The tradition of holding special services on different days during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter—in other words, the tradition of Holy Week—began almost seventeen centuries ago, in the city of Jerusalem. Early Christians there, two or three hundred years after Jesus’ death, had begun celebrating a series of services at different locations that were important in that last week on the days when they would have taken place. So on Thursday night, they went to the upper room where Jesus had his Last Supper with his disciples before he died. On Friday, they went to the site of the crucifixion; on Saturday and Sunday, the site of the tomb and the resurrection. At each place, they’d hold a service, in a kind of pilgrimage to those important places in Jesus’ final week.

Holy Week is a kind of pilgrimage for us, too; not in space, but in time. It’s a way of methodically and slowly walking through these events of Jesus’ last days and the completion of his ministry: his death, his resurrection, the precious last moments with his disciples, and the anguishing last moments of grief and loss.

But like any pilgrimage, this isn’t about the past. It’s not about the places or the times we’re visiting. It’s about the present. It’s about our own lives.

There’s a beautiful invitation in the Easter Vigil before the long series of readings and psalms begins: “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history, how he saved his people in ages past; and let us pray that our God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption.” (BCP p. 288)

In the events of Holy Week, we always balance those two halves: hearing the record of God’s saving deeds in history, and praying that God will bring to each of us the fullness of that redemption. As year after year we re-enact these moments in Jesus’ last days, it’s important for us to remember that they’re always about what Jesus is doing in our present day. It’s not so much that we need to be like Jesus and wash one another’s feet; it’s that we need to understand what it means for Jesus to wash our feet. We don’t offer the sacrifice of Jesus again on the cross; we try to understand what that sacrifice on the cross two thousand years ago means today. And while we proclaim the resurrection Sunday after Sunday, we mark our Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday services with special celebration because there’s a reminder for us of the greatness of that triumph over all the powers of death and evil in the world. So I invite you, this Holy Week, to join in however much of that pilgrimage you can, whether it’s just Palm Sunday and Easter, or the full Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to the Vigil. Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history; and let us pray that God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption. Amen.