What is Holy Week?

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is March 29th, 2021 and we are beginning what we call Holy Week.
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Now what I want to do on the program today is talk about the significance of Holy Week, a little bit of the history behind it, why we celebrate this week as distinct from other weeks on the Christian calendar, and talk about whether or not we should be doing the celebrating that we're doing.
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So let's begin by talking about what Holy Week is.
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Holy Week has typically been described as the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday or what's more typically called Resurrection Sunday.
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And Palm Sunday, of course, is the day that Jesus Christ rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.
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And in doing so, he was demonstrating that he was the King of Israel.
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He was fulfilling a specific Old Testament prophecy.
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And he did so while the people held palm branches and they shouted, Hosanna.
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Hosanna, of course, means save us.
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And that's what they wanted Jesus to do.
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But the salvation that they were looking for was a very specific type of political salvation, not necessarily the spiritual salvation that Jesus was providing through what he was doing in his work and going to do in his work on the cross.
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They wanted to see Jesus overthrow the Roman government.
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They wanted to see him set up the kingdom of earth on heaven or in heaven or excuse me, the kingdom of heaven on earth.
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I'm sorry for that confusion.
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And they wanted to see the victory over their oppressors.
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And so when Jesus came in on the back of a donkey, they see this fulfillment of prophecy and they say, this is the guy who's going to do this.
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And so Jesus comes into Jerusalem with the lauding of the crowd, as it were, and that happens on Palm Sunday.
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Now, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, very important events happen.
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I don't want to recount those events on today's program because this Friday night, Brother Mike Collier is going to be preaching at our church on Good Friday, and he's going to actually recount these events.
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And my plan, if everything works out right, is to take a portion of the recording of his sermon and play it on next week's program.
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So if you're interested in Holy Week and what happens on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, this is something that he has studied in great detail, something he likes to share and something I want to let him actually expound on.
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But the events between Sunday and Friday are important.
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Of course, Thursday night, typically in Latin has been referred to as Maundy Thursday.
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That is the night that Jesus had the Last Supper, and then Friday is the day that Jesus was crucified, and so we call that Good Friday.
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Now there's a lot of confusion, especially among unbelievers, about why we would call the day that Jesus was crucified Good Friday.
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Why would we say it's good? I mean, this is the day our Lord was crucified.
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In fact, I've heard people actually question whether or not Christians should display crosses.
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They make the point that, well, Jesus was crucified on a cross, and that's terrible, so why would you celebrate the cross? Why would you put crosses on your buildings? Why would you wear crosses on your necklaces? Why would you have crosses on your homes or in pictures or whatever? And for an unbeliever, I understand why that question would come up, but the answer is very simple.
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The reason why we call it Good Friday and the reason why we celebrate the cross is because it was on that cross that Jesus did the work of atonement.
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It was on that cross that Jesus received in himself the wrath of God for our sin, and he was punished in our place.
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And so the cross becomes a good thing, not that it was good in the sense of Jesus being tortured and nailed to a cross and hurting and dying, but the good is the reason behind why he did it and what he was able to accomplish in it.
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So from Palm Sunday, we go to Good Friday.
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Then Saturday is the Sabbath, and the Bible says he was buried on Friday.
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He was in the tomb all day Saturday, and then on Sunday, he rose from the dead Sunday, which some people call Easter.
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We tend to prefer to call it Resurrection Sunday because that's what it is.
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It's the day Jesus rose from the dead, and there's a lot of conversation that goes on about whether or not we should even use the term Easter.
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Some people connect it to the pagan goddess Ishtar, and that's the goddess of fertility and love, and many people know that Easter is often associated with things like eggs and rabbits, two symbols of fertility, and of course, Ishtar, the pagan god of fertility.
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So using the word Easter can be somewhat problematic, and so I understand why people would prefer to use the word Resurrection Sunday, and typically that's how we define that Sunday.
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But here's the interesting point.
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As Christians, we celebrate Resurrection Sunday every week because the very reason why we worship on the first day of the week, which is Sunday, rather than on the Jewish Sabbath, which is Saturday, the very reason for our celebrating our faith on Sunday is because that's the day Jesus rose from the dead.
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And so when we think about our faith and the root of our faith, we think about the day Jesus rose.
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In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us very clearly, if Jesus Christ be not raised, we of all men are most to be pitied.
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That's 1 Corinthians 15.
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We do not have a faith if Jesus is still dead.
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We do not have a faith worth believing, according to the Apostle Paul, if Jesus did not come out of the grave, because if Jesus did not come out of the grave, everything that we say about him is untrue, and all that has been preached about him are lies.
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This is why people who say that we don't need the resurrection to have Christianity are just wrong.
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The Apostle Paul does not allow for such a thing.
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He says without the resurrection, there would be no Christianity.
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So every Sunday, we celebrate the resurrection.
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That's why we worship on Sundays.
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But once a year, and this is important because it's not a necessary thing, but it is a common thing among Christians.
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Once a year, we take a special time in the year, in the church calendar, to recognize the resurrection of Jesus as the central moment, not only of our faith, but of all of human history, and we focus on it with special services, such as in our church, we're going to have a sunrise service, and then we're going to have our regular service, again, we're going to have a Good Friday service.
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We're going to have a lot going on this week because we're celebrating the resurrection.
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And again, we celebrate the resurrection every time we gather on the Lord's Day, but we give special attention and significance to this event during this time of year.
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And some people say, well, you shouldn't do that.
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Every Sunday should be treated as Resurrection Sunday, and in a sense, that's true, but there's nothing wrong with having seasons where we focus on certain things, such as in the Christmas season, we would focus on the birth of Christ, and that is the Incarnation, the focus of Christmas is not just the birth of a baby, but the Incarnation of God in the flesh.
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And then in the Easter season or the Resurrection season, we celebrate the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which the Apostle Paul says is, in fact, the Gospel.
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First Corinthians 15, when he's defining the Gospel, he says, Jesus Christ died according to the Scriptures, he was buried, and he was raised again according to the Scriptures.
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In death, we have Christ justifying us, in death there is justification, in burial there is verification, he's actually dead, you don't bury living people, you bury dead people, so in burial he is verified as dead, and in his resurrection there's vindication.
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I taught this sermon a few years ago and it just sort of stuck with me, in death there is justification, in burial there's verification, and in his resurrection there is vindication, because his resurrection vindicates everything he said was true.
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Jesus is the truth, and everything he said was true.
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And so that's what Holy Week is.
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If a church chooses not to celebrate Holy Week, if a church chooses not to celebrate the Resurrection Sunday as a unique or special time of year, they have the right to do that.
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I mean, Romans 14 tells us some people celebrate a day, other people choose not to, and no one should judge one or the other, because each one should do toward their own master, they should be faithful.
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So at our church this week, we are celebrating Holy Week, we are celebrating from the time of Palm Sunday, where Jesus came into Jerusalem as the people's hero, people's champion, and only through a few days he went from being lauded as king and son of David to the same people who shouted, Hosanna, would later shout, crucify him, just in a few days, and on Friday he would be crucified, and on Sunday he would rise again.
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This is the week that changed the world.
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This is the week that changed everything.
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This is the week that reminds us every year why we serve the Lord Jesus Christ, because he is the one who not only died, but was raised.
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And on Sunday morning, this coming Sunday morning, we've been teaching this to our children, Christians all over the world will face each other at certain points of the day and they will look at each other and they will say, he is risen, to the response the other person will say, he is risen indeed.
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And that actually goes back a very long time in Christian history, where Christians would look at one another and say, he is risen, and the response is, he is risen indeed.
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And indeed he has, and indeed that is where we place our trust.
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I hope that you have a wonderful Holy Week.
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I look forward to, throughout this week, talking about various aspects of this season and why it matters, and I pray that you'll be with us each day to learn more about it.
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Thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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We love to receive your comments and questions, and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.