Justin Appel
Dear Friends in Christ,
As we arrive at the end of this Lenten season, I am happy to see the lectionary contains Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians:
‘Rejoice in the Lord; again I will say, Rejoice’ (Phil. 4:4).
It may seem a counter-intuitive to find such an uplifting message just preceding this somber period we call ‘Passiontide’ or the ‘Triduum’. But perhaps the surprise we feel (I felt it today, sure) is a symptom of our tendency to divide up these historical events in the life of Christ and attempt to ‘live them over’.
Take the Triduum, for example. It is certainly possible to divide these three days into different kinds of commemorations: the ambivalence of the Last Supper, the terror of Christ’s crucifixion, and the numb sadness of waiting at the grave. These things become separate periods of time, three different economies, three episodes in an unfolding drama, after which comes resurrection.
All of this is good; it's a natural and an ‘earthy’ way of reliving these days in Jerusalem and making them our story too.
But the Christian attitude toward time is complex. We don’t just relive the past, nor do we forget the implications of these stories for the present and future. The Paschal mystery has always had a unative quality, by which we memorialize Christ’s death and suffering while recognizing that he has definitively conquered death. We grieve, knowing that our sins have crucified our Lord, but also we enter into the joy of Easter with a serious sense of the weighty nature of our deliverance from sin and death.
It is probable that the early Christians understood this ‘Pascha’ as a deliverance, as a ‘passing over’ recalling the deliverance of the Israelites from their Egyptian captors. They also expected the Lord to return at any moment, so they kept a Paschal vigil expectantly. The past formed their attitude towards the present moment.
How does this affect us today? We can enter into the lows and highs of this Triduum taking St. Paul’s message to heart — ‘Rejoice in the Lord always’ — because we know what has already happened!
Yours in Christ,
Justin
P.S. Below you can find a wonderful English setting of this passage by Henry Purcell. Notice the lovely ‘bells’ heard in descending string lines!