A Contemplation on Holy Week with Rev. Richard Goodall

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

Holy Week is an archetypal week, and one can find mirrored in it the process of the Sacrament of Consultation. The exploration of the meaning of Holy Week was intended to reveal the gift that is available to all of us through the Sacrament of Consultation.

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. We can view the candles on the altar in respect to the evolutionary process of the Human Being. In the first three periods the development occurs, then in the fourth period there is a transformative agent and in the last three periods the development of the first three periods is transformed.

On Palm Sunday the donkey is an image of the first three periods or the first three candles. This is the first creation out of the father God. Christ is represented by the fourth candle, and the colt of the donkey is the last three periods or the last three candles - that is, the second creative process. So, the events of Holy Week are archetypal, and we can learn to make these events our own.

Holy Week needs to be placed in the context of the festival year. It expresses in time what our constitution expresses in space. The year and the human being are an expression of the path of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac. We may experience Holy Week in relation to our own transformative process as it is expressed in the Sacrament of Consultation. We may consider whether we work out our path through life wilfully or whether we are merely pushed by outer circumstances.

We can picture it like this:

In the image of a circle is expressed the potential that existed in the very beginning which is the Father principle.

This potential unfolds into two worlds. The second is a partial expression of the Father principle that is spiritual at first but is eventually thrown out into matter.

The lower world is constantly sustained by the Father principle world working into it giving us the image of the lemniscate.

A progression of the lemniscate (the so-called ‘dancing lemniscate’) represents all processes of development and growth in the life of a human being from birth out of the spiritual world on the left to the return to the spiritual world on the right.

It is also a picture of the process of the festival year. Passiontide is the descent towards the crossing point, with Holy Week just above the crossing point and the realm of death. Good Friday is at the crossing point into the realm of death and the deeds of Holy Saturday are represented below the crossing point. Easter Sunday is at the same place as Good Friday but going in the opposite direction having transformed the realm of death.

Christ incarnated at a point in time where the death of the soul had become a reality. The soul of human beings could not overcome the forces of death.

On Easter Sunday a new physical constitution without any mineral content comes into being. Christianity is the religion of the body – the redemption of the physical body from the mineral into a pure spiritualised physical body.

Holy Monday presents an image of a new reality. The Fig Tree is representative of an old path of initiation. The Fig Tree occurs throughout the Gospels. In John’s Gospel when Philip introduced Nathaneal to Jesus, Jesus says to Nathaneal, “I saw you under the Fig Tree before Philip called you”. Luke tells of Zacchaeus who climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see Jesus. The donkey and the colt of a donkey are tied in the place of the Fig Tree where the disciples untie them on Palm Sunday. On Holy Monday Jesus curses the Fig Tree and says that it will no longer bear fruit for humanity.

The Fig Tree represents a specific stream of spiritual training that opened up the initiate to an atavistic clairvoyance in which pictures of the world of spirit were made available to the initiate from outside. These visions were given to the specially prepared initiate with the help of a hierophant.

This stream of initiation is being superseded by the deed and sacrifice of Christ. Within a few days the Risen One will enter the Inner Room and breathe the Holy Spirit into the disciples. At this stage only John is aware of the Holy Spirit. The other ten will experience the Holy Spirit in the sound like the rush of wind and the tongues of fire that enter into those sitting in the circle at Pentecost.

The new seed planted by Christ into the human constitution only begins to germinate in the fourteenth century. Jesus says that the new way is through Faith. Faith is not a blind belief, but a trust born out of knowledge. Knowledge comes through an inner path of opening up to the world of spirit and experiencing something thereby. In order to become receptive to the world of spirit we must offer our availability to the Spiritual World.

The Sacrament of Consultation begins with the idea of an offering. We are called upon to offer our thinking to the Divine. The effectiveness of the thinking that precedes the sacrament and can be offered up will clarify for us what it is that we are offering.

Holy Tuesday represents a battle between the traditional ways of being and a new way of thinking. It is control through an outer law versus a new freedom that arises through inner morality. This battle that begins on Holy Tuesday is still being waged today. Human beings generally have still not developed their inner life to the extent that their actions are driven solely by an inner morality. Much of human activity is still driven by our subconscious without the control of the ‘I’-constitution.

Jesus counters the accusations that are levelled at him by making it clear that he has no will but the will of the Father. He tries to raise the consciousness of his accusers to this higher will.

The second aspect of the Sacrament of Consultation is our will. The counter-flow to our offering is the in streaming of our highest will. We connect with our pre-birth will of incarnation in full consciousness through the Sacrament of Consultation.

We learn through Holy Tuesday that it is precarious to be ahead of the times. The Christian Community and the work of Anthroposophy are to lead humanity forward. This is only achieved when we work harder on ourselves. It is not possible to change the current paradigm through rationality. But through how we are in our being we can influence the world around us. This comes about through our inner work. People want to live comfortably. Outer rules and convenience create comfort. We need to be prepared to offer up what holds us back in order to do the work that will take us forward. Nothing new comes without sacrifice.

Holy Wednesday is a day of calm that ends in a meal. There is turmoil at the meal. A careful reading of John’s Gospel suggests that Christ was busy in the first weeks after the Baptism and in the last weeks before the final entry into Jerusalem. In between there seems to have been very little outwardly occurring in the life of Jesus. Most of the time was spent in prayer.

We are citizens of two worlds. One world places outer demands on us and the other world we do not really know. This is the Spiritual World. Most of our activity in life is not related to where humanity is going. We need to find active restfulness in our lives if we wish to connect with the spiritual world. When we achieve this connection we may feel backed in our normal activity. Without this backing from the world of spirit we feel alone and the result is anxiety, stress and even burnout.

We can identify each of the people present at the meal at the end of the day within us. Lazarus who had recently been raised from the tomb and who was transformed on a spiritual level. Mary, the woman who had had demons driven from her, and had been healed on an astral level. Martha, the woman who had suffered from an issue of blood, who had been healed on an etheric level. Judas, who acts out of physical drives. Martha is frenetic in her preparation and Judas is frenetic in his condemnation. Mary transforms her energy into a deep reverence and performs an act that she does not comprehend herself.

Someone must lead in the development of humanity, but in taking humanity forward they will be left behind in helping everyone catch up. The first will be last and the last first. This is a law in the development of humanity. We must learn to be servants to those it is given us to help.

The Wednesday meal and the anointing of the feet belong to the stillness. It is the sustenance of the stillness that sustains us. In the Sacrament of Consultation the third aspect is peacefulness of soul.

Maundy Thursday is filled with significance. Jesus sends his disciples to find a man carrying water. In the tradition of the Jews it was the women who carried water. It was only in the Essene tradition where men carried water. The Upper Room where the meal is prepared is steeped in history. This room is on Mount Zion, the place where Melchizedek prepared the offering of bread and wine that he presented to Abraham. Melchizedek was the priest of the Sun Mysteries. These Sun Mysteries continued underground until they were able to surface again in the stream of humanity in the offering of Christ at the Last Supper.

Because the Last Supper occurred within the Essene Order we know that no alcoholic wine was served. The Essene Order were about the purification of their astral nature. Directly across the road was the house of the Chief Priest who was himself preparing for the Passover.

The traditional of the Pascal lamb began in Egypt when the Israelites were instructed to slaughter a lamb and use the blood to mark their doorpost of their house. There were further instructed to prepare the meal of lamb’s meat and bread, but there was no time to leaven the bread. No bone of the lamb was to be broken. They were to eat standing up with staff in hand ready to depart. The Angel of Death would pass over each house marked with the blood of the lamb but in every other house the first born – the one who would carry forward the line of succession – was killed.

This meal was prophetic for the Christ who becomes the Pascal Lamb for humanity and takes on the task of disempowering the Angel of Death that would kill the first-born, the ‘I’-constitution, of human beings.

After the meal Jesus fulfils the prophetic meal of Melchizedek.

The Fall took effect in our warmth constitution. The offering of animal blood was a surrogate for the warmth of human beings. This warmth is offered as penance to the Spiritual World. The blood of the goat becomes the scapegoat for the warmth of the human being that is offered in sacrifice to the Spiritual World.

The second meal, the offering of Melchizedek, lays a seed into the human being that germinated in the 14th century which will enable us to make the offering out of our souls. Christ constitutes the making whole of the human being in the four parts of this meal.

The washing of the feet of the disciples was a sacramental process of what Christ’s earthly life and Resurrection is about. Before the meal of the Bread and Wine love lived in the constitution of the human being, it lived in the blood. It was not an awareness but rather a fact that a Greek loved all Greeks, etc. With the meal of Bread and Wine a new spiritual love can arise in human beings that transcends blood ties. This action is an expression of the essence of the gospel.

The Logos, the creator of all life on earth, humbles Himself to wash the feet of His creation. His body becomes the earth. We walk on the body of Christ.

Christ is able to redeem the mineral element of the human being because no bone in his body is broken – no bone of the Pascal Lamb is broken. No spirit could penetrate that deeply into earthly matter before. His offering.
Christ pours his etheric substance into the physical substance of the bread and the wine to transubstantiate these physical substances into the substances of his body and his blood. This pouring out of his etheric forces is the beginning of his death process. The transubstantiation.

Passover is on Friday; the Last Supper is on Thursday night. John presents it as the night before Passover. On the night of Passover, no one left the house as the Angel of Death roamed outside. Judas is the first to leave the house to cross the road to the house of the Chief Priest to betray Jesus. He walks in the realm of the Angel of Death.  Jesus also, then leaves the house to do battle with the realm of death. Jesus has already begun to pour out his etheric and formative forces.

The Communion, the fourth part of the Act of Consecration of Man, is the discourse in which Christ reveals to his disciples His relationship to the Father.

In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus battles to hold his physical body together. It is only with the help of the angelic world that he is able to accomplish this. This help is symbolised by the youth fleeing from the Garden. These beings offer up etheric forces to Jesus. The blood that flows from Jesus during his prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane is his shedding his old physical constitution as Christ penetrates into the deepest aspects of the physical constitution to spiritualise it.

Maundy Thursday is the revelation of the spiritual world of God.

Good Friday: When on the cross the lance pierces the side of Christ and blood and water flows from the wound, these are new etheric forces that begin the process of the etherisation of the earth that in the future is to become a sun.

When Jesus is given the vinegar on the cross this jolts him into full consciousness to the awareness that the last of the physical has been fully penetrated by the Christ and he can now say: “It is complete”.

When the body is laid in the earth it immediately turns to ash and in the subsequent earthquakes the earth absorbs the body completely.

The laying of the seed of the physical body of Jesus, fully spiritualised by Christ, into the earth is the turning point of time in the trajectory of the earth away from the spirit to begin its return to the spirit.

Holy Saturday is possibly the most dramatic day of Holy Week, but nothing is said about it in scripture. We come to a full understanding by firstly understanding the incarnation of Christ.

The Baptism in the Jordan is the conception of Christ into the sphere of the earth. The gestation is the three year period between the Baptism and the Crucifixion during which the spiritual intact idea of the Human Being transforms the physical body of Jesus. Once this transformation is complete a completely new constitution comes into being that is spiritual. The death on the cross is the birth of Christ into the earth. The flow of the blood from the cross is the birth of Christ into the earth. This process is quite the opposite of our death. When we die our soul and spirit leave the earth. The Resurrection Body is the Phantom Body that replaces the physical human constitution of Jesus.

The moment that Christ has the experience of hunger, following the Baptism and the forty days in the wilderness, Christ becomes subject to the adversary forces that rule the world of earth. As the Christ makes whole (heals) the physical body of Jesus these forces of healing (making whole) become available to all of humanity. These are the healing deeds of Christ during the three years. The transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, as said above, are only possible because Christ streams his etheric forces into these substances. At this point the body of Jesus dies and it only through His will forces and spiritual assistance that He keeps the body going until the ultimate death on the cross. When the body is laid into the tomb it turns to ash which is taken into the earth during the earthquakes that follow.

For every impulse there is an opposite impulse that arises. This is the nature of the duality of earthly existence. Without light darkness does not exist.

In the evolution of the human being new faculties come into being. These faculties become available from the Godhead through the hierarchies. The development of the human being passes from one hierarchy to the next. As each faculty comes into being its polar opposite, that which can destroy it, also comes into being. It comes into being as a spiritual being but it will eventually materialise through warmth, air, water into mineral existence. All physical material substance is densified light.

Our continued development is possible only because of the earth. Here the polarities of the creative impulse exist. In a sense they are banished to the earth. Rudolf Steiner provides us with an understanding of the inner being of the earth. The mineral sheath is like the shell of an egg holding in the rest of the earth. The physical constitution of the earth is directly related to the constitution of the human being, but in a negative sense. It contains the polarities that came into existence as a result of the developing faculties (constitution) of the human being.

There are divine forces that work down into the human being and there are adversary forces that work up from within the earth into the human being. The human being is the meeting point of these divine and adversarial forces.

As we begin to awaken into our individuality we will choose with which of the forces we will align ourselves, the divine forces or the negative forces. Christ brings into the human being the impulse to awaken to our individuality.

We may consider each Christian-era century to have the quality of one year of development of a human being’s life. By the 21st century we are twenty one. We can reflect on the development of Christianity and see how it follows the development of a child. The first 300 years were the golden years. Thereafter Christianity became a state religion and became fixed and hardened. The development of a child recapitulates the development of the human being. It is the understanding of this process of development that sets Waldorf Education apart as it matches the development of the child’s path of recapitulation of human development.

We can look forward and realise that somewhere between the ages of 28 and 35 the human being breaks with the intentions that were set for them by their family, education and society and decides to do what is uniquely theirs. In the time before a life transition is reached the tools are made available. Thus, Anthroposophy and The Christian Community were given to humanity one hundred years before we can fully understand their use and can effectively begin to work with these tools.

When we awaken the individuality, the forces from the centre of the earth will work to subdue this awakening.
The journey of Christ on Holy Saturday into the centre of the earth was to break the stranglehold of the forces within the earth on the development of the human being. This makes Holy Saturday the most dramatic day of Holy Week.

The human being lives at the meeting point of mighty spiritual forces from the centre of the earth which we can subdue by aligning ourselves with the being of Christ. It is in us that the forces of evil are transformed through the Christ forces. This transformation occurs in us through us allowing it, and aligning with the Christ-in-me.
The negative forces have a legitimate role to play and an illegitimate role. Michael does not slay the dragon but subdues it, he subdues the illegitimate role.

The possibility for the human being to awaken forces to withstand the negative forces of earth is the work of Christ on Holy Saturday in his descent into the earth.

The thoughts that we entertain will shape our existence. In our time the attention that we have to give is the most lucrative commodity in the cyber world that we possess.

We are only now beginning to understand the gospel. The definition of death is the place where the will of the Father is withdrawn. Therefore Jesus says that he can do nothing but the will of the Father. Resurrection can occur only through the presence of the will of the Father.

Easter Sunday is the eighth day. It is the octave that raises the events of Palm Sunday to a higher level in the Resurrection of Christ.