HOLY WEEK & EASTER 2024
Week Beginning Sunday 24th March
Holy Week is magnificent, challenging, powerful, exhausting, intriguing and utterly remarkable. Each year we dive out of our own space and time to be immersed in the great events of salvation - not as a memory or a story, but as a reality which changes our lives and world in a way beyond imagining. Much of this is achieved through the celebration of the liturgy. One of the most challenging aspects of the liturgy of Holy Week - and the Triduum in particular - is that it is diffeArent. It is not the usual day by day or week by week liturgy that our parishes celebrate.
Perhaps you have not celebrated Holy Week as a whole before, or even not at all. Give it a go, and see how marvelous Easter is afterward.
Perhaps you have not celebrated Holy Week as a whole before, or even not at all. Give it a go, and see how marvelous Easter is afterward.
All the major liturgies will be streamed live via our Facebook page
PALM SUNDAY OF THE LORD'S PASSION
MONDAY, TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY
of Holy Week
THE SACRED TRIDUUM
Christ redeemed us all and gave perfect glory to God principally through his paschal mystery: dying he destroyed our death and rising he restored our life. Therefore the Easter Triduum of the passion and resurrection of Christ is the culmination of the entire liturgical year. Thus the solemnity of Easter has the same kind of preeminence in the liturgical year that Sunday has in the week. The Easter Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, reaches its high point in the Easter Vigil, and closes with Vespers on Easter Sunday.
Maundy Thursday of the Lord's Supper
GOOD FRIDAY OF THE LORD'S PASSION
HOLY SATURDAY (Easter Eve)
Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.
From an ancient Homily