The holiest week of the Christian year has begun, and we are on the brink of the most important liturgy of the entire Christian year. It is one liturgy in three acts: The Paschal Triduum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter. In the Triduum, we come closest to how the Church’s ancient Holy Week liturgies were celebrated. Rather than commemorating different events in Jesus’s life separately, the earliest liturgies of Holy Week were observed in one long liturgy, centered around the historical locations of the final moments of Jesus’s earthly life. While there were pauses within the liturgy for practical reasons (i.e., so people could eat and rest), the liturgy of Holy Week was meant to encompass all the events of Jesus final hours on earth. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the passion, the cross, the empty tomb: they are all there in the way the earliest Christians celebrated Holy Week.
This is important because it means that, if we participate in all the Triduum liturgies, we aren’t given the option of choosing what we want to experience, suffering or glory. If we’re going to have salvation, it comes with the whole package: Jesus’s earthly life, his saving deeds, his ministry, his teaching, his suffering, his death, and his resurrection from the dead. When we participate in all the liturgies of the Paschal Triduum, we must acknowledge our own suffering and sinfulness. We must be honest. We must go into the darkest moments of existence with our own selves and with others. We don’t get to pick Easter alone from a buffet of offerings. We either have all of the Paschal Mystery, or we don’t have it at all.
If you have never before experienced all the liturgies of Holy Week, would you consider making time to do so this year? I believe you will be changed. If you truly want to understand the Christian faith, these liturgies will teach you about the deepest mystery of the Gospel.
Here’s some of the good news we will find this week: When truth itself has lost its moorings, eternal Truth speaks confidently in the faces of lies. When immigrants are allowed to die at the border of a country that could offer them a better life, the Risen Christ stands at that border, too, wounds and all, to give them life. When racism continues to play out in insidious ways publicly and privately, we are shown in the mystery of baptism the potential to rise to new life from the death of our sinful prejudices. When hateful rhetoric demonizes our Jewish brothers and sisters, the heirs of God’s first covenantal promises, we know that the mystery of salvation surpasses heinous scapegoating. When LGBTQ+ youth are denied support and safety by the state, leading some to suicidal despair, and while some may wish to wash their hands of their blood, the Good Shepherd finds the lost and brings them home. When death speaks all its accusing lies, the voice of the Risen One tells each of us that we are loved and all that is past can be forgiven.
This is not a week for triumphalist glory. It is a week to celebrate that our truest hope meets us in darkest despair, not with easy answers or facile solutions, but with patience and long-suffering compassion. May you find the loving embrace of the Risen Christ in all the varied emotional moments of this week. In the Paschal Mystery, may you find the salvation offered to the entire world. And may this week be a blessing to you and yours.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle