THE
P RTAL
April 2017
Page 9
The Great Week
Fr Julian Green has been thinking about Holy Week
F ull central
to the month of April, this year, is the celebration of the Great
Week, or Holy Week. From Christian antiquity, the principal Christian feast day was
Sunday, the weekly feast day of the Resurrection. Certainly by the second century, the first day of the week
was observed as the Christian ‘sabbath’ and it was on this day – the Day of the Lord – that the Christian
people gathered for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Alongside this weekly celebration, the annual
celebration of the great Passover of the Lord was the first annual celebration to be established. Indeed, in
time, the exact date for the celebration of Easter became something which was not only controverted, but
also defined a person’s orthodoxy and communion with the Church.
The first historical reference we have to the
celebration of Holy Week is found in the Apostolic
Constitutions, an anonymous collection of treatises
on the organisation of the Church dating from the
late fourth century, and being compiled in Antioch in
Syria. In that text, we can read that Holy Week, which
it refers to as the Passover Week, is kept as a fast from
Monday to Saturday.
Quite specifically, it tells us that the faithful would
eat only bread, salt, and herbs for food, and only water
for drink. Meat and wine were absolutely forbidden.
Furthermore, it tells us that Good Friday and Holy
Saturday were observed as complete fasts. Having
exhorted the people to fast, the Constitution then in the time when the Christian communities lived in
gives us an account of the Easter Vigil:
a pagan world. It is certain that they managed to keep
Sundays, even when the first day of the week was a
“From the even till cock-crowing keep awake,
normal working day.
and assemble together in the church, watch
and pray, and entreat God; reading, when
When we look around our churches, while Good
you sit up all night, the Law, the Prophets,
Friday may still attract a crowd, the rest of Holy Week
and the Psalms, until cock-crowing,
can be the preserve of only the most devout. In an age
and baptising your catechumens, and
which is newly pagan, many Christian people’s lives
reading the Gospel with fear and trembling,
are shaped more by work and commerce than by a
and speaking to the people such things as
fervent adherence to the central teachings of the faith.
tend to their sal vation… Now the Lord
is risen, offer your sacrifice, concerning which
The challenge to us is really to live this great week
He made a constitution by us, saying, ‘Do this
as a week above all weeks, a week in which to place
for a remembrance of me’; and thenceforward
prayer, fasting, liturgy, devotion before all the other
leave off your fasting, and rejoice, and keep
cares and worries we may have. First and foremost, it
a festival, because Jesus Christ, the pledge of
is the way in which we respond to the call of the Lord
our resurrection, is risen from the dead.”
to take up his Cross and follow him which we are most
able to show in the way in which we not only observe
The historical origin of these feasts and fasts is very but truly live Holy Week.
interesting. What shines out from the evidence is that
Let’s allow Holy Week this year really to impinge on
the early Christians took these commemorations of the
Passion and the celebrations of the Resurrection very our daily routine, and let it stand out as a week of true
seriously. While our earliest records of Holy Week come devotion to the Lord. But let that devotion also overflow
from the period after the establishment of Christianity into works of charity, which allow us to share in the
as the official religion of the Roman Empire, we can mission of Jesus Christ, who came not to serve but to
guess that the keeping of Holy Week had its origins be served, and to give his life as a ransom for many.