Constantine, St. Helena, and the True Cross
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Liturgies
Holy Week begins this coming Sunday, called Palm or Passion Sunday in the Church’s calendar. Christians who celebrate these eight days all get a sense that these ceremonies are very ancient. There is a lot to take in.
On Sunday April 1, we reenact the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before his death by processing with palm branches, chanting “Hosanna, Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of the Lord,” and then will read a lengthy and moving Gospel on his sufferings and death.
Varying liturgies and programs on the Passion are traditional Monday through Thursday in Holy Week, including the beautiful and solemn Tenebrae Service, and meditations on the Words of Christ on the Cross. On Monday April 2, we will hear Haydn’s Last Seven Words of Christ with the Ariana String Quartet (which will also be with us on Palm Sunday).
On Thursday April 5, we begin the “Three Day Liturgy” (Triduum) of Easter proper with a commemoration of the Last Supper and the first Eucharist. We will recall Jesus’ instructions to his disciples at that meal to love one another (the “New Commandment” or “novum mandatum,” hence the name Maundy Thursday). We sing the hymn Ubi Caritas et Amor, Deus Ibi est (“Where true Charity and Love are, God himself is there.”) We remember the example he gave them in this, by washing their feet, by washing one another’s feet. We then have Eucharist, and finally remember his abandonment and betrayal in Gethsemane by stripping the altar, opening and emptying the aumbry (the Tabernacle where we keep the consecrated elements of the Eucharist), and leaving the Church in darkness. We will keep overnight Vigil that night in the Church, with the reserved Sacrament for viewing and meditation. Keeping with the solemn, stark tone of the Church after the stripping of the altar, we will keep the Sacrament in the Church on a simple paten (plate) and covered with fine linen in what is called an Altar of Repose rather than in an ornate Monstrance.
On Good Friday, April 6, we do not celebrate the Eucharist: our focus on this day is the one, perfect sacrifice once made by Christ on the Cross rather on the repeated sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that is the Eucharist. During the Good Friday Liturgy, we will have Veneration of the Cross, where we pay respects and give God our prayers while touching a large wooden representation of the instrument of Jesus’ death.
In the Evening on Holy Saturday, April 7, we hold the long and richly symbolic Easter Vigil Service, which begins with a Paschal bonfire, a process of the Paschal candle, the singing of the ancient Easter hymn the Exsultet, a reading of scenes from our race’s salvation history, a service of Holy Baptism, and the first Eucharist of Easter. On Easter Sunday morning, April 8, the three-day liturgy concludes with the Festival Mass of Easter Day, the greatest Feast of the Christian calendar.
These rites are ancient, but do not all go back to the earliest period of Christianity. Rather, most go back to the fourth century and two important but very different women who separately went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and popularized the local Easter commemorations they found there.
The first is St. Helena, the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, who as soon as Christianity had become a legal religion favored by the Empire in the fourth century went to Jerusalem to recover relics of the era of Jesus and the apostles. She reputedly found the miraculously preserved Cross upon which Jesus had died and then provided for the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher over the site of his burial, and started a ceremony of publicly honoring the True Cross.
The second is a relatively little-known Spanish nun named Aetheria or Egeria, who wrote a travelogue of sorts about a pilgrimage to Jerusalem she took at the end Fourth Century shortly after Helena had begun these traditions. Writing home to her sister nuns, she told of a liturgy of shaking palm branches in the streets of Jerusalem on the Sunday before Easter as the bishop enters the city riding a donkey, and of other practices commemorating the events of that last week of Jesus life, including a large public rite on Good Friday giving honor and reverence to the Cross Helena had found, the Adoration of the Cross. According to Egeria,
“As the eleventh hour draws near … all the children who are [gathered at the top of the Mount of Olives], including those who are not yet able to walk because they are too young and therefore are carried on their parents' shoulders, all of them bear branches, some carrying palms, others, olive branches. And the bishop is led in the same manner as the Lord once was led… From the top of the mountain as far as the city and from there through the entire city … everyone accompanies the bishop the whole way on foot, and this includes distinguished ladies and men of consequence.”
Egeria's description includes the first eyewitness account of the practice of venerating the cross—in her case, the "True Cross" recently discovered by St. Helena—on Good Friday. Awed at worship on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified, Egeria described carefully to her sister nuns back home everything she saw in what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:
“A throne is set up for the bishop on Golgotha behind the Cross, which now stands there. … The gilded silver casket containing the sacred wood of the Cross is brought in and opened. … It is the practice here for all the people to come forth one by one, the faithful as well as the catechumens to bow down before the table, kiss the holy wood, and then move on.”
Holy Week owes many of its rites to these two women pilgrims, St. Helena and Egeria. Other commemorations, like the Via Dolorosa or the “Way of the Cross,” and the fourteen “Stations of the Cross” also in part stem from them. The accounts by both these pilgrims and travel writers sought to make the events of Holy Week available and accessible to people unable to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. By creating the cult of the “True Cross,” and the practice of “Veneration of the Cross,” and popularizing the “Liturgy of Palms,” they both helped make the commemorations available to people far removed in time and space from the Jerusalem of Jesus, including us today.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment