Published in Spirituality
Vol.18, Mar/Apr 2012; No. 101
The Paschal Mystery
Holy Thursday
Triduum (three days) is in no need of any superimposed theme. The theme of these high holy days is the transformational movement of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus as commemorated and concelebrated in the linked liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday. But the paschal mystery, if it is to become our lived mystery, does evoke questions if we but open the ears of our heart and listen.
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that the character of persons is evidenced more in the questions they ask than in the convenient answers they are all too ready to offer and that “to make known one’s questions is, no doubt, to come out in the open oneself.” Jewish author and sage Elie Wiesel once wrote that when he was a young boy the town’s holy fool, Moshe the Beadle, taught him “that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” When young Elie asked his poor barefoot master, “And why do you pray, Moshe?” the wise-fool said, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”
Questions are important. They reveal a lot about who we are and whose we are; about who we are becoming as questing people and about who God is for us. Triduum is an opportune time to reflect together on what the essential questions are for us as people of faith, as followers of Jesus. It might be wise to pray to God to help us discover the burning questions of our time. The gospel for the Feast of the Lord’s Supper offers us some clues. Will we let Jesus wash our feet? If like Peter’s first response, we resist, why do we resist Jesus’ gentle yet profound gesture? Do we realize what Jesus has done for us, how Jesus stoops to conquer—self-absorption, greed, indifference toward others, senseless violence, the abuse of power, racism, religion that stays within church walls masquerading as faith, unnecessary poverty and disease, self-loathing, loneliness, and despair– by giving us an example of mercy in action? What will it require of me to be a towel woman or a towel man? What will it cost us to be a community of foot washers? What will it cost us if we are not? Have we lost the meaning of Jesus’ first graceful action as depicted in this evening’s gospel (taking, blessing, breaking and sharing bread) by neglecting the second compassionate action described (washing feet)?
Good Friday
The 13th century German mystic, theologian, and preacher Meister Eckhart once said that the question of Christmas is “What does it matter that the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus 2,000 years ago if I do not give birth to Jesus in my own day?” Perhaps the question today is not “were you there when they crucified my Lord?” but rather where, when, and how is Christ being crucified today. Where is Christi’s body being bruised, broken, and dehumanized in this place and in this time? The urgent questions Good Friday evokes are whether or not we are awake and alert to, haunted and grieved by, concerned about and responsive to the suffering of Christ in our world now? Why and about what is God weeping today? The pressing and prophetic question is will we make God’s anguish our own?
Before his assassination, Archbishop Oscar Romero taught us that to share in the anguish of God means “to share in the destiny of the poor.” Before we can “let him easter in us,” to borrow Hopkin’s famous line about Christ, we must be in solidarity with those who are being crucified in our own day. Committed not merely to mimicking Jesus but to transposing into our lives and world the saving compassion he embodied as he hung between two criminals, what is paramount for Christians is not just what happened at Calvary but what we do with what happened at Calvary. To make the sign of the cross is to align ourselves with all crucified people in our midst and beyond. To trace the cruciform on our body means to sign on for more than just staring at, giving money to, or praying for those who suffer. As the Jesuit theologians Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino insist it means to ask and to act on the questions who and where are the crucified ones today and how can we take them down from the cross?
Easter
Easter comes. Into all of creation groaning for God’s salvation, Easter comes. Into a weary world whose natural resources are squandered or hoarded or sold for profit, Easter comes. Into communities and neighborhoods marred by poverty and violence, scarred by hopelessness and fear, Easter comes. As an emphatic answer to our human and holy quest, Easter comes. Into the deep yearning of our lives, lives that like exquisite garments bear the moth-eaten pock marks from betrayal, duplicity, pettiness, callousness, and moments when like Jesus we felt completely abandoned by God, Easter comes. Out of nowhere, out of death, out of the heart of darkness which was caged and cradled in the heart of God, Easter comes. As the too-good-to-be-true good news, as the inconceivable new possibility, as the answer of amazing grace, Easter comes.
But does Easter not also come as an ongoing question, as even more than the great gift from the great mercy of God? Once graciously and jubilantly received, does Easter not also ask something of us, dare I say it, require something of us? And is that not too an amazing surprise, an equally unexpected and unearned gift? Was it not already an embarrassment of riches to be created as images of God, to be deemed children of God, to be called people of God without also being showered with this final bequest, to be invited to be partners of God? But how do we do this? How do we give away even a piece of the garment of new life with which God has so lavishly clothed us? Perhaps the words of the poet Wendell Berry are enough food for thought and action during this season of the Rising Son: “Practice resurrection.”
by DANIEL J. MILLER, Ph.D.