Holy Week: A Preparation For The End Times

By JAMES MONTI

For centuries, the faithful have pondered and wondered just what the mysterious prophecies of the Book of Revelation mean. Of course, like the prophecies of the Old Testament, these prophecies of the end times won’t be fully understood until they are totally fulfilled. Yet like the rest of Sacred Scripture, the Book of Revelation does tell us much of what we need to know and believe here and now. What can already be discerned from afar is that in the end times the Church will experience her ultimate participation in the Passion and death of Christ, her ultimate Good Friday.
The events of the very first Holy Week certainly have an apocalyptic look and feel to them, complete with mysterious “great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:11) — the three hours of darkness “over the whole land” and the darkening of the sun (Luke 23:44-45). It was in fact during Holy Week, not long before Holy Thursday, that our Lord delivered to His apostles His own very detailed prophecy of the end of the world (Matt. 24:3-44). Viewed from this perspective, the Church’s annual celebration of Holy Week can be said to be her ultimate preparation for the Apocalypse.
The parallels between Holy Week and the end times begin with Palm Sunday. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola (+1556) gives us an intimation of this with his meditation upon the “Two Standards,” wherein we see Christ as the “supreme Leader of the Good” taking a humble stance just outside Jerusalem to confront Satan, bringing to mind His approach to Jerusalem upon a donkey on the first Palm Sunday.
Yet the nature of His mission in entering Jerusalem, to confront and vanquish Satan, accompanied by His apostles and the multitude bearing palm branches and crying “Hosanna,” anticipate another coming of the Lord, His Second Coming, when “the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him” (Matt. 25:31). The saints of Heaven are described in the Book of Revelation as bearing palm branches in their hands (cf. Rev. 7:9), the very trophy of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem before His Passion.
The medieval Church’s manner of celebrating the Palm Sunday liturgy accentuated its apocalyptic connotations. To begin with, throughout Catholic Europe every city and town celebrated the Palm Sunday procession as a massive civic event, with one principal procession through the streets, often beginning outside the city gates and traversing the streets to the principal church or cathedral.
Medieval society set aside its normal round of activities to live Holy Week, attuned to its cosmic significance as shaping the final destiny of all mankind. The dramatization of the moment of entry into the church in this procession, cast as a dialogue between the celebrant as Christ thrice demanding admittance from those daring to bar his way, imaged the return of Christ at the end of time, when the world’s captivity under Satan will be totally overthrown.
Among Catholics from many different cultural backgrounds, it is a very common custom to visit the graves of loved ones on Palm Sunday. In the villages of medieval Catholic Europe, the graves of loved ones were usually very close at hand, just outside the church in the parish graveyard. So, the Palm Sunday procession would often pause for a station at the graveyard cross. Catholic cemeteries evoke both the Passion and the Second Coming of Christ. For it is in the cemetery that our own personal lifelong journey with Christ to Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher is completed.
But these cemeteries will subsequently become “ground zero” for the Day of Judgment, the day when our bodies will come forth from the grave to share in the Easter victory of Christ and meet Him as He returns in glory.
The pattern of events outlined in the Book of Revelation and Our Lord’s own prophecies of the end times echo the unfolding of Holy Week, with the enemies of Christ in both cases initially gaining the upper hand, only to be totally vanquished in the end.
The desertion of the apostles on Holy Thursday night corresponds to the prophecy of a time when even many of the just will be deceived (cf. Matt. 24:24), that time about which Our Lord asks the haunting question, “. . . when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).
The spiritual battle that will come toward the end of the world is in essence simply the second phase of the battle fought during the first Holy Week, as the Book of Revelation attests: “. . . they will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful” (Rev. 17:14). For what is said of the final battle points back to the first: “He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God” (Rev. 19:13).
In the ancient three-day office of Tenebrae that begins on Holy Thursday, the apocalyptic dimensions of the Passion come to the fore, versified in the cataclysmic imagery of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, sung in a setting of growing darkness as the candles of the Tenebrae “hearse” (candle-stand) are gradually extinguished, like the stars that will fall from the sky (cf. Matt. 24:29) when the end of time draws near:
“The Lord determined to lay in ruins / the wall of the daughter of Zion…Her gates have sunk into the ground; / he has ruined and broken her bars…my heart is poured out in grief / because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, / because infants and babes faint / in the streets of the city” (Lam. 2:8-9, 11).
On Holy Thursday night, the climactic battle between Christ and the forces of evil begins in earnest with the arrest of Our Lord in Gethsemane, epitomized by His words to those who came to seize Him: “This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). That moment is preceded by a watch, a watch for the apostles and for us as well: “. . . remain here, and watch with me” (Matt. 26:38). For the apostles, that watch was to be in the Garden of Olives; for us, it is in the Repository of the Blessed Sacrament. And in our Holy Thursday watch before the Holy Eucharist we likewise fulfill another command to watch given by Our Lord, given to prepare us for His return at the end of time: “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matt. 24:42).
As was done in the plot to condemn Christ to death, so to in the end times, the enemies of God will resort to falsehood and deception:
“Now the chief priests and the whole council sought false testimony against Jesus that they might put Him to death…many false witnesses came forward” (Matt. 26:59-60).
“For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matt. 24:24).
“And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations” (Rev. 20:7-8).
It is at the moment when Our Lord gives His definitive answer to the question of the high priest Caiaphas, “…tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God,” that He Himself proclaims His final triumph over His enemies at the end of time: “But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26:63-64).
On Good Friday, the world was indeed to see Our Lord “coming on the clouds of Heaven,” silhouetted against a dark sky as He hung upon the Cross, in likeness to the time to come when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Matt. 24:29). In their spiritual blindness, the enemies of Christ gloated over this sight, deriding Him with the insult, “If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross” (Matt. 27:40). But at three o’clock, nature herself was to unveil the death of Our Lord as the prelude to His Second Coming:
“And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt. 27:51-53).
This mysterious raising of the dead in Jerusalem upon the death of Christ presaged what will transpire at the end of time: “…the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5: 28-29).
In the Church’s rite of Adoration of the Holy Cross, one can readily perceive the intermingling of the two theophanies of Golgotha and the Final Judgment. For when during the adoration rite the crucifix is at last fully unveiled, we find ourselves face to face with Christ Crucified “coming on the clouds of Heaven” as both our Savior and our Judge, confronting us in the singing of the Good Friday Improperia with that haunting question that we will have to answer on the Day of Judgment: “My people, what have I done to you? Or how have I grieved you? Answer me!” (The Roman Missal, ©2010, ICEL).
The nexus between the first Holy Week and the end of time reaches its climax at the Easter Vigil, heightened by an ancient belief of the early Christians that when Christ will come again in glory, it will be during the Easter Vigil that He will arrive. This connection is an indispensable interpretive key to understanding the joy annunciated by the Church in this liturgy. Without this eschatological perspective, the joy of Easter night can seem painfully premature in the light of life’s all too real sorrows.
But if that joy is looking beyond the present to the completion of Christ’s victory at the end of the world, even those experiencing a great personal pain or sorrow at Eastertime can take solace in the very real hope that in the end every tear will be wiped away and every painful separation from our loved ones will be undone forever.
Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!