1979 Book of Common Prayer come from the time of Constantine. In the 1928 BCP there were just prayers collects and readings. No specific services. So even though this is our most recent prayer book, it contains some of the oldest services in the history of the church.
The records we have come mostly from a pilgrim whose name was Egeria. She was a nun who recorded her experience of a pilgrimage for the Holy Week services that were located in Jerusalem. Holy Week in Jerusalem was designed as a teaching tool for the many new converts to Christianity once Constantine made it a religion recognized by the state. Please understand there was a huge flood of converts once Constantine once he recognized Christianity because his mother was a devote Christian and really evangelized for the faith. This was sort of a Vacation Bible School for adults if you will. Pilgrims to Jerusalem would re-enact the biblical story starting on Palm Sunday and moving to what is formally known as the Tridium, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Great Vigil of Easter, which began at sundown on Saturday and ended with the first Eucharist of Easter at sunrise. Pilgrims like Egeria took these traditions back to their own churches and the practice spread.
The pilgrims of Egeria’s day experienced the story, they didn’t just hear about it. That is why the liturgies of Holy Week are experiential. We have a meal, actually wash feet, and then strip the altar, we sit and pray at the foot of the cross on Good Friday. Ignatius knew the importance of experiencing the bible stories. In his Spiritual Exercises a person is asked to envision themselves in each of the stories and that is what I intend to do for this Holy Week in the course of our services. With each of these services I invite you to move into your heart and feel not just hear. Ask yourself the questions, of what would it have been like to be there. What would I have done if I had been there?
This year’s Holy Week services are designed for you to not just hear the story but experience them.
As we go through this Holy Week I hope that you will come on Thursday to experience Maundy Thursday; the meal, the foot washing story told around the table followed by the washing of feet, the story of the Eucharist, and the stripping of the altar. Friday with the church stripped bare to hear again the whole story with a reflection on it by Rev. Wendy as she retells the story from the viewpoint of Mary Magdalene and then to sit at the foot of the cross and walk the Stations of the Cross. Then you will truly have experienced Holy Week just like those in the early church. Then you will be ready to really celebrate on Easter with the Vigil on Saturday and services on Sunday morning.