Holy Week and Easter: What They Are and How to Keep Them

Holy Week is the week before Easter, the seven days in which the Church walks again through the last days of Jesus of Nazareth: his entry into Jerusalem, his last supper with his friends, his arrest, his death, and his rising. It is called holy because the Church believes nothing else in time carries this much weight. Every other feast depends on this one. Christmas announces that God has come; Holy Week and Easter are the reason he came.

The week does not stand alone. It completes Lent, the forty days of fasting and almsgiving that prepare a Christian to enter it rightly, and it opens onto the fifty days of Easter joy that follow. Holy Week is the hinge. Everything before it leans toward Friday and Saturday; everything after it is lit by Sunday.

What is Holy Week and why is it called holy

Holy Week is holy because it is the week the Gospels themselves dwell on longest. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John move quickly through years of Jesus's public life and then slow almost to the hour once he reaches Jerusalem. The Church has always taken that slowing as instruction: this is the part to enter, not summarize.

The week begins with Palm Sunday, when crowds laid branches before Jesus as he rode into the city, and it ends at the empty tomb. In between lie betrayal, a last meal, a trial, a death, and a long silence. Holy Week asks the Christian to walk that road in real time rather than skip from the branches to the alleluias.

What happens on each day of Holy Week

Each day of Holy Week marks a specific event from the final days of Jesus's life, moving from triumph through betrayal, death, and silence to resurrection.

Palm Sunday opens the week with Jesus's entry into Jerusalem, the crowds crying Hosanna and spreading cloaks and branches before him. Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday follow his last days of teaching in the Temple, his anointing at Bethany, and the quiet beginning of Judas's betrayal. Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper, the washing of the disciples' feet, and the institution of the Eucharist; the name comes from the Latin mandatum, commandment, for Jesus's words that night, a new commandment I give you, that you love one another. Good Friday is the day of the crucifixion, kept in fasting, silence, and the veneration of the cross; nothing about it is cheerful, and the name refers to its holiness, not its mood. Holy Saturday is the day of the tomb, when the Church keeps vigil in the stillness between death and resurrection, a day with no Mass of its own in the Western rite until the Easter Vigil after nightfall. Easter Sunday, or Pascha, completes the week with the proclamation that Christ is risen, the center on which the whole year turns.

The Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul both stood inside these events, one as witness and one as the man whose later preaching carried their meaning across the empire. The Rock: A Life of Saint Peter, Prince of the Apostles follows Peter from the upper room through his denial in the courtyard to the shore where the risen Christ met him again. Apostle to the World: The Life of Saint Paul opens on a man who never saw the empty tomb yet built his whole life on the fact of it.

Why do Christians celebrate Easter, and where does it come from

Christians celebrate Easter because they hold that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified on Good Friday, rose bodily from the dead on the third day. Easter is not a spring festival that borrowed a resurrection story; it is a resurrection claim that happens to fall in spring because it was set against the Jewish Passover, the feast during which Jesus was killed and rose. The Gospels date the events precisely against Passover, and the earliest Christians kept Pascha, their word for Easter, as the fulfillment of that older feast rather than a replacement for it.

Easter's date moves each year because it is reckoned from the Passover reckoning behind it, tied to the first full moon after the spring equinox. The Western and Eastern churches calculate this slightly differently, which is why Catholic and Protestant Easter and Orthodox Pascha often fall on different Sundays. Both are keeping the same feast by the same ancient method, applied to different calendars.

Saint John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, preached a Paschal homily so beloved that the Orthodox Church still reads it aloud in every parish at the end of the Easter Vigil, inviting fasters and latecomers alike to the feast because none are turned away. The Golden-Mouthed: A Life of Saint John Chrysostom tells the life behind that voice.

How to keep Holy Week and what to read

Holy Week is kept by slowing down enough to follow the Gospel narrative in order, ideally reading the Passion accounts aloud on the days they describe. A simple plan: Matthew 21 for Palm Sunday, John 13 for Maundy Thursday, John 18 to 19 for Good Friday, and the resurrection chapters, Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, or John 20, for Easter morning. Many parishes add foot-washing on Thursday, veneration of the cross on Friday, and the Easter Vigil's new fire and first alleluia after dark on Saturday.

Mary Magdalene stood at the cross on Friday and at the tomb before dawn on Sunday, the first to see the risen Christ and the first to announce him, which is why the Church has long called her apostle to the apostles. The Apostle to the Apostles: The Life of Mary Magdalene keeps her at the center of that morning rather than at its edges. Mary of Nazareth kept the same vigil from the foot of the cross onward, and Blessed Among Women: The Life of Mary, Mother of God follows her through the week every mother of a condemned son would recognize.

Thomas à Kempis wrote his Imitation of Christ as a manual for exactly this kind of slow walking beside Jesus's suffering, and The Quiet Cell: A Life of Thomas à Kempis shows the quiet Dutch community that produced it. Augustine of Hippo was baptized at the Easter Vigil in Milan in 387, the feast arriving at the exact hour his long resistance gave way, and The Restless Heart: A Life of Saint Augustine of Hippo carries the reader to that font. In the Orthodox world, Saint Seraphim of Sarov greeted every visitor who came to his cell, any day of the year, with the Paschal greeting, Christ is risen, my joy, and The Wonderworker of Sarov: A Life in Three Books shows a man for whom Easter never really ended. Each life opens free as an Invitation volume in the house's free library, a fitting way to enter a week that asks to be entered slowly.