The leading liturgical scholar Robert Taft is fond of saying that “words are words but things are things.” By this he means that in our study of liturgical history we may encounter a wide range of different names for a rite or a variety of different explanations as to its meaning, yet no matter what it is called or how it is defined, it is nevertheless the same ritual act that is persisting throughout different historical periods and often in diverse regional and ecclesiastical traditions. In examining the Christian feast of Easter, however, we are faced with an example of exactly the opposite phenomenon, where the same name persists, but the liturgical celebration to which it refers changes its form and function quite radically in the course of history.
We can see the first of these major shifts, or mutations as we might call them, in the first few centuries of Christianity’s existence, as my own essay in this volume reveals. The celebration of Pascha (as Easter was known) began life as the Christian version of the Passover, observed on the same day as its Jewish antecedent and focused upon Christ as the paschal lamb who had been sacrificed for the sins of the world, although this central theme was set within the context of the whole of the Christ-event, from his birth to his expected second coming. By the fourth century, however, the festival had changed its form and meaning. It was now observed on the Sunday following what would have been the Jewish date and constituted the final part of a three-day celebration (a triduum, as western Christians came to call it) of Friday-Saturday-Sunday, commemorating the passage of Christ from death to resurrection. Its theme was therefore no longer “Christ, the Passover lamb, sacrificed for us” (cf. 1 Cor. 5:7) but “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”
Alongside this, further changes had been taking place, as the essays by Maxwell Johnson and Martin Connell indicate (in the companion volume 6 of this series, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons). On the one hand, the triduum had acquired a preparatory fast of forty days duration. This was an amalgamation of three quite distinct earlier traditions. There had originally been an annual forty-day fast observed by Egyptian Christians in the period following January 6 in imitation of Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness after his own baptism, and also used as a period of preparation for the baptism of new converts in Egypt. There had also been a three-week period of fasting immediately before Easter kept by those in Rome and North Africa who were preparing for baptism at that festival. And there had been a similar period of fasting before baptism at other times of the year that was observed in other places. As Easter came to be seen universally as the primary occasion in the year for baptism in the fourth century, these customs coalesced everywhere into a standard forty-day season of fasting immediately before that festival. On the other hand, from the end of the second century onwards the Easter celebration had also become extended forwards into a fifty-day season of rejoicing—the “days of Pentecost”—during which every day was kept as though it were a Sunday, with both fasting and kneeling for prayer forbidden. Thus, more than a quarter of the year was now controlled by the Easter festival.
The unified character of the celebration of sacred time, however, could not survive this liturgical “stretching,” and cracks quickly began to appear. Eventually, as Joanne Pierce’s contribution in particular demonstrates, the one celebration all but collapsed into a succession of relatively independent feast days, each commemorating some individual occasion in the life of Jesus or of the early church. With this came a change in the style of the liturgical observances themselves. The English liturgical scholar Kenneth Stevenson has offered a very useful categorization of three successive stages in this evolution.1
The first, which existed during the first three centuries of the church’s existence, he calls “unitive.” Here the paschal mystery was celebrated as a whole in the single night of the Easter liturgy: it may have been preceded by a short preparatory fast of one, two, or more days, and prolonged into the fifty-day season of Pentecost, but there was no division of the period into discrete portions with separate liturgies focusing on different aspects of the whole.
The second stage he calls “rememorative.” This emerged during the fourth century, beginning apparently at Jerusalem, where various events recorded in the New Testament in connection with the death and resurrection of Jesus began to be commemorated individually in the very places and on the very days that they were believed to have happened. Since most of the significant events prior to the resurrection of Jesus happened in the seven days immediately preceding it, this period came to be called “Great Week” by Christians in the East and “Holy Week” by those in the West. These celebrations incorporated certain elements that featured in the biblical narratives, but no attempt was made as yet to reenact the episodes in all their details. So, for example, on the Sunday before Easter the whole crowd walked down the Mount of Olives carrying branches of palm or olive and repeating “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” in remembrance of Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city, but a donkey was not included in the procession. Similarly, no attempt was made to locate the eucharistic celebrations on Holy Thursday at the supposed site of the Last Supper, and the procession from Gethsemane through the city in the early hours of Good Friday did not replicate precisely the route taken by Jesus, with detours to the house of Caiaphas or Pilate. Instead the procession went directly to Golgotha, where later in the day a supposed relic of the true cross was venerated, but there was no dramatic reenactment of the events leading up to the crucifixion itself.
Thus, whatever motivated these liturgical developments, it was obviously not a desire to follow in every single footstep of Jesus in the last days of his life. For that reason, the term “historicism,” which is often used of these innovations, may not be the most appropriate expression for them. What the Christians were doing was attaching sacramental importance both to time and to place as means of entering into communion with the Christian mysteries. It was in effect an extension of the already long-established tradition in relation to the Christian martyrs, whose cult was always celebrated on the anniversary of the day of their death and only at the place where their remains were interred.2
The final stage Stevenson terms “representational.” Here conscious attempts were made to restage, at least partially, all the individual incidents in the last week of Jesus’ earthly life and following his death that are described in the canonical Gospels. This style of celebration reached its full flowering in the late Middle Ages in the West, and included such customs as the washing of the feet of twelve males on Holy Thursday, in imitation of Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet, and the burial of a consecrated host in an Easter sepulcher on Good Friday, in imitation of the burial of the body of Jesus. Its aim was pastoral—to make the biblical narratives come alive for the congregation—and it proved very popular, so much so that it spawned the para-liturgical tradition of the “mystery plays”—full dramatic reenactments of biblical narratives—as well as elaborate musical settings of the liturgy and of popular devotions, as Robin Leaver’s essay in volume 6 reveals.
What the “representational” gained in terms of popular piety, however, it lost in terms of the theological unity expressed in the earlier stages of liturgical development. Lent came to be viewed more as the season for imitating the self-denial of Jesus than as preparation for the paschal celebration. The devotional center of Holy Week tended to be Good Friday and its focus on the suffering inflicted on Christ by sinful human beings, to which Easter Day constituted a joyful corrective, when God intervened to put right the wrongs. Similarly, the celebration of the Ascension of Christ forty days later and of the gift of the Holy Spirit fifty days later were also seen as distinct events, rather than as aspects of the one paschal mystery. Above all, in a remarkable reversal of the earliest traditions of Christianity, the Easter vigil itself became the least well-attended liturgy of the whole season, and what is more, for the convenience of the clergy, in the course of the Middle Ages it was moved back from Saturday night to Saturday morning, with the result that the drama of the Easter candle shining in the darkness was lost in the brightness of the daylight.
While in the Catholic tradition the rites belonging to this season had undergone major mutations, in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century they were almost entirely swept away, as part of the Reformers’ general rejection of the use of all ceremonies in worship that were at best not understood by ordinary people and at worst interpreted in a highly superstitious manner. All that were usually left were the names for the more significant days together with the traditional biblical readings belonging to them. Special liturgies as such tended to disappear entirely: thus, ash was not used on Ash Wednesday, nor palms on Palm Sunday, and the Easter vigil vanished completely from sight, leaving Easter Day much like any other Sunday of the year.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the process of liturgical revision that has been a feature of most western Christian traditions in the second half of the twentieth century, the liturgies of Lent, Holy Week, and the Easter season have undergone quite a major refashioning in the hope of recapturing some of the spirit of the early centuries, as John Melloh’s essay illustrates with regard to the Roman Catholic Church, which pioneered this change. Yet, the results have not been an altogether unqualified success. The gradual and unplanned evolution of the various components of these seasons in the course of history has left several points of tension that current revisions have not resolved. Should we, for example, think of Holy Week as a distinct liturgical unit in its own right—as the equivalent “Great Week” is in eastern traditions—or should we view Lent as leading directly to the triduum? Indeed, how far is the triduum itself to be celebrated as a unity, and how far as a series of distinct units? Can the Easter vigil ever really be restored as the heart of the Christian year, especially when in many countries today the Easter weekend has become for so many people an occasion for a short vacation rather than a time to spend in intense religious activity in one’s own parish community? And is it realistic—rather than just a liturgical enthusiast’s fantasy—to think of restoring fifty days of paschal rejoicing in congregations that are already tiring of singing Easter hymns by the second Sunday in the season? In other words, has the notion of “sacred time” as such become so foreign to modern people that it must be replaced by a series of individual colorful liturgical events, from which—as from a menu—worshipers may pick and choose those that appeal to them and discard the rest?
Besides these broad questions, there are also specific issues with regard to Christianity’s relationship with Judaism that also remain unresolved. The tendency already present in the gospel narratives to attribute the blame for the death of Jesus to his Jewish opponents rather than to the Roman authorities was magnified in many elements of the Holy Week liturgies that developed later, and in the para-liturgical “mystery plays” or “passion plays.” While some of these have been “toned down” in modern practice, the legitimacy of others is still debated. Can one still sing Improperia, the “Reproaches,” in the Good Friday liturgy, for example? This chant contrasts God’s generosity to “his people” with their own disdain for God. It is argued by many that God’s “people” should be understood here to denote all humanity and its sinful response to God’s grace, and so there is no problem in continuing to use this ancient text. But others believe that it will nevertheless be heard as referring to the Jewish people. Similarly, the Good Friday liturgy has also traditionally prayed for the conversion of Jews to the Christian faith. Christians are divided over whether this should be retained or whether such prayers should be reworded to pray instead for the continuing fidelity of Jews to the revelation which they have received. But perhaps the greatest uncertainty surrounds the legitimacy of Christians attempting to celebrate a form of Jewish seder during Holy Week. In recent decades this practice has been enthusiastically taken up by Christians in many places in a sincere attempt to enter in a positive way into the Jewish roots of their tradition. However, as Frank Senn’s essay in volume 6 explains, while the motives may be laudable, such celebrations raise serious theological questions that demand a reconsideration of their advisability.
While these two volumes, therefore, chart the course of liturgical practices that have undergone significant mutations both in ancient times and in recent revisions, they do not mark the end of a process of change, but only another stage in a long journey. Future decades will undoubtedly see further alterations and amendments to these rites as Christians attempt both to understand their own past more clearly and to relate more effectively to the world in which they now find themselves.
1. See Kenneth W. Stevenson, “The Ceremonies of Light—Their Shape and Function in the Paschal Vigil Liturgy,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 99 (1985): 175 ff.; “On Keeping Holy Week,” Theology 89 (1986): 32 ff.; and Jerusalem Revisited: The Liturgical Meaning of Holy Week (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 9 ff.
2. See also R. A. Markus, “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71.