What Holy Week really means

Holy Week is a time to clear our schedules of unnecessary activities. Our minds and hearts should be fixed on Jesus and what He did for us. Having fulfilled the 40 days of Lent, we ought to see the Holy week of thy passion. With the words  sung at Vespers of Friday, Lent comes to its end and we enter into the annual commemoration of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. Holy week really encompasses a lot, and the better for one understands the meanings behind the different days, the better one will be able to celebrate Easter with a clean spirit due to the fact that Easter is important because all of Christianity revolves around the death and resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus did not die for our sins, or if Jesus did not rise again after three days, then the entire hope of Christianity is based upon nothing but lies and falsities. 

In short, we would be meaningless as a religion, because our sins would not be forgiven by Christ. If it wasn’t for Easter we would have to continue living as the Jews of old and offering animal sacrifices to the Lord for our sins.The Christian faith has many symbols including that of Holy week. We often replicate the process Jesus underwent on the cross in a symbolic sense. We die to our old selves. We also are “buried” through the sacrament of baptism and experience a resurrection and new life in Christ. Christ gives us a new life holistically. We experience some of that new life during our time on earth and look forward to experiencing to experience the rest of the resurrection in Heaven. 

“For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” – (Romans 14:9). We celebrate Easter and Holy Week as well because God lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we deserve to die, so that we could live. That in so doing we can experience resurrection with Him!

Sem. Robert Bigabwarugaba