Holy Week

Well, yesterday was Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Great Three Days before Easter. "Maundy" is a corruption of the latin word for Command; on Maundy Thursday we celebrate the Last Supper, at which Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and commanded them to love one another. The service (at St. Mark's, anyway,) consists of scripture, footwashing, Communion, and the stripping of the altar.

Today is Good Friday, the day Our Lord was crucified. We have two choices of worship today: Stations of the Cross at noon, or Tenebrae (the Service of Shadows) in the evening. I like Tenebrae, myself. ( Read more... )

Tommorrow is Easter Vigil. It's the least important of the Great Three Days (a lot of churches who do Maundy Thursday and Good Friday don't do the Vigil). It's not as fun. It's based on the fact that the Jewish day begins at sundown the day before, so Christ was raised Saturday night. The world just didn't know it until Sunday morning. Anyway, the service starts after dark, and there's candlelight, and a procession, and chanting, and scripture reading, and sometimes a baptism. It's kind of long and boring.

BTW, if you're confused by the fact that there were three days between the Death and Resurrection, but there's only two between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? It has to do with the fact that the Jewish day does begin at sundown the day before, and by the time the formal cycle of feasts was being set up the church had progressed far enough from its Jewish roots that nobody knew that and they got confused.

And seldear has a great commentary on Easter from the Sunday Morning Herald (It's down at the bottom of the page). It's only five paragraphs long, and it has meaning for both sacred and secular, so check it out. Here's the text by itself on Seldear's page