Justin Appel
Dear Friends in Christ,
Today is the Wednesday in Holy Week, that moment of calm before the deep plunge that is the Paschal Triduum.
These three days are the fulcrum point of our revolving world, the heaviest and densest moment in the cycle of our liturgical life. All our hopes, our potential, our desire to know and become united with Christ are coming to a critical point. We sense the past, present, and future converging in the mystical nature of these Three Days.
Today, I would like to meditate on the movement that is already beginning, by listening to the glorious 7th-century hymn, Vexilla regis prodeunt, written by Venantius Fortunatus.
The Roman Missal places this hymn on Good Friday at the moment when the Sacrament is taken in procession to the high altar. The context is thus a mixture of Eucharistic overtones with the adoration of the Cross itself (the original purpose of the hymn was for a procession of a relic of the True Cross).
This hymn paints the Cross with strangely beautiful imagery, addressing it thus:
“Arbor decora et fulgida”
O Tree! In radiant beauty bright!
The tree becomes blessed, transformed by contact with “the blessed limbs” of the God-Man. Now, the “mystic Cross” which “refulgent glows” become a throne from which “our God hath reignèd.”
The image of the crucified Christ, laid out as a supine corpse, as Bishop Maxim Vasiljevic reminds us, reveals “the true ethos of the Church, which reveals the ethos of the cross and resurrection,” for “the hanged dead Man is already the King of Glory.”
On the cross, death was conquered by Love—a reality which is central to the meaning of these holy days. We, who were created by Love, through Love, and for Love, have been delivered from death by Love. The tree of the cross reveals the true nature of this Love, as the Word of God delivered himself to this death “of his own will,” to save us all from death.
So, as we approach these days, let us enter into the Paschal joy fully, embracing the grief and pathos of Christ’s passion, which is summed up in the imagery of the cross. As we do this, let us also look forward to that bright day when, as the old Paschal liturgy, “Now are all things filled with light!”
Yours in Christ,
—Justin
