I grew up in a tradition that did not observe Holy Week as such. We had Easter Sunday and we had Good Friday — the latter, in our churches, was a sober evening service with hymns in a minor key and a long sermon on the wounds of Christ. Maundy Thursday, Tetelestai, Holy Saturday, the Easter Vigil — these arrived in my life in seminary, as discoveries. I am still discovering them.
What I want to say, briefly, is what is at stake in those eight days. Not historically — the history is well rehearsed. Not liturgically — there are better guides for that. What is at stake in your week. Why the church keeps insisting on this rhythm, year after year.
The first thing is the order of events. The Last Supper before the cross, the cross before the silence, the silence before the resurrection. The order matters. The contemporary tendency — common in evangelical preaching, common in my own teaching when I am not careful — is to collapse the order. To preach the cross with the resurrection on Good Friday so nobody has to feel the weight. To make Easter Sunday a triumph that erases the silence. Holy Week resists this. It asks you, every year, to sit in the wrong order on purpose. To grieve before you celebrate. The reason is theological. The grief is real. The celebration is because the grief was real.
The second thing is the body. The week is intensely physical. Bread is broken. Feet are washed. A man is whipped, nailed, killed. A body is laid in a tomb. A body, not a soul or an idea, walks out of the tomb three days later. Christianity is a deeply embodied faith and Holy Week is when this becomes most obvious. The temptation, again, is to spiritualize the events. The week resists the temptation. It asks you, with deliberate insistence, to remember that the gospel is about a body — broken, raised, glorified.
The third thing is the silence of Saturday. Most of us do not know how to spend Holy Saturday. We have not been taught. The day is not commemorated by most evangelical congregations and arrives, accordingly, as a strange in-between in the household — the kids are out of school, the eggs are dyed, the Easter clothes are pressed, and there is, theoretically, nothing happening. But there is something happening. There is a body in a tomb. There is a community in grief that does not yet know how the story ends. The early church remembered this day. It is the day Christ descended into the dead. It is the day the disciples wept and ate nothing and did not know. To sit in it deliberately — even for an hour, even for a half hour — is to receive something the rest of the year does not give you. It is to remember that the resurrection is unearned. That you cannot pull it forward by an hour.
I am not asking you to keep the week the way a high-church liturgist would keep it. I am asking you to keep the order. Friday before Sunday. Grief before triumph. Body before idea. Tomb before garden.
He is risen indeed. But not yet. Not until the third day.