Holy Week Reflections (March 2005)
  By David L Rattigan

I look forward to Holy Week. To me it's almost like being there in that final week of Jesus' life, living through it with him. There's a tension that builds as we meet night after night, and the final hour creeps upon us.

I was overwhelmed when I experienced my first Anglican Maundy Thursday service last year. I wasn't sure what to expect in this commemoration of the night of Christ's betrayal, and I sat there in disbelief as at the end of the service the church was systematically dismantled before my eyes. Amid total hush, the priests calmly and clinically removed everything in sight, stripping the altar to leave it naked and bare. The lights in our vast, 17th-century church were extinguished one by one, and darkness and emptiness fell over us like a blanket; and with a sense of abandonment we found ourselves tangibly thrust into the experience of Christ at Gethsemane. The joyful celebration of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday came as a palpable relief after the week's intense lead-up to the death and darkness of Good Friday.

This is in fact what I love about the Anglican Church, and what first drew me to its worship as a student a few years ago: In the liturgy, we are taken on a dramatic journey through creation, fall, law, grace and finally salvation in Jesus Christ. We live through the Christian story.

Holy Week will begin on Sunday with the exuberant waving of palms in celebration of the arriving King; and it will continue throughout the ensuing six days with the painful reminder that the cheers and jubilation soon turned to jeers and rejection; and it will end next weekend with the declaration that the salvation of God has come in death and resurrection.

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 © Copyright, David L Rattigan 2005