Holy Week and Evangelical Easter

Over the next ten days, you are going to see and read all kinds of fascinating — and often toxic — takes on why Jesus died and what the resurrection really means. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but the megachurch marketing machine is already in full swing: “You’re Invited” hype reels, pastor teaser clips, email campaigns, kid-focused attractions, door-to-door promotions, and paid social media ads designed to drive attendance. I even saw one church promoting registration spots for a ‘Baptism Splash,’ as if the life-changing sacrament of holy baptism were some kind of quick‑service, drive‑through: pull up, get dunked, and pick up your ticket to heaven on the way out. Evanjelly Jesus for the win!

It’s all so gross.

Evangelical Easter isn’t a perennial story of necessary death and resurrection; it’s often a promotional event. Resurrection is the ultimate culture war win. Jesus doesn’t descend; he freaking launches. The gospel is no longer good news for the poor, the grieving, or the crushed—it is a success story for the already comfortable. Instead of following the liturgical calendar, the story jumps from triumph to triumph. It moves from the pride of Palm Sunday directly to the elation of Easter morning, missing the messy parts in the middle. There’s little room for anguish, or for Maundy Thursday’s vulnerability. Good Friday’s injustice is a minor inconvenience. And Holy Saturday? It is almost completely erased to make room for pre‑Easter celebrations for those unwilling to sit even for one day with the scandalous truth that God is dead.

Growing up evangelical, I knew nothing of Holy Week and the Church’s invitation to join Jesus on his journey through death. Bereft of the liturgical arc, evangelical Easter is a spiritual highlight reel: glory stacked on glory, celebration without cost, resurrection without crucifixion. In skipping the descent, we lose the meaning of ascent. We miss the downward path, the invitation to go and do likewise, the confrontation with power, the suffering love that refuses violence even in service of the most sacred ends, and the divine surrender that unmasks the powers that be once and for all.

But thankfully, the liturgical calendar tells a different story, know as the Great Paschal Mystery: a story of unraveling, scattering, betrayal, abandonment, and, worst of all, the very death of God.

Holy Week is the highpoint of the Christian calendar. The earliest recorded reference to Christians setting aside this week for special observation dates back to the third century. Jesus' followers have celebrated the Paschal Mystery for over a thousand years as a way to prepare to meet the risen Lord on Easter morning. When followed thoughtfully, Holy Week is not a march from victory to victory, it is the solemn invitation to join Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. These seven days are participatory, inviting us to move beyond remembrance into formation, where Jesus’ downward journey becomes not just his story, but the shape of the life we are learning to live.

In the liturgy, we do not merely remember what happened to Jesus; we are asked to participate with him. The liturgy interrupts our addiction to upward mobility by asking us whether we are willing to share in his suffering. Holy Week refuses to let Jesus’ story remain his alone. It insists that his descent is our descent, his dying our dying, and his rising our rising.

To rush past the cross on our way to the empty tomb is like opening a gift without the heart to embrace it. This is precisely the danger Jürgen Moltmann names in The Crucified God. We prefer a God who conquers decisively over a God who suffers openly. To skip the cross, and all that lead to it, is not only bad theology—it is spiritual malpractice. A Christianity that bypasses the crucified Christ inevitably becomes a religion of triumph, power, and nationalism. It produces people equipped for celebration but not for solidarity, fluent in hope but ill‑prepared to remain proximate to suffering. In a world still marked by violence and abandonment, such theology leaves us alone at precisely the moment we need a God with us.

When taken seriously, Holy Week is a collision of expectations: crowds longing for liberation, religious authorities guarding their fragile power, and imperial largesse determined to crush anything that resembles a threat. It is a week defined by competing visions of what the world should be and who gets to shape it. And at the center of it all stands Jesus—announcing a kingdom that does not look like Rome’s, gathering followers who do not fit the patterns of power, and embodying a way of life that unsettles both empire and the religious establishment.

Leaving evangelicalism has allowed me to encounter Holy Week through a different lens. These coming days now feel like a divine invitation into the Way of Jesus—the long, costly way of descent. His life calls us not toward accumulation or victory, but toward a transformation shaped by surrender, shedding, and the courage to let go. Jesus didn’t die for you in the sense of appeasing a wrathful deity; he died before you, showing the path every human must walk if they wish to become fully human, fully divine. He didn’t die so that you could avoid death. He died to show you how to die—and, in doing so, how to truly live.

As you make your journey to the cross this year, take time each day to read the story of Jesus. Ponder his final week on earth. If you are brave enough, attend a Maundy Thursday or Good Friday service at one of your local mainline churches. As odious as the cross is, this is where our faith begins: in the cold, dark night of the soul when we dare believe in a God powerful enough, and humble enough, to die at the hands of Her children.

This is why these seven days matter so deeply. They are participatory, not performative. They invite us to inhabit Jesus’ downward journey—not as a historical anomaly, but as the pattern of life we are being trained into.

Holy Week forms a people who know how to remain present at the cross because they trust that resurrection does not erase suffering, but transforms it from the inside.

To stay with the cross is not pessimism. It is fidelity. And it is only those who have learned to stand beneath the cross—without rushing toward consolation—who are capable of recognizing resurrection when it finally appears.

Amen.

Gary Alan Taylor