Cross with symbols of Holy Week - plam leaves, bread & wine, crown of thorns, and Easter lily.

Avondale Pattillo UMC

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Holy Week

The last week of Lent is one of special devotion as we remember Christ's Passion. The word "Passion" comes from the Latin word patior, meaning "I suffer".  Athanasius, in his Festal Letter of 330, referred to it as "holy Paschal week."

Greek and Roman worship books called it the "Great Week" because great deeds were done by God during this week. In the 4th century, Bishops Athanasius of Alexandria and Epiphanius of Constantia used the name "Holy Week".

At first only Friday and Saturday were observed as holy days.  Wednesday was added later as the day on which Judas plotted to betray Jesus.  And by the start of the 3rd century the other days of the week had been added.

The pre-Nicene Church celebrated just one great feast, the Christian Passover, on the night between Saturday and Easter Sunday morning. But by late in the 4th century the various events had been separated and people began commemorating them on the days of the week on which they had occurred:

From joyous entry Jerusalem to death to resurrection - all in one week!

The early Church of Jerusalem organized dramatic ceremonies during the week at appropriate local holy sites that had been restored by the Emperor Constantine. Visitors were so moved that many of these ceremonies, such as the Palm Sunday procession and the Good Friday reverence of the cross, have spread from Jerusalem to churches worldwide.

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The complete Holy Week in Scripture and Hymns

Hymns below are in the public domain. Links to the words and music are mostly from HymnSite.com. Numbers are the Hymn number in the United Methodist Hymnal (UMH).

Sunday

The Triumphal Entry, Jerusalem

Hymns

Monday

Jesus curses the fig tree

Jesus cleanses the temple

Tuesday

The authority of Jesus questioned

Jesus teaches in the temple

Jesus anointed, Bethany

Wednesday

The plot against Jesus

Thursday

The Last Supper

Hymn

Jesus comforts the disciples

John 14:1-16:33

Gethsemane

Hymn

Thursday night & Friday

Jesus' arrest and trial

Friday

Jesus' crucifixion and death, Golgotha

Hymns

The burial of Jesus, Joseph's tomb

Sunday

The empty tomb, Jerusalem

Hymns

Our Response ...

 

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 Passion Plays

Traditionally the last two weeks of Lent observed as a period of devotion to the Passion of Christ.

The sufferings of our Savior, which reached their peak with his death on the cross, appear to have been thought of as an inseparable whole from a very early period. In Acts 1:3 Luke speaks of those to whom Christ "showed himself alive after his passion" [KJV]. (More modern translations have changed "passion" to "suffering" for clarity.)

Modern Passion Plays have their roots in the religious plays of the Middle Ages.  The popular taste for dramatic productions was fed by early Easter religious celebrations. The clergy emphasized more and more the dramatic moments, and added new subjects, among them some of a secular nature. They introduced the characters of Pilate, the Jews, and the soldiers guarding the tomb.  These additions were done more to satisfy the people's love of novelty and amusement. So  the early Easter celebrations became actual dramatic performances, known as the Easter Plays.  The secular aspects and the fact that these plays didn't instruct the congregation concerned many religious leaders.

The Easter Plays represented in their day the highest development of the secular drama. But people wanted to see Jesus' whole life, particularly the story of his Passion. So a series of dramas started, which were called Passion Plays, with the sufferings of Jesus being the main subject. Some of them ended with the entombment of Christ.  In others the Easter Play was added to show the Savior in his glory.  Still others close with the Ascension or with the dispersion of the Apostles.

By the fourteenth century, the Passion Play had complex enough that it required repeated practices prior to performance.  Nearly all the Passion Plays are founded upon the Passion Play in Tyrol, Germany. At Bozen, Germany, women first started playing female roles.

The wealth of the citizens provided for magnificent productions on the public squares, where Passion Plays moved to after being expelled from churches as containing too little religious instruction. The citizens and civil authorities considered it a point of honor to make the productions as elaborate and varied as possible.

In the seventeenth century, the elaborate Jesuit dramas arose and most Passion Plays were relegated to out-of-the-way villages and to the monasteries. Public interest in the Passion Play re-awoke during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The extent of Mary's role in Passion plays is influenced by elements from Scripture, apocryphal gospels and legends.

One scene sometime shown is a recreation of Michelangelo's statue "The Pieta" (The Lamentation of Christ), which depicts Mary holding Jesus' dead body.

Today, many churches have again added drama to the normal Sunday worship services.  Small vignettes or short plays dealing with the various events of Holy Week are also making their way back into church services.

See our The Passion page for information about the traditionally Anti-Semitic nature of Passion Plays, which was sometimes used to incite people, plus about the movie "The Passion of the Christ."

Learn more ...

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Avondale Pattillo UMC
3260 Covington Hwy., Decatur, GA 30032
404-294-4063

This pages was last edited March 30, 2008 5:08 PM

 

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