Holy Week in Protestant Churches
Anglicans/Episcopalians, along with other Protestants in the Catholic liturgical tradition, such as Lutherans, observe Holy Week much as the Roman Catholic Church does. Anglicans style the most important days Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter Even.
Of Protestant fellowships, perhaps the Holy Week services (Passion Week) of the Moravian Church are the most extensive, as the Congregation follows the life of Christ through His final week in daily services dedicated to readings from a harmony of the Gospel stories, responding to the actions in hymns, prayers and litanies, beginning on the eve of Palm Sunday and culminating in the "Easter Morning" or Easter Sunrise service begun by the Moravians in 1732. Some Protestant churches make much of the foot washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday, for others it may be the only time in the year when Holy Communion is celebrated, other churches celebrate versions of the Jewish Passover at this time.
Other Protestant churches do not have the special ceremonies that distinguish Holy Week in Orthodox and Catholic churches. However, these Protestants conduct more informal celebrations of Holy Week, usually including sermons about the last week of Christ's life, and possibly some special services on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and or Easter Sunday.
The consensus of modern scholarship is that the New Testament accounts represent a crucifixion occurring on a Friday, but a Thursday or Wednesday crucifixion have also been proposed, especially in fundamentalist circles. Some scholars explain a Thursday crucifixion based on a "double sabbath" caused by an extra Passover sabbath falling on Thursday dusk to Friday afternoon, ahead of the normal weekly Sabbath. Some have argued that Jesus was crucified on Wednesday, not Friday, on the grounds of the mention of "three days and three nights" in Matthew 12:40 before his resurrection, celebrated on Sunday; others have countered by saying that this ignores the Jewish idiom by which a "day and night" may refer to any part of a 24-hour period, that the expression in Matthew is idiomatic, not a statement that Jesus was 72 hours in the tomb, and that the many references to a resurrection on the third day do not require three literal nights.
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Famous quotes containing the words holy, week, protestant and/or churches:
“In spite of all her faults her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself,—low whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded seclusion of his own chamber. “Cora, Cora,” he had murmured, so that the sense of the sound and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So the old flute was doomed and its fate was pathetic,
‘Twas fastened and burned at the stake as heretic,
While the flames roared around it they heard a strange
noise—
‘Twas the old flute still whistling ‘The Protestant Boys’.”
—Unknown. The Old Orange Flute (l. 37–40)
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)