Holy Week

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The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (illustration from the Duke of Berry's book of hours )

The Holy Week ( . Ahd  kara ; earlier, action ',' grief ',' sadness' Passion Week : even silence week is) Christian church year the last week of Lent and Lent and the week before Easter . In other languages, churches or denominations such as the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church , the period including the Easter celebration is referred to as Holy Week ; in Anglican Holy Week . In the Christian Orthodox churches there is also the Great Weekor Great Holy Week , which is traditionally characterized by strict fasting followed by breaking the fast at Easter .

etymology

The term is derived in German from Good Friday ( mhd.  Karvrītac ; more often kartac ). The compound is an education with ahd. Kara (9th century), which was lost in New High German , mhd. Kar 'mourning, lamentation', asächs. kara 'worry, complaint', aengl. caru , cearu , engl. care 'worry, sorrow'. In Old Norse means kǫr , bed ', bedside particularly', poetic even, grief, pain ', Goth. Kara , concern' (* germ. Diamonds). In today's German the word is still barren in ahd. Karag , mhd. Karc used (for example in taciturn ). In English , Holy Week is referred to as Holy Week , Italian settimana santa , French semaine sainte , Spanish semana santa or Dutch as Goede Week ("good week"). This makes the German designation a linguistic peculiarity with regard to the European world languages.  

Duration and meaning

Holy Week begins on Palm Sunday with the remembrance of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem and also includes the quiet days Monday through Wednesday . This is followed on the evening of Maundy Thursday the commemoration of the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper and on Good Friday the celebration of the suffering and death of Jesus. The Holy Saturday is considered to be the day of peace of the grave of Jesus Christ. Holy Week ends with the celebration of Easter Vigil .

The term Holy Week is a traditional term from German-speaking countries . In other languages ​​as well as in the Roman Catholic liturgy one speaks of the "great" or holy week ( Latin Hebdomada sancta , from Greek griechβδομάς ), which - unlike Holy Week - includes the Easter Sunday beginning with the celebration of Easter Vigil and the theological one Thoughts of the unity of suffering and death on the cross of Christ and his resurrection from the dead ( Paschal mystery ) takes into account.

Holy Week was - like the entire fasting period before Easter or Christmas - in Christianity as a so-called closed time , in which public festivities ( dance ban ) or church weddings were not allowed. Today, Good Friday (and in some cases Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday ) is a legally protected silent day in the German federal states . There are restrictions on Holy Week in all Christian denominations. For example, the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland has regulated that no church weddings are carried out during Holy Week. In the Roman Catholic Church, certain sacramentals associated with a joyful festival secret are not donated. Good Friday is considered a “fast and abstinence day”, on which one only has a filling meal and no meat dishes.

Liturgy and customs in the Christian denominations

Roman Catholic Church

The Holy Week ( Latin hebdomada sancta ) is the octave from Palm Sunday to Easter in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church . In contrast to Holy Week, it is not a pure week of mourning.It rather frames the celebration of the messianic entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem on the first day, the three Easter days with the mass of the Last Supper and the commemoration of the passion and death of Jesus with the celebration of the holy Easter vigil on eighth day of holy week. Since the Second Vatican Council , a distinction has been made in Holy Week between Holy Week (from Palm Sunday to Vespers on Maundy Thursday) and the Triduum Sacrum or Triduum Paschale (from the Mass from the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday evening to Easter Sunday inclusive). Nevertheless, the entire week that ends before Easter is still referred to as Holy Week.

Mass celebrations, hour prayers and devotions

Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the only days of the church year on which no holy mass is celebrated. At the Kartagen, the carmets are sung in the mornings, especially in cathedrals and monastery churches . In some places there are daily devotions on the Way of the Cross during Holy Week . On Good Friday, the main service is the afternoon celebration of the passion and death of Christ . On Holy Saturday only the Liturgy of the Hours is held. Between the Good Friday liturgy and Easter Vigil there is a custom in many churches to visit the “ holy grave ” with the crucifix placed there in silence ( visitatio crucis ).

In the morning of Maundy Thursday, the Christian mass with the consecration of the holy oils takes place in the episcopal churches . In many places, this celebration is held on an earlier day in Holy Week.

Cross covering

The veiled cross, symbol of the passion time

Already on the fifth Sunday of Lent , Passion Sunday ( Judica ) and the beginning of the actual Passion time , the crucifixes and crosses in the churches are veiled as a sign of mourning, even reliquaries , precious evangelists or crowns of lights were veiled in the Middle Ages, often already from Ash Wednesday or from the third on the Monday after the first Sunday of Lent . If there are triptychs and winged altars , these are often closed and show the simpler rear of the wings. In the Middle Ages, the velas used to cover the crosses were mostly made of white linen. Today they can be made of silk, wool, cotton or linen. For the color, purple is prescribed; until the liturgical reform after the Second Vatican Council , the cross on the high altar was covered with a white velum on Maundy Thursday .

Silence of the bells

According to a centuries-old custom in all Roman Catholic churches, out of mourning for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, from the glory of the mass from the last supper on the evening of Maundy Thursday to the glory in the celebration of Easter vigil, the bells (sometimes also the chiming of the clock) are silent . It is popularly said that "the bells fly to Rome". Pickguards, ratchets , rattles and similar wooden tools are used as substitutes to remind the believers of the times of prayer and worship ( angelus , hourly prayer ). The altar bells are also replaced by such rattles. Neither the organ nor any other musical instrument is played. Instead, the services are sung a cappella . The renunciation of bells and solemn organ playing is also practiced in Protestant churches.

Ratchets

ratchet

An old Roman Catholic custom in Austria , Baden and Bavaria is the ratchets , where children, mostly acolytes , go with wooden ratchets down the streets or from house to house. The tower ratchet is known in Klosterneuburg . This custom is also widespread in Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate , where it is known as "Kleppern". In the Rhineland and in rural areas of East Hesse ( Diocese of Fulda ), children move through the village with ratchets. Also in the Westphalia (z. B. Waltrop and Nottuln ), there are the so-called cents per kWh, up to Fridays of green Thursday with their Räppeln (ratchet) by the location and Bauerschaften drag. The origins of the rattling and rattling are believed to be in the time before the Christianization of Europe. It is reasonable to assume that the purpose was once to symbolically drive away the spirits of winter with noise in order to welcome spring. Regional is the ratcheting of Heischebrauch that the children go with a collection box from house to house and deliver Easter greetings; they collect Easter eggs , candy and money.

Artistic reception

The Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) composed the Officium Sanctae Hebdomadae , which is performed very rarely. It contains 37 individual chants for the Tenebrae , which were to be sung ad matutinum , i.e. early in the morning, on the most important days of Holy Week (Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday) . They are one of the highlights of the polyphonic ( polyphonic ) Figuralgesangs the Renaissance .

Protestant churches

Holy Week is also considered the most important week of the church year in the Protestant churches , Good Friday and Easter Sunday as the two highest feast days.

Martin Luther , however, rejected the traditional customs and a special design of the Holy Week, which was called Marterwoche at the time . In his German Mass of 1526 he demanded that “the week of torture should be the same as other weeks”. In the Reformation church ordinances , the four days from Wednesday to Saturday of Holy Week were often treated as "half holidays" on which work should not rest. Two variants developed: Either one wanted to read and preach the whole story of the Passion during Holy Week (now predominantly called the Silent Week ) (which increasingly concentrated on Good Friday ), or one wanted to think about every day what was happening on the same day the last week of the earthly life of Jesus and thus make the observance of the silent week a reflection of its (imagined) past course. Especially in the north German Protestant churches there was passion harmony of Johannes Bugenhagen formative. This kind of daily devotions with readings that follow Jesus' path through the week and matching songs and prayers has been preserved in the Moravian Brethren to this day.

Liturgy and church music

Today Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are celebrated liturgically. In some congregations there are also Passion devotions on other days of Holy Week, sometimes daily; More widespread, however, is the practice of celebrating Passion devotions every Wednesday or Friday throughout the entire Passion period. In many cases, the celebration of Easter vigil takes place according to the early Christian model. In some places it is common to have dinner on Maundy Thursday . On Good Friday, the congregation meets for worship, usually with the Lord's Supper , for devotions and often to passion music, for example at the hour of Jesus' death in the afternoon. The St. Matthew Passion or the St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach are often performed. Good Friday processions are in the tradition of the Way of the Cross , for example in Berlin . On Holy Saturday, the day of Christ's rest in the grave, the bells are also silent in Protestant parishes.

The classical passions of Heinrich Schütz , Johann Sebastian Bach and others developed from the custom of performing the Passions . In the 18th century, observational pieces became increasingly important and sometimes supplanted the Bible text, as exemplified in Carl Heinrich Graun's The Death of Jesus . The celebration of Maundy Thursday took a back seat to that of Good Friday, which became a whole holiday and “the day of the festival peculiar to the Protestant Church”. In the 19th century the traditional forms began to be rediscovered. In 1847 Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen published The Holy Passion and the Silent Week with drafts of divine services for every day, but without much response.

The renaissance of Johann Sebastian Bach's Passions focused on Good Friday. The actual celebration of Holy Week was characterized in many areas by the fact that confirmation was celebrated on Palm Sunday and the school year ended at Easter and the newly confirmed were released from regular school. In the 20th century, Wilhelm Stählin and the Berneuchen movement provided further attempts to revive a worship service throughout the week , of which the only new form that was essentially able to establish itself in many places was the Easter Vigil . and the Lower Saxony Liturgical Conference.

Other Christian churches

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
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literature

  • Odo Casel : Type and meaning of the oldest Christian Easter celebration. In: Yearbook for liturgical science. 14th Vol., 1934, pp. 1-78.
  • Congregation for Divine Worship: Circular “On the Celebration of Easter and its Preparation” . Pronouncements of the Apostolic See 81; Bonn 1990; 15-46.
  • Franz-Rudolf Weinert: Understanding and celebrating the Easter festival group . Pustet, Regensburg 2001, ISBN 3-7917-1689-1 ; Pp. 59–98, Chapter 3: Holy Week and the Three Easter Days.

Web links

Wiktionary: Holy Week  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Holy Week  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Brauns: The Church Lexicon - Silent Week. In: NDR.de . April 6, 2017. Retrieved April 9, 2017 .
  2. ^ Cajus Fabricius: The Church of England: Your Prayer Book, Confession and Canon Law p. 17; Walter de Gruyter 2014 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. ↑ Holy Week. In: Digital dictionary of the German language . Retrieved May 3, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Sonja Winkler: There is grief and worries in Holy Week. In: derStandard.at . April 10, 2017, accessed May 4, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Jan Willem Drijvers and Vincent Hunink: In het land van de bijbel: reisverslag van Egeria, een dame uit de vierde eeuw p. 141; see. online in Google Books
  6. ↑ Life Regulations Act, Section 33, Paragraph 5 in the version dated January 15, 2016, accessed on August 10, 2017.
  7. ↑ Agathe Lukassek: Good Friday: "It is done!" In: kathisch.de . March 28, 2018, accessed April 17, 2019 .
  8. ^ Herbert Thurston: Holy Week. In: The Catholic Encyclopedia . Vol. 7. Robert Appleton Company, New York 1910, newadvent.org.Retrieved April 13, 2014
  9. ^ Basic order of the church year 16, 28, 30, 31; Martin Klöckener : Holy Week. I. Liturgy . In: Walter Kasper (Ed.): Lexicon for Theology and Church . 3. Edition. tape 5 . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1996, Sp. 1276 .
  10. ↑ Tobias Glenz: Holy Week and Easter - You need to know that. In: kathisch.de . April 13, 2019, accessed May 6, 2019 .
  11. ^ Manfred Becker-Huberti : Celebrations, festivities, seasons. Living customs all year round. Herder Verlag, Freiburg, special edition 2001, ISBN 3-451-27702-6 , p. 289.
  12. ↑ Joseph Braun : The Liturgical Paraments in the present and past. A manual of paramentics. 2nd, improved edition. Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) 1924 (Reprographischer Reprint. Verlag Nova und Vetera, Bonn 2005, ISBN 3-936741-07-7 ), p. 233 ff.
  13. ^ Maundy Thursday: The day on which the bells fall silent. The press of April 9, 2009, accessed on May 2, 2019.
  14. ↑ Keyword Holy Week. In: ekd.de. April 7, 2004, accessed April 15, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Quoted by week, great. In: Real Encyclopedia for Protestant Theology and Church Volume 21, p. 426.
  16. ↑ Theodor Kliefoth : The original order of worship in the German churches of Lutheran knowledge: their destruction and reformation. Stiller, Schwerin, 1847, p. 72.
  17. ↑ The church year. Good Friday. In: ref.ch. Retrieved April 15, 2019 .
  18. ^ Evangelical hymn book , edition Rhineland / Westphalia / Lippe, No. 833.
  19. ↑ Evangelical church year. In: kirchenjahr-evangelisch.de. Retrieved April 15, 2019 .
  20. ^ Paul Graff : History of the dissolution of the old forms of worship in the Protestant Church in Germany up to the advent of the Enlightenment and Rationalism, Volume 1. Second edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1937, p. 119.
  21. ↑ Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen : The holy story of suffering and the silent week. Hamburg: Perthes 1847 ( digitized version )
  22. ↑ The Holy Week. Regulations for Holy Week services and the celebration of Easter Vigil. 1951
  23. ↑ Holy Week. 1993. See Karl-Friedrich Wiggermann:  Holy Week . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG). 4th edition. Volume 4, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2001, Sp. 835-836.