As a companion piece to my rant last December about having to sort out two Christmases, the subject this week is the Easter dilemma, also resulting from an overlap of secular culture and the Christian calendar.
In the world around us, Easter Sunday is observed, yes, even celebrated, as a paean to spring. Longer days, better weather, and the end to cabin fever are causes for rejoicing.
The hymnody of the day includes such melodious odes as “Easter Parade” and “In My Easter Bonnet”. Rituals feature egg dying, egg hiding and egg hunting. Bright colored vestments are the order of the day, as are jelly beans and other candies to delight the taste. The personification of the spirit of the season is the Easter Bunny.
So much for the secular holiday. Now with fear and trembling we turn to the Christmas Holy Day of Easter, only to discover that Easter is not a single day as we’d been led to believe, but a season of seven full weeks plus a day for a total of fifty days.
For the rest of the world, however, Easter is over and done with. While Christians are supposed to have barely begun observance and celebration, the attendance charts for the Sundays of the Season of Easter reveal that most members have bought the 24-hour Easter concept.
Part of the problem is, strangely enough, how the church has come to deal with the crucifixion of Christ, which is a necessary preliminary to Easter.
In the old days (prior to 1955), the Sunday before Easter was observed just about universally among Christians as “Palm Sunday”, recalling the great parade of Jesus and his fans into Jerusalem. That signaled the start of Holy Week, step-by-step leading up to the Passion of Christ.
There came a time when the Roman Church, for a variety of reasons, decided that the Gospel readings for the sixth Sunday of Lent would include the Synoptics’ accounts of Christ’s suffering and death. In the wake of Vatican II, many Protestants, including Presbyterians, bought this practice as well.
Several reasons are cited for this, most of which are fairly obtuse, except for one honest one: Let’s deal with the Passion of Christ the Sunday before Easter because realistically not many people go to Good Friday services—and we shouldn’t just go from one celebration (Palm Sunday) to another (Easter). Therefore, the narrative of the Passion of Christ is squeezed in as a footnote to Palm Sunday.
(As an aside: Why don’t we call it Palm/Passion Sunday, if we’re going to continue this practice, instead of Passion/Palm Sunday, which is out of chronological order?)
The result of this minimalizing of the crucifixion by making it part of Sunday worship rather than allowing it a day of its own is to minimalize the Resurrection as well. What is dealt with in a piece of Palm Sunday liturgy can be disposed of easily in a 24-hour Easter.
On the other hand, if we were to give full throttle to Holy Week, including the Triduum (the Great Three Days of Maudy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday ending with the Easter Vigil) we would recognize the need to continue the Easter response. What happened during Holy Week deserves rehearsing in our lives, and the results of the Resurrection speak volumes to the God-given new life we receive from the Risen Lord.
What this all means is that we need to put some energy into restoring the Christian calendar. It’s been too easy to abandon it for the sake of convenience and acquiescence to another Hallmark holiday. Lent in its fullness includes a profound Holy Week, which deserves to be followed by an even greater, longer season of rejoicing in Christ’s resurrection.
Does your church have services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and/or Holy Saturday (Easter Vigil)? What happens in your congregation in the way of on-going Easter observances all the way to Pentecost?
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
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The beinningless-beginning of time's beginning is rooted in the Revelation of the Savior and the Lord God as the Father, Son, and Spirit of Eternal Time. All time and times belong to Him, and we do not do well when we attempt to make absolute the forms of that which is rightly relative.
ReplyDeleteJohn McKenna
The Birth and Resurrection Society is consistent. We tend to major in preparations, not in that for which we are supposedly preparing. The 24-Hour Christmas is preceded by four weeks of Advent. The 24-Hour Easter is preceded by a forty day Lent. What follows? Well, we at least have a vestige of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." But of Easter? The Eastern Orthodox still maintain the Bright Week after Easter, culminating in Bright Sunday, one week later. The Romans still have a word for that Sunday, "Dominica in Albis, the Sunday in White. The cathedral churches of Orthodoxy still celebrate the Divine Liturgy every day of Bright Week, and the observant Orthodox get up early every morning of that week and receive communion before they go to work. Here in New Jersey, there is a church in the metropolitan New York area that still does this, but it is the only one I could find.
ReplyDeleteThere are stories of the early practice of this. Persons baptized at the Paschal Vigil, were given white robes. They wore white all during Bright Week. AND, fellow Christians, in order that the new Christians might not be embarrassed about being so obvious, would also wear white that week. Can you imagine what the impression would be if all Christians would make their public confession by wearing white, during their regular daily tasks, every day of Bright Week?
We and most of the Western Christian Church, call "The Second Sunday of Easter," in the vernacular, “Low Sunday." For the Orthodox, Bright Sunday is another Pascha, another Easter. It is the "Eighth Day," the day of fulfillment, of the eschaton. Every Sunday in the "Great Fifty Days" leading to Pentecost, is another Eighth Day, a celebration of the glorious resurrection of Christ.
And the only vestige for us in the Western Church is the Roman term, Dominica in Albis, and virtually nobody even knows of that vestige. Perhaps someone should write a "popular" song, "The Seven White Sundays of Easter!"
No, don’t forget the preparation, but don’t ignore the importance of that for which we are preparing!
The Birth and Resurrection Society is consistent. We tend to major in preparations, not in that for which we are supposedly preparing. The 24-Hour Christmas is preceded by four weeks of Advent. The 24-Hour Easter is preceded by a forty day Lent. What follows? Well, we at least have a vestige of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." But of Easter? The Eastern Orthodox still maintain the Bright Week after Easter, culminating in Bright Sunday, one week later. The Romans still have a word for that Sunday, "Dominica in Albis, the Sunday in White. The cathedral churches of Orthodoxy still celebrate the Divine Liturgy every day of Bright Week, and the observant Orthodox get up early every morning of that week and receive communion before they go to work. Here in New Jersey, there is a church in the metropolitan New York area that still does this, but it is the only one I could find.
ReplyDeleteThere are stories of the early practice of this. Persons baptized at the Paschal Vigil, were given white robes. They wore white all during Bright Week. AND, fellow Christians, in order that the new Christians might not be embarrassed about being so obvious, would also wear white that week. Can you imagine what the impression would be if all Christians would make their public confession by wearing white, during their regular daily tasks, every day of Bright Week?
We and most of the Western Christian Church, call "The Second Sunday of Easter," in the vernacular, “Low Sunday." For the Orthodox, Bright Sunday is another Pascha, another Easter. It is the "Eighth Day," the day of fulfillment, of the eschaton. Every Sunday in the "Great Fifty Days" leading to Pentecost, is another Eighth Day, a celebration of the glorious resurrection of Christ.
And the only vestige for us in the Western Church is the Roman term, Dominica in Albis, and virtually nobody even knows of that vestige. Perhaps someone should write a "popular" song, "The Seven White Sundays of Easter!"
No, don’t forget the preparation, but don’t ignore the importance of that for which we are preparing!