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Mark your calendars now and plan to join us for Holy Week at Holy Cross! Scroll below to check out all the happenings of Holy Week, and plan to join us as you are able. Peace to you today, and we look forward to journeying with you through Holy Week to the joy of Easter Day!!

Scroll below for detailed information for each worship experience. You will find the Zoom link for all services here.

I look forward to a journey through Holy Week with you!

The Great and Holy Week
Saint Augustine (354-430 CE) called Holy Week the “Great Week” because of the powerful things God accomplished during these days. Today, followers of God continue to journey through Holy Week—Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Resurrection of Our Lord: Easter Day—to remember and celebrate God’s action through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, as well as to claim that God’s story of resurrection becomes our story of new life every day.

On this day we take our place with all who gathered around Jesus as he made his entry into the city of Jerusalem to suffer and die, those initially gathered around Jesus were hungering and thirsting for transformation in their lives and in the world. Alongside all who gathered then, we gather today to wave palms of welcome and cry out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” We long for Jesus to enter our lives today to bring the blessing and peace which only God can bring.

Maundy is the English form of the Latin mandatum, from the “mandatum novum,” or the new commandment that Jesus gives on the night he is betrayed and handed over: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34) On this day we read the story of Jesus’ final meal with his followers before he was crucified. At this meal Jesus models God’s self-giving love by washing the feet of those who were gathered. This action becomes our call to mission as the people of God, to love one another as Jesus loves us.

In ancient times this day was called the Triumph of the Cross. English speakers now call the day Good (originally “God’s” Friday) because we believe that through Jesus’ death on the cross, all receive the good gifts of salvation, eternal life, and daily resurrection reality. On this day the focal point of the worship experience is an extended and interactive reading of the passion of Jesus from one of the four Gospels. This passion narrative—the story of the betrayal, arrest, mockery, suffering, crucifixion and burial of Jesus—delivers the good news of God’s self-giving love which transforms us and the world. The worship experience concludes when at the foot of the life-giving cross we pray for everyone and everything on earth and engage in a liturgy of reverence for the cross on which hung Christ, the savior of the whole world.

Christians consider Easter to be the “first day.” From Easter comes the practice of worshiping on Sunday morning. It is the first day of the week. It is also the first day of new creation, sometimes called the “eighth day” of the week, for on it Christ restored the image of God in the human and in so doing also brought restoration and renewal to all of creation. The Easter season proceeds from and celebrates this first day. In the resurrected Christ, there is time after the end, life after death, restoration of what was broken, the brightening of what had gone dark. In the fifty days of Easter, Christian communities around the world strive to worship God in a way that illustrates that the body of Christ lives now in the heavenly places and also in the gathered body in the world. Worship is where heaven and earth meet. (this description of Easter Day comes from Sundays and Seasons)