Work Signs of Wonder this Holy Week

by Dr Raymond Perrier · April 13, 2014

There was a time in history when the Catholic Church was genius at using symbols to communicate.Now it seems that pop stars and advertisers are the masters of imagery and the Church instead uses longer and longer words and people no longer understand or feel the deeper underlying meaning.

Israeli border police watch as a Palestinian youth carries palms to sell to Palm Sunday pilgrims on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. How are we making the symbols of Holy Week relevant in our parishes? (Photo: Debbie Hill/CNS)

The palm cross that you are clutching as you go home from church this Sunday shows what happens when our symbols become so frozen that we lose sight of what they are symbolising.

Perhaps you even wave the little palm crosses as the procession comes in but do you stop to notice how odd it looks? Of course, we are re-enacting the way that the crowd welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. But we don’t do it as they did with branches from nearby trees; instead we used dried up thin bits of leaf made into a holy shape.

To me this is one of many missed opportunities during Holy Week. This period of our liturgical year is filled with wonderful symbols to help us to feel what it was like to accompany Jesus during his last week.

And yet too often our way of symbolising has become so ritualised that we feel nothing. We are comforted by the familiarity of the actions and elements that we return to each year , but the very familiarity robs them of their ability to stop us in our tracks and take notice.

Pope Francis following the master of grand gestures, Bl John Paul II showed us in last year’s Holy Week what happens when you take the symbolising seriously and use it, as it should be used, to draw attention to the underlying meaning.

The washing of feet on Holy Thursday night is of course a re-enactment of what Jesus did to the Apostles. Now Rome is rather grand and feet are a bit smelly so it had become customary that the Pope would pour water from a golden jug over the feet of 12 specially chosen priests – all men, all dressed in vestments, all probably with their feet nicely pedicured beforehand.

But then a few weeks after his election it was Francis’ turn. He chose to wash the feet not of princes of the Church but of young people, not just of young people but of young men and women, not just of young men and women but of young offenders, and not just of Catholics but even of Muslim.

If you are the sort of person who cares for the rubrics you probably want to cry out: but the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, and the equivalent of the 12 apostles would be 12 priests, and they must all be good Christian men because so were the apostles!

But the Apostles also were married, bearded, olive-skinned and circumcised, so we have to be careful where literal re-enactment might lead us. What matters is the underlying meaning: the act of washing feet was an act of abasement – Jesus lowering himself to the level of a slave to show what he meant by service.

Which of the TV pictures of papal foot-washings has been the more effective one in the modern age to express the idea of Christian service? Which one caused you to stop and wonder: what does this mean?

In Holy Week, every parish can, like Francis, think about how to use powerful symbols to help people to see the underlying meaning of the liturgies. Here are a few examples I have seen over the years that might inspire you to think about ones that will work in your community:

– For the Palm Sunday procession people cut branches from their trees at home and bring them to church to wave.

– For the washing of the feet, men and women are chosen who are the most neglected in the parish the homeless, the disabled, the refugee, the remarried divorcee, the mentally handicapped.

– Alternatively, there are bowls of water all round the church and everyone has to wash a foot and have a foot washed, love one another as I have loved you.

– The priest goes out into the town and offers to polish people’s shoes for free (as one bishop in England does every Holy Thursday).

– The altar of repose is not simply a side altar inside the church but is some distance away in a garden: so we really do walk with the Lord, and uncomfortably kneel and watch with him.

– The reading of the Passion gospel is done by multiple voices around the church, with one group playing disciples, another group the soldiers, another group the fickle crowd: more like a traditional mystery play and less like a dull ordeal to be endured.

– For the veneration on Good Friday there is only one cross and a life size one that we all clamour round so we sense what it was like to wait and yearn to be close to Jesus.

– The Easter fire really is a bonfire that will light up the night sky and tell the world that the Lord is risen.

– People bring bells, pots and pans, and drums to the Easter Vigil to wake the dead during the Easter gloria and allow our pent-up joy to overflow.

– Everyone wears white to Easter Sunday services so that we are all reminded of our baptism and how we have been washed clean by the blood of the lamb.

And one final thought: don’t assume that people know what the symbols mean why, for example, we genuflect on two knees as we leave on Holy Thursday and then do not genuflect at all when we come in on Good Friday or Holy Saturday.

Explain it for people, include it in the Mass sheet; help people to understand not just what they are doing but why they are doing it.

And give people a Holy Week that they will want to talk about to their friends and neighbours and thus spread the Good News.