Today I met with the superintendent of our school district. He mentioned having grown up in a religious tradition that did not observe the services of Holy Week, the ones that are de rigueur in Lutheran contexts.
This year we have experimented at our church with a schedule more like his. No Maundy Thursday service. No Good Friday service. Just a passion Sunday service last Sunday evening.
So far I am appreciating the change on multiple levels. For one it has meant I had time last night for a date with my spouse… we went out for pizza. Tonight I have time to host a Dnd session with my son and some of his friends.
It also feels like solidarity with the vast majority of the membership of our church these days, most of whom were not raised in Lutheran contexts and for whom the services are unfamiliar.1
The service last Sunday evening was much better attended than these midweek services had been post pandemic. I think weekday evenings have become very busy for families especially those with kids.2
It does leave me wondering why liturgies are our preferred way of observing Christ’s death: I mean, on the day of Christ’s crucifixion people were working. At least some of them. Religious observances didn’t begin until sundown, but much was why the women couldn’t return to care for the body on Saturday and went early Sunday morning to the tomb.
Maundy Thursday was kind of a liturgy but it was really more a meal. It could be argued the best thing Christians could do on Thursday would be to share such a meal together, less a church sacrament and more just a meal.
No matter what else I can come up with to say on this Friday, one thing I can say is that stepping away from “what I’ve always done” has allowed some perspective.
I don’t know if there are any good words on this day. In our tradition sometimes the gospel of John is simply read as the word, without a sermon, but even that has problems, as Amy Jill-Devine points out in her interview about the anti-Jewish tendencies of that Passion.
One thing has been clear to me this week: how I consider my connection to Christ’s death has undergone a spiritual shift. I used to think it was my job to beat my breast on Good Friday and go to my corner and think about what I’d done (killed Christ).
I no longer think that. Today I’m more apt to think, “Dammit, they got him.” Maybe the way people the world over have felt when Martin Luther King Jr or others died. Not complicity but deep loss and a sense of being left driftless. “Shit there goes our leader. The movement is dead.”
I’ve been reading Rudolf Bultmann’s classic Jesus and the Word and at one point in there he writes:
However little we know of the life of Jesus, if we keep in mind that he was finally crucified as a Messianic agitator, we shall be able in the light of the eschatological message to understand the fragmentary accounts of the end of his activity, overgrown though they are with legend. He seems to have entered Jerusalem with a crowd of enthusiastic adherents; all were full of joy and of confidence that now the Kingdom of God was beginning. It was a band like that which the Egyptian prophet attempted to lead to Jerusalem, which was halted and scattered by a division of troops sent by the Procurator Felix to meet it. Jesus entered Jerusalem, and with his followers took possession (as it seems) of the temple, in order to cleanse the holy precincts from all evil in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom.”
Then the authorities killed him.
I’m not sure there is a right way to observe the day the man and the movement died. You can go to church. You can hike. You can fast. You can eat. Like the thing we tell ourselves as we grieve… take care of yourself. Everyone grieves in their own way.
Me, this year, I met the superintendent and took a meal to a family in our church who had a new baby, I cleaned part of the yard and finished a book review that needed writing. I took the dog for a walk. Then I wrote this.
On a Friday a long time ago the man I try to follow was killed for being an agitator. This is the day I acknowledge with others I have no idea what to do.
My apologies to the old time Lutherans who may wish we had stuck with Lutheran patterns.
The superintendent, who grew up with revivals, said revivals have been shortened these days as well, people have less time.
I wonder whether the most appropriate observances from Thursday on might be various forms of “foot washing” - finding ways to serve others up close and personal. To day I visited with an elderly woman and read stories to a man in assisted living. I plan to do more of that kind of service.
This is a wonderful insight.