Why Observe Holy Week?

As we move from Lent into Holy Week, it is worth asking why we do it. Why do we observe these same days, year after year?

You might say that we do it as an act of worship, offering thanks to God for his many blessings. Or perhaps it is a tool for education, a way of more deeply understanding the Word of God. Or maybe we let Tevye, from Fiddler on the Roof, have the last word and simply say: it’s tradition.

All of that is true, as far as it goes. However, the early Church believed that something more was taking place.

The liturgical year was not simply a way of remembering the past, or even expressing devotion in the present. It was, as the liturgical theologian Massey Shepherd puts it, sacramental:

“The Christian year is a mystery through which every moment and all the times and seasons of this life are transcended and fulfilled in that reality which is beyond time… Each single feast renews the fullness and fulfillment of the Feast of feasts, our death and resurrection with Christ” (Liturgy and Education, 99).

There is, then, a real relationship between what we celebrate and what God has done. When we keep the Church year, we don’t simply call something to mind, as we typically mean it, but rather we are being drawn into it. The life of Christ becomes present to us in a real, though mysterious, way.

Fleming Rutledge makes a similar point: the Church calendar is one of the primary ways we are united to Christ. In these seasons, the past events of salvation history and even the future fulfillment of God’s kingdom are not locked away in some other time. They are given to us here and now, as something we are meant to enter.

So then, Lent and Holy Week are not simply things we observe. They are realities we step into.

In Holy Week, we do more than recall the suffering of Christ, we walk with him. We hear again the cries of “Hosanna.” We sit at the table on Maundy Thursday. We stand at the foot of the cross on Good Friday.

We are drawn into Christ’s own life, into his self-giving love, his obedience, his death, and, ultimately, his resurrection. And as we walk that path, we are, perhaps incrementally, being transformed by the encounter.

This is why we keep these days. Not because God needs it. But because we do. Because we need to be brought, again and again, into the mystery by which we are saved.