Sunday Trivia Answer

With yesterday's celebration of Palm/Passion Sunday, the church has entered into the time known as Holy Week. It is undoubtedly the most important week in the life of the church, and has been for centuries. Yet where and when does it come from?

The celebration of Easter, the Christian pasch, is probably as old as the church itself. We have records that talk about the church's celebration of the resurrection of our Lord at least back to the 2nd century, and the controversies around the dating of Easter are some of the first controversies in the church. Yet, Easter alone does not make a Holy Week. It was the addition of Good Friday and Maundy Thursday which began what we would call Holy Week - and once they were added, they remained a central part of the Christian year ever since.

We cannot say exactly when the celebration of Holy Week began. But the first record of the celebration come from the late fourth/early fifth century. It was the Spanish nun Egeria who made a pilgrimage to around the holy place of the Mediterranean - from Mt. Sinai and Egypt, through Jerusalem, on to Galilee. And it was from Jerusalem that Egeria brought the first account of Holy Week.

With the end of persecution, Christians from all of the world began to seek out the places of their Holy Scriptures. Naturally, this meant a draw of pilgrims to the city of Jerusalem, the place where much of the Bible - both Old Testament and New - took place. Rites developed around these holy places, commemorating the events that took place there. And so it was a natural development that the church in Jerusalem began to commemorate and re-enact the last events of Jesus' life in the the places where they happened, in the week leading up to Easter.

With the Protestant Reformation, the celebrations of Holy Week became less emphasized. In many reformation churches - especially those of the Calvinist/Reformed family - the days of Holy Week were only mentioned within a normal service of Matins or Holy Communion. With the liturgical movement of the middle to late 20th century, there was a recovery in many Protestant churches of the centrality of Holy Week (especially the Vigil) and a return to the timeless liturgies that began in Jerusalem in the fourth century. You can see this shift reflected, for example, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship.