When we lived in Sudbury our downtown congregation joined with two others, one United Church, the other Anglican, for a Holy Saturday evening service. It was powerful for everyone involved but also demanding after Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the anticipation of Easter morning. When our dedicated choir showed up at our home carrying torches I knew it was time to reconsider -- kidding!
In the years after we ended our participation Saturday was an oasis of calm in a hectic week, unless I ended up with a funeral, which happened more than once.
Today I'm mindful of the unusual intersection of Jewish Passover/Pesach, Muslim Ramadan, and Christian Holy Week/Easter -- even Orthodox Holy Week fits in. There is an excellent piece in today's Globe and Mail regarding the significance of this convergence by Charles L. Cohenm the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction.
I'll share a few paragraphs with you, and perhaps we can all ponder what we share in common, even while we honour the truths of our traditions and our convictions:
You could argue that the current convergence of Ramadan, Passover and Easter is an incidental curiosity, hardly indicative of a more substantive relationship between the traditions – but there is more to the matter than that. In fact, the festivals’ current proximity provides the occasion for discovering deeper congruities between the traditions. The religions share some critical fundamentals: devotion to the one God, reverence for Abraham and sacred literatures that are inter-referential. Fasting may be central to Ramadan, but it is hardly a Muslim monopoly; Jews and Christians have fasts of their own.
The histories of the three traditions have braided themselves together for more than a millennium; adherents of each have shared ideas and customs even as they constructed separate religious identities. Whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover meal, some Christians have recently started to hold their own, Christ-centred seders to reflect on their faith’s Jewish roots. Ramadan echoes elements of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, both of them fasts that also recall the divine revelation of scripture.
The convergence’s newsworthiness might thus be interpreted as a popular acknowledgment that Judaism, Christianity and Islam comprise a family of religions bound together by their worship of Abraham’s one God even as they differ – often significantly – about details. That Ramadan, Passover and Easter all come close together this year – a transient phenomenon that will nevertheless come again – mirrors the dynamic that has characterized Abrahamic relationships throughout history: Jews, Christians and Muslims have continually drawn upon each other’s heritages to model, and remodel, their own.
Now, if we could just add an imam to the cartoon below...
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