As I write these words, we are (in linear time, at least) somewhere between Jesus’s betrayal and arrest and his crucifixion. As you read them, perhaps he is already on the cross. But, of course, we are in God’s time, not linear time. Every day, Jesus is crucified and every day he is risen, and yet for these Three Sacred Days of the Paschal Triduum, we try to enter God’s time and make some theological sense of what is happening.
The greatest temptation right now is to jump to Easter, so, now, I’m not writing with easy assurances of the Easter greeting. While we are always partially in Easter, but at this moment, we need to linger with the uncomfortable silence of the aftermath of Jesus’s death and his resting in the tomb. This is the space that most people wish to flee. The silence of our lives as we are with Jesus in the cold tomb causes all our unanswered questions, grief, pain, suffering, insecurity, anger, and envy to surface. But if we are to be redeemed, these things must come out. We must hand them over to God. And now is the time.
Every year, I find myself putting most other work on hold for a week or two as I finalize liturgy leaflets, write sermons, work on liturgical customaries, practice chanting, and ensure that all is in order for Holy Week services. While it may be tempting at times to imagine this as a waste of time, it is not. As I’ve said before, the liturgies of the Triduum are the earthly context in which we are “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). And because I believe this is true, then all the time rehearsing with acolytes, printing leaflets, decorating the church, and attending the liturgies themselves is at the heart of who we are as people living in Christ.
I’m deeply grateful to all who are assisting with the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter: liturgical participants, Altar Guild, musicians, staff, and countless others who serve behind the scenes. Thank you. It’s a delight this year to have the Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley with us as our guest preacher for the Triduum, as well as guests in our retreat house, who are spending this holy time with us. Thank you to those helping with retreat hospitality.
I pray that these Three Days may be a blessed gift in which you rush not to Easter too quickly but stay on the cross and then in the tomb for a time. God is there with you, as the poet Malcolm Guite says in a meditation on the Stations of the Cross, “on his knees” with you. And when we rush to the tomb on Easter morning, we bring all that has surfaced this week and let God take it and redeem it. I leave you with this poem by the late Anglican priest and poet R.S. Thomas:
The Answer
Not darkness but twilight
In which even the best
of minds must make its way
now. And slowly the questions
occur, vague but formidable
for all that. We pass our hands
over their surface like blind
men feeling for the mechanism
that will swing them aside. They
yield, but only to reform
as new problems; and one
does not even do that
but towers immovable
before us
Is there no way
of other thought of answering
its challenge? There is an anticipation
of it to the point of
dying. There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.
(R.S. Thomas Collected Poems: 1945-1990, Phoenix Publishing, p. 359)