Coronavirus Pastoral Letter - 6 3rd April 2020

3rd April
Friday in Passiontide
Pastoral Letter No. 6

Fr Andrew writes:

PREPARING FOR HOLY WEEK AND EASTER

The most significant week of the Christian year and the Christian life is almost upon us: Holy Week. The seven days of Holy Week are an echo of the Genesis account of the creation, as a New Creation comes into being in Jesus Christ, the New Adam.

PALM SUNDAY

The week begins with Palm Sunday. Like every Sunday in normal times we would expect to gather together in church, but on Palm Sunday we gather outside the church. There is a sense that we stand on the outside with Christ, the excluded one, as we prepare to enter our holy place, as he entered the Holy City.

The refrain ‘blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’ (Psalm 118.26 and the Liturgy) is applicable to Christ entering the Holy City and entering our lives and also to all our entrances into church, into our homes, workplaces and where we share our lives: may we enter all such places in the name of the Lord and as bringers of peace (cf Luke 10.5).

The Blessing of Palms marks the beginning of the Liturgy and then we begin the procession. There is no penitential rite (confession) on Palm Sunday, or at least not one that is spoken. The procession is our walk of penitence. It is an unspoken embodiment of our desire to walk in new directions in our lives and ‘to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6.8).

Yet there is no procession this year and no Palm Crosses. What do we do? How about using your time for exercise time (which we’re all permitted) on Palm Sunday to make your walk one where you consciously seek to walk in new ways, and with every step shake off your frustration, anger, boredom, despair, or however you’re feeling at the moment. With every step walk deeper into the promises of the One who comes to you: ‘if we walk in the light as God himself is the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin’ (1 John 1.7).

Palm Crosses. Well, on Palm Sunday morning I will be blessing our church supply of palm crosses and when we are all back together they will be distributed (even though it won’t be Palm Sunday!). They will remind us on the pain and lament of enforced social distance and isolation.

This year let’s make our own cross (you could take it on your walk). There’s a very simple way – for all ages - to make a cross from a single piece of paper (https://www.facebook.com/croydonminster/videos/204439907518671/) The cross could decorated or have prayers written on it. When the Palm Sunday Liturgy is broadcast you can hold it up for blessing, and then why not put it up in your window? We would also love to gather together photos of our crosses. You could send them to connect@croydonminster.org and we will post them up on the church Facebook page and Twitter.

The cross on Palm Sunday takes us to the heart of the matter. The Passion Gospel. The accounts of Jesus’ passion are at the heart of the Gospel tradition, appearing in all four gospels. The Passion Gospel from either Matthew, Mark or Luke is always a feature of Palm Sunday, and often read in dramatized form. This year it will be from St Matthew 26.14-27.66.

MONDAY, TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK

These days are often a little overlooked, partly, I suspect, because of the scale and drama of the other days of the week. They are profound in themselves because they take us into the realities of what awaits Jesus in his passion and death. After the exhilaration of Palm Sunday and the Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, these days remind us how things go sour.

These days are not to be glossed over.

The Old Testament reading each day is from the Prophet Isaiah in the passages known as the Suffering Servant Songs and they are powerful, stark and beautiful (Isaiah 42.1-9; 49.1-7; 50.4-9a). The Gospel readings are all from St John (John 12.1-11; 12.20-36; 13.21-32) and all point to the coming glorification of Jesus passion and death.

THE TRIDUUM SACRAM

MAUNDY THURSDAY

Triduum Sacram is the Latin name for the three holy days (from the evening of Maundy Thursday to the beginning of the new week – Easter Day) in which all the major themes of salvation are uncovered. In the Triduum the days form a continuum: the Liturgies of the Triduum are effectively one service only interrupted by sleep.

Maundy Thursday is the commemoration of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, and the giving of the New Commandment (the Mandatum Novum, from which we get the word ‘Maundy’). At the heart of the Liturgy is the washing of feet that reveals Jesus as the servant king, who came ‘not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Matthew 20.28). At a time when we cannot gather to wash feet or have them washed, how do we serve others? For those who can, we do acts of kindness for a neighbour, volunteer to be a telephone befriender, for example, and each and everyone of us can pray for those who serve, especially in healthcare. Please pray for those in our congregations who work in the NHS serving others. Maundy Thursday reminds us that service of our neighbour cannot be disassociated from our Eucharist; worship turns us first to God, then to our neighbour.

Maundy Thursday also makes clear what John the Baptist had first said of Jesus; ‘Look, behold, here is the Lamb of God’ (1.29). Maundy Thursday connects us with the Passover tradition of Israel and the Jewish People, whose doors were daubed with the blood of the Passover Lamb so that they were spared death. The Eucharist is the Christian Passover meal because we share in the life and blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who delivers us from death and leads us into life. How we now hunger for the food of the Eucharist, as the Israelites hungered for the manna from heaven to feed them day by day (Exodus 16).

GOOD FRIDAY

Good Friday is dominated by the Cross. The sign of the cross is marked on our heads at baptism and we seek to walk with Jesus in the way of the cross. This is why the devotion of the Stations of the Cross is so powerful and moving. It recapitulates the passion and death of Jesus, for all people and our salvation. The Stations of the Cross are a distilled version of the Passion Gospel we hear said or sung each Good Friday (John 18.1-19.42). You will be able to watch and join in with the Stations on the church website and Facebook page this Holy Week.

We won’t physically be able to touch or kiss the wood of the cross this year as we would in church. You may though make an act of veneration of a cross that you have at home. In kissing that object you reverence the mystery it represents. It is one of the ways, at this time, that we can still be in touch – literally – with the signs of our faith.

HOLY SATURDAY

This is a day of stillness and absence. As God rested on the seventh day in the Genesis account, so Christ’s lifeless body rests in the tomb. As he said from the cross, ‘all is accomplished’. On this day creation pauses ready for the life of the new day, a day that the Church Fathers (the theologians of the first centuries of the Church’s life) called, ‘The Eighth Day of Creation’, i.e. day one of the new creation week that we live in now! As dusk falls on Holy Saturday we begin a Vigil of watching and waiting for the dawn which brings hope and life, promise and freedom. Perhaps we can identify with that feeling more than ever this year. (See Pastoral Letter 5 for more on Holy Saturday)

EASTER AND THE PASCHAL MYSTERY

This is all what is known as the Paschal Mystery, the great component parts of the Christian Faith in which everything is held up and revealed to us and fulfilled in the promise of Easter, of which more in my next letter.

Each year at Passover the Jewish people, the first to hear God’s word, our ancestors in faith, cry ‘next year in Jerusalem!’: this year we cry ‘next year in the new Jerusalem, our church home!’