Passion Sunday: An Anglican Perspective

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

The Fifth Sunday in Lent occupies a distinctive place in the Anglican liturgical year. It is not a Principal Feast and not a Red-Letter Holy Day. It is a Sunday within the season of Lent, and it has a name: Passion Sunday. The BCP 2019 appoints a collect on page 606 and lectionary readings on page 721 for this Sunday, noting its name as a subtitle beneath the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Like Good Shepherd Sunday in the fourth week of Easter and Rogation Sunday in the sixth week of Easter, Passion Sunday is a named Sunday with a distinctive theological emphasis — in this case, the sharpening of Lent’s focus as the cross comes into view and the final week of the season approaches.

Passion Sunday stands one week before Palm Sunday. Holy Week is now within sight. The season has moved through repentance, self-examination, and the discipline of Lent, and now it arrives at this final Sunday before the drama of the Passion begins in earnest. The collect does not speak of the cross directly. It speaks of disordered wills, of loving what God commands, of fixing the heart where true joys are to be found. But it is precisely in this interior territory — the unruly will, the wandering affection, the heart that desires the wrong things — that the cross does its deepest work. Passion Sunday is the Sunday on which Lent names what the Passion is for.

Liturgical Context

Lent is the Church’s forty-day season of preparation for Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. It is a season of fasting, self-examination, and penitential prayer — a time when the Church accompanies Jesus into the wilderness and reflects on the cost of sin and the grace of redemption. The six Sundays of Lent — five numbered Sundays plus Palm Sunday, which opens Holy Week — each carry their own collect and lectionary readings, tracing an arc from the wilderness temptation of the First Sunday through the deepening approach to the Passion.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent is the last Sunday of Lent proper, after which Holy Week begins. The name Passion Sunday reflects a tradition in which this Sunday marked the beginning of Passiontide — a two-week intensification of Lenten observance, distinguished historically by the veiling of crosses and statues and the removal of the Gloria Patri from the liturgy. The BCP 2019 does not prescribe this full Passiontide practice, but it retains the name as a theological marker: this Sunday, the suffering of Christ begins to occupy the foreground. The Passion is no longer approaching from the distance. It is here.

The Appointed Readings

The lectionary readings for Passion Sunday are found on page 721 of the BCP 2019 and vary by year. Across all three years they hold together the themes of death, resurrection, and the cost of following Christ — pressing the Lenten season toward its Paschal destination.

Year A appoints Ezekiel 37:1–14, Psalm 130, Romans 6:15–23, and John 11:(1–17)18–44 — the raising of Lazarus. The vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is the prophetic counterpart to the Lazarus account: “Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.” (Ezekiel 37:12, ESV) The God who breathes life into dead bones is the God who stands before a tomb and commands: “Lazarus, come out.” (John 11:43, ESV) Psalm 130, the great penitential psalm of waiting — “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” — is the soul’s posture before both readings: waiting for the God who raises the dead, hoping in his steadfast love. Romans 6:15–23 presses the resurrection into the ethics of daily life: freed from sin, the believer is now a slave of righteousness, bearing fruit that leads to sanctification and eternal life. The arc of Year A on Passion Sunday moves from death to resurrection to new life — the arc of Holy Week in miniature.

Year B appoints Jeremiah 31:31–34, Psalm 51 or 51:10–15, Hebrews (4:14–16) 5:1–10, and John 12:20–33(34–36). Jeremiah 31:31–34 is the great new covenant passage — “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” (Jeremiah 31:33, ESV) — the prophetic vision of a transformed interiority that the collect’s petition for ordered wills and affections echoes directly. The collect’s petition for grace to love what God commands and desire what he promises is the human counterpart to exactly this promise: Jeremiah envisions God writing the law on human hearts so that his people will love and desire what he commands. The collect and the Year B Old Testament reading are asking for and promising the same interior transformation from different directions. Hebrews 5:1–10 presents Christ as the great high priest appointed from among human beings, who learned obedience through what he suffered. And John 12:20–33 is the pivotal passage in which Jesus announces the hour of his glorification: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24, ESV) The cross is named directly on Passion Sunday in Year B. The grain of wheat, the hour of glorification, the drawing of all people to himself when he is lifted up — the readings do not soften the approach to Holy Week.

Year C appoints Isaiah 43:16–21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:7–16, and Luke 20:9–19 — the parable of the wicked tenants. Isaiah 43 opens with the declaration: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19, ESV) Philippians 3:7–16 is Paul’s great renunciation — counting all things as loss for the sake of knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings. And the parable of the wicked tenants in Luke 20 ends with the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone, and Jesus looking at the chief priests and scribes who will shortly deliver him to Pilate.

The Theological Significance

Passion Sunday is the Sunday on which Lent’s interior work and the exterior event of the Passion are drawn into explicit connection. The season has asked the Church to examine its disordered loves, its wayward affections, its tendency to desire the wrong things and to fix the heart on what is passing rather than what is permanent. Now, one week before the cross, the Church is asked to see what those disordered loves cost — and what the Passion accomplished for them.

The collect’s petition is notable for what it does not ask. It does not ask for strength to endure the remaining days of Lent. It does not ask for understanding of the Passion or for feelings appropriate to Holy Week. It asks that the heart would be fixed where true joys are to be found. This is the interior disposition the Passion calls forth: not grief managed correctly, but love rightly ordered, the will brought into alignment with what God commands and promises. Augustine’s famous words from the Confessions hover behind the collect: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Passion Sunday is the Sunday on which that restlessness is named most sharply, because the cross is in view and the question it presses is: where is your heart fixed?

The raising of Lazarus in Year A is among the most theologically charged passages in John’s Gospel, and its appointment on Passion Sunday is exact. Jesus weeps at Lazarus’s tomb before he raises him — “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35, ESV) — the shortest verse in the Bible and one of the most theologically significant. The Son of God, who is about to demonstrate his power over death, stands at the grave of his friend and weeps. The Incarnation means that death is not a matter of indifference to God. It costs him something. And the raising of Lazarus is not simply a miracle. It is the sign that points forward to what Jesus will accomplish in his own death and resurrection — and the act that precipitates his own: it is immediately after the raising of Lazarus that the chief priests and Pharisees begin to plot in earnest to put him to death.

The BCP 2019 Collect and Preface

The BCP 2019 appoints the following collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent on page 606: “Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” The collect is one of the most psychologically honest in the entire BCP. It begins with a confession: we have unruly wills and disordered affections, and only God can bring them into order. It asks for the grace to love what God commands — not merely to obey it, but to love it. And it asks for the heart to be fixed where true joys are to be found. The whole of Lenten discipline points toward this: a heart reoriented toward God, freed from the tyranny of lesser desires, capable of receiving what God has promised. The cross, which stands at the end of the week following this Sunday, is the means by which that reorientation is accomplished.

The Preface of Lent, found on page 153 of the BCP 2019, governs this Sunday as it governs every Sunday and weekday of the Lenten season: “You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast; that, fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and renewed by your Word and Sacraments, they may come to the fullness of grace which you have prepared for those who love you.” (BCP 2019, p. 153) Read on Passion Sunday, the Lenten preface carries particular weight. The Paschal feast for which the Church has been preparing is now one week away. The cleansing of the heart the preface names — through prayer, works of mercy, and renewal by Word and Sacraments — is the work that Lent has been doing, and that Holy Week will complete. The collect asks for the rightly ordered heart; the preface names the means by which God grants it.

Passion Sunday in Anglican Worship

The name Passion Sunday and the observance of Passiontide — the two-week period from this Sunday through Holy Saturday — has a long history in the Western Church. In the traditional liturgical calendar, Passiontide was marked by the veiling of crosses and images in purple or red, the omission of the Gloria Patri, and an intensified focus on the Passion narrative in the daily offices. The BCP 2019 does not mandate these practices, but many Anglican parishes observe them as a natural deepening of the Lenten atmosphere. The veiling of the cross in particular is a powerful visual catechism: the cross is not hidden because it is shameful, but because its full unveiling is reserved for Good Friday, when the Church’s gaze is ready to receive it fully.

Purple or violet vestments continue throughout Lent, including on Passion Sunday, marking the penitential character of the season through its final Sunday before Holy Week changes the color to red. The liturgy on this Sunday may incorporate the reading of one of the Year’s Passion Gospel texts from the lectionary — particularly John 11 in Year A or John 12 in Year B — which begins to draw the congregation into the narrative that Palm Sunday will continue and Good Friday will complete. The arc from Passion Sunday through Easter is one continuous movement, and the Sunday before Palm Sunday is where that movement accelerates.

Observing This Sunday

To observe Passion Sunday: pray the collect from BCP 2019, p. 606, and let its petition be honest — asking genuinely for the grace to love what God commands rather than what the disordered will prefers. Read the appointed lessons for the year. In Year A, read John 11:1–44 in full and sit with Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb before commanding him out of it. Read Ezekiel 37:1–14 and hear the breath of God moving over the dead bones. In Year B, read John 12:20–33 and hear Jesus name the hour of the grain of wheat — the death that bears much fruit. Read Jeremiah 31:31–34 and receive the promise of the law written on the heart. In Year C, read Philippians 3:7–16 and let Paul’s renunciation of all things for the sake of knowing Christ press the question of what the heart is actually fixed upon.

Let the week that follows — the final week of Lent before Holy Week — be shaped by the collect’s petition. The swift and varied changes of this world will not stop. The invitation of Passion Sunday is to fix the heart, amid all of it, where true joys are to be found — and to arrive at Palm Sunday ready to follow the humble King all the way to the cross.

Conclusion

Passion Sunday is not a feast and not a holy day. It is the Fifth Sunday in Lent — a named Sunday with a name that carries weight. The Passion is in view. The cross is one week from Palm Sunday. The collect asks for what the season has been working toward: a will brought into order, a heart fixed on true joys, the grace to love what God commands and desire what he promises. It is a small but precise petition, and it is exactly the right prayer for the Sunday on which Lent sharpens into the Passion.

“Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” (BCP 2019, p. 606)