On the Liturgical Calendar

The Octave Day of Pentecost commonly called Trinity Sunday

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hast it given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that this holy faith may evermore be our defence against all adversities; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Christian liturgical year has been developed over the years to highlight a number of feasts and seasons throughout the year that help us to, as Dr Charles Nienkirchen, once said, hitch our micro-story to Christ’s meta-story. Put another way, the Christian calendar helps us to keep our minds focused on the many things God has said or done for us over the course of the year. The seasons of the year, and days, all have colours associated with them and help individuals to understand and associate some of the values and ideas being honoured in a given season or day, and again to ensure the focus is on God and how we are to respond to what he has said and done for us.

Christian calendar begins with the season of advent, which is the first four Sundays prior to Christmas, which both recalls the anticipation held by Jews for the coming of the Messiah and also reviews the many prophecies that foretold the birth of Christ. The liturgical colour for advent is purple, which is a royal colour, and speaks to Christ’s status as King of Kings.

Advent leads in to Christmas Day and Christmastide, the twelve days after Christmas. It celebrates the birth of Christ and retells the story of that birth. It is a white season, the colour of celebration. It is a joyful season filled with celebratory hymns proclaiming the birth of the messiah and saviour. Christmas ends on Epiphany, January 6th, which celebrates the arrival of the three wise men. Epiphany and Epiphanytide is a green season, reflecting the epiphany of the wise men that Christ was the Messiah, and as the colour green is a colour of growth it further reflects the growth of their faith as they reflected on the implication of the epiphany they had had in Christ.

Epiphany ends on Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent. Lent returns to the colour purple, and is a season both of anticipation and of penitence, as Christians meditate on and anticipate the commemoration of Christ’s passion and death on the cross on Good Friday. Indeed here the colour purple anticipates the purple robe Christ was forced to wear by the soldiers as they mocked him shouting, “hail King of the Jews.” Lent is known as a season of fasting, when, as a discipline, Christians will seek to give up some comfort and take on spiritual disciplines to help them prepare for the coming Holy Week and Easter season.

Lent ends on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. Palm Sunday begins Holy Week and the commemoration of Christ’s final week. Holy Week is red for Christ’s blood which is about to be shed. Holy Week is perhaps the holiest time of the Christian calendar, marking Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Judas’s betrayal on Holy Wednesday or Spy Wednesday as it is sometimes called, the Last Supper, the washing of the disciple’s feet and the institution of the Eucharist is remembered on Maundy Thursday.

Good Friday begins the Easter Triduum of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The Eucharist is not administered on Good Friday, Christ’s Passion, or Holy Saturday, when Christ lay dead in his tomb. There is no liturgical colour associated with these days as the Altar and Sanctuary are usually stripped after Maundy Thursday. In the earliest days of the Church there were only two feasts celebrated, that of the Easter resurrection and that of Pentecost.

Easter Sunday is a white, or white and gold, season. It is the most joyful and celebratory of all Christian feasts, and indeed was one of the first of the Christian feasts. The Eastertide season remains white and celebratory and often seeks to emphasize the many changes that were evident in the early Church, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, as a result of the resurrection.

Easter ends at Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit, commemorated in Red for the description of the Holy Spirit as descending like tongues of fire. After Pentecost we return to the liturgical green of ordinary time. Like the Green during Epiphany, it symbolizes growth and is a time when we consider growth in our Christian life. During this time, however, there are a number of important feasts. The Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday, and is the celebratory white of Easter. It unsurprisingly celebrates the doctrine of the trinity. The Feast of Corpus Christi is the next Thursday, and is often commemorated on the Sunday after Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the institution of the Eucharist recognized on Maundy Thursday, but which cannot be properly celebrated so near to Good Friday, and during the sombre season of Lent. It in particular emphasises the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Finally, the last Sunday before Advent is  the Feast of Christ the King or the Reign of Christ. This final celebration recognizes Christ as King of Lord and all, and is a fitting end to a calendar which will begin again on the next Sunday with Advent and the anticipation of the coming of Christ the King.

These seasons have more importance than merely helping us to see the narrative of Christ. They are observed with a lectionary that provides for thematically appropriate readings for the day, which also takes you through a multi-year cycle of Scripture readings that cover the vast majority of Scripture. The Anglican Church of Canada uses the Revised Common Lectionary, which is used by many other Christians including the Roman Catholic Church, Lutherans and others.

The importance of this becomes all too clear when you consider that in almost every Anglican service there is an opportunity for a homily to be preached, for the purpose of helping to explain the word of God. In many Protestant denominations neither the Christian calendar nor the lectionary are observed. Preachers may discuss any themes or any Scripture readings they like at any point in the season.

Explaining the word of God is often described as exegesis, a Greek word which generally means to draw out the meaning of something. The opposite of this is eisegesis, which means to read into a passage a meaning which is not there. When dealing with the word of God, clearly the desire is to explain God’s meaning and intent, and not to simply use the Holy Scriptures as a tool to proclaim our own views.

When you are forced by the lectionary to move through the Christian calendar with its themes, and the lectionary with its associated readings, you are confronted with God’s meaning already. If you have nothing to tell you which Scripture to look at, what the theme of the week is and what part of God’s meta-story we are exploring, it is much easier to accidentally or intentionally move towards eisegesis by picking and choosing verses that support whatever argument you happen to want to make. Doctrine and teaching must be rooted in Scripture and not merely scriptural verses, because those verses alone can be presented out of context and not have their proper meaning.

The further you depart from the original context in which a given piece of writing was created, the easier it is to misunderstand it’s context, even if the plain text is understandable to you. The famous story of Philip and the Ethiopian in the Acts of the Apostles illustrates this point. The Ethiopian is reading from the Book of Isaiah when Philip comes upon him. Philip heard him reading, and he asks if the Ethiopian understands. Clearly the man understands the words, because he is reading them, but his response is, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Here he is not looking for someone to translate the words because they are in another language or read them to him because he is illiterate. The passage makes clear that he has read them. He wants Philip to draw out the meaning of the passage to him, to explain it to him as a priest would in a homily. Philip does this, explaining how Christ fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecies, and ultimately the man comes to Christ.

Today, we are all Ethiopians, and luckily for us, the Christian calendar and the lectionary are there to help provide some guidance, just as the Holy Spirit guided Philip to the Ethiopian.