Sacred Triduum – Communio

Entering the Sacred Triduum

“This is a warning to all Catholics & Orthodox. Holy Week is Serious Business for serious disciples of Jesus Christ. The Sacred Rites (aka “ceremonies”) are not incidentally or accidentally lengthly. They are deliberately lush with the symbols of Worship at the heart of which is the Lord Jesus the Christ Himself. Entering into the Mysteries of the Triduum (Holy Thursday/Good Friday/Holy Saturday) sweeps us from lenten preparation and plunges us into the waters of Baptism where we drown to worldly allurements and arise to Easter Joy. These are deep waters, still waters where the testimony of the apostles and disciples churn among the testimonies of evangelists, martyrs, monks, nuns, and Households in Christ made holy through wives and husbands dedicated to Christian Living among truly heathen tribes and cultures. Here we join this communion of saints to refresh our souls, rededicate our bodily existence to the announcement of the Gospel — In Christ, God and Man are reconciled. May the Blessings of this Holy Week drive from us whatever is insipid and feeble. May it revest us with such Grace that will make us “strong, loving, wise” witnesses to Christ in this place and age.”

Courtesy of Fr. William Seifert

Good Friday for the Orthodox Christians

Today our Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters are observing their Paschal Triduum according to the Julian calendar. The beauty of our Church is the ability to allow different and venerable traditions to co-exist.

We can do nothing apart from the Paschal Mystery of Christ. Hence, it is key to keep in mind that the Cross and Resurrection is central to our Hope in communion with God. In this Mystery we come to know the transformative nature of Love. Regrettably, too many Catholics and dare I say, Orthodox, have forgotten the centrality of the Mystery.

Let us pray for our Orthodox brethren during these days.

“Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon a Tree,
He who is King of the Angels is arrayed in a crown of thorns.
He who wraps the heaven in clouds is wrapped in mocking purple.
He who freed Adam in the Jordan receives a blow on the face.
The Bridegroom of the Church is transfixed with nails.
The Son of the Virgin is pierced by a lance,.
We worship your Sufferings, O Christ,
We worship your Sufferings, O Christ,
We worship your Sufferings, O Christ,
Show us also your glorious Resurrection.”
~Antiphon XV, Holy Friday Matins

Christ crucified transforms the old man, a new creation: is our gaze on Him?

The Church is silent. The Lord is dead; His mother and the Beloved disciple have buried the Lord. We carry on in sorrow, our hearts are quiet and searching for the one who made the promise that things would be different if we believed in Him. Holy Saturday is a distinct day in the Church. Good Friday totally transforms us from something old to something new, this is a time of patient awareness that it is not business as usual. If it is, if we can’t see that our real lives are not the same, then we need to beg the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mother to show the reasons why life is different now with Jesus crucified and in the tomb.

Pope Benedict’s meditation at the Colosseum lst evening gives us focus:

This evening, in faith, we have accompanied Jesus as he takes the final steps of his earthly journey, the most painful steps, the steps that lead to Calvary. We have heard the cries of the crowd, the words of condemnation, the insults of the soldiers, the lamentation of the Virgin Mary and of the women. Now we are immersed in the silence of this night, in the silence of the cross, the silence of death. It is a silence pregnant with the burden of pain borne by a man rejected, oppressed, downtrodden, the burden of sin which mars his face, the burden of evil. Tonight we have re-lived, deep within our hearts, the drama of Jesus, weighed down by pain, by evil, by human sin.

Continue reading Christ crucified transforms the old man, a new creation: is our gaze on Him?

Fr Cantalamessa: Good Friday – there is one truth…

The papal preacher preaches to the Pope each Good Friday. A distinction not given to many. The renown Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa said many good things to think about, not a few points that are crucial to our own witness of the Gospel, a few are given here now. The link to his homily is given below.

There is a truth that must be proclaimed loud and
clear on Good Friday. The One whom we contemplate on the cross is God “in
person.” Yes, he is also the man Jesus of Nazareth, but that man is one person
with the Son of the Eternal Father. As long as the fundamental dogma of the
Christian faith is not recognized and taken seriously — the first dogma
defined at Nicea, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and is himself God, of
one substance with the Father — human suffering will remain unanswered.

The
response of the cross is not for us Christians alone, but for everyone, because
the Son of God died for all. There is in the mystery of redemption an objective
and a subjective aspect. There is the fact in itself, and then awareness of the
fact and our faith-response to it. The first extends beyond the second. “The
Holy Spirit,” says a text of Vatican II, “offers to all the possibility of
being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery.”

One thing
distinguishes genuine accounts of martyrdom from legendary ones composed later,
after the end of the persecutions. In the former, there is almost no trace of
polemics against the persecutors; all attention is concentrated on the heroism
of the martyrs, not on the perversity of the judges and executioners. St.
Cyprian even ordered his followers to give twenty-five gold coins to the
executioner who beheaded him. These are the disciples of the one who died
saying: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.” Truly, “Jesus’ blood speaks a different language from the blood of Abel
(Hebrews 12:24): it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings
reconciliation.”

Read the papal preacher’s homily in full here: Fr Cantalamessa Good Friday homily 2011.pdf

Christ’s love is both horizontal and vertical

Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the Scripture: “I thirst.” A bowl full of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished”; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

“I thirst.” “It is finished.” With these two phrases Jesus, looking first to humanity and then to the Father, bequeaths to us the burning passion at the heart of his person and mission: love for man and obedience to the Father. His is a love both horizontal and vertical: in the shape of the cross! And at the intersection of this twofold love, at the place where Jesus bows his head, the Holy Spirit wells up, the first fruits of his return to the Father.

This final breath which brings Jesus’ life to completion evokes the work of creation, which now is redeemed. But it is also a summons to all of us who believe in him to “bring to completion in our own flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”. That all may be complete!

Lord Jesus, who died for our sake!
You ask, that you may give,
you die, that you may leave a legacy,
and thus you make us see that the gift of self
opens a space for unity.
Pardon the gall of our rejection and unbelief,
pardon the deafness of our hearts
to your cry of thirst
which echoes in the suffering of our many brothers and sisters.

Come, Holy Spirit,
parting gift of the Son who dies for us:
may you be the guide who “leads us into all the truth”
and “the root which sustains us in unity”!

The silence of Holy Saturday

Some say that on Holy Saturday Jesus went to hell in triumph, to free the souls long imprisoned there. Others say he descended into a death deeper than death, to embrace in his love even the damned. We do not know. Scripture, tradition and pious writings provide hints and speculations, but about this most silent day it is perhaps best to observe the silence. One day I expect he will tell us all about it. When we are able to understand what we cannot now even understand why we cannot understand. Meanwhile, if we keep very still, there steals upon the silence a song of Easter that was always there. On the long mourners’ bench of the eternal pity, we raise our heads, blink away our tears and exchange looks that dare to question, ‘Could it be?’ But of course. That is what it was about. That is what it is all about. O felix culpa!

O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,

Which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

To prodigal children lost in a distant land, to disciples who forsook him and fled, to a thief who believed or maybe took pity and pretended to believe, to those who did not know that what they did they did to God, to the whole bedraggled company of humankind he had abandoned heaven to join, he (Jesus) says: ‘Come. Everything is ready now. In your fears and your laughter, in your friendships and farewells, in your loves and losses, in what you have been able to do and in what you know you will never get done, come, follow me. We are going home to the waiting Father.'”

Father Richard John Neuhaus

Death on a Friday Afternoon

Jesus is the victor because He’s the victim, Cantalamessa reminds us on Good Friday

The official preacher to the pope, but not an official of the Holy See, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preached this homily to the Holy Father (and thus to the world) at the Good Friday Service. The preacher’s has received much criticism –VERY unfairly in my opinion if you read what he said– from the secular world, from Catholics who live on the margins of the Faith and others like the Jews for the points of comparisons made therein. It is not a perfect text and nor is it prudent in some places, but it needs to be engaged with faith and reason and not broken into pieces and read out of context. Read the text!!! The problem is that the sound bites we receive from the media become the only criteria of assessing whether something is good, worthy or acceptable for consumption whereas reason would want to hear the whole thing, even to re-read what was said before making foolish comments. Does the imperfect always mean bad? Father Cantalmessa is an evocative and provocative thinker and preacher. I think he deserves a fair hearing without the spin given in the media.

Father Raniero’s homily can be read here Good Friday homily 2010.pdf.

Holy Saturday: something strange is happening as we contemplate the Lord’s death

On Great and Holy Saturday the Church contemplates the mystery of the Lord’s descent into Hades, the place of the dead. Death, our ultimate enemy, is defeated from within. “He (Christ) gave Himself as a ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the Cross … He loosed the bonds of death” (Liturgy of Saint Basil).

From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Something strange is happening—
there is a great silence on earth today,
a great silence and stillness.
The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.
The earth trembled and is still
because God has fallen asleep in the flesh
and He has raised up all who have slept
ever since the world began.
God has died in the flesh, and hell trembles with fear.

Continue reading Holy Saturday: something strange is happening as we contemplate the Lord’s death

God’s Friday

For our sake he was crucified! Jesus, at his death, embraced the tragic experience of death as it had been fashioned by our sins; yet, in his death, Jesus filled death itself with Love, he filled it with the presence of God. By Christ’s death, death itself was vanquished, for he filled death with the one power capable of cancelling the sin that had spawned it: Jesus filled death with Love!

Through faith and Baptism, we have access to the death of Christ, to the mystery of the Love by which Christ himself tasted and conquered death … and this in turn becomes the first step of our journey back to God, a journey which will end at the moment of our own death, a death experienced in Christ and with Christ: in Love!

~Archbishop Angelo Comastri

Holy Thursday: a “constant examination of conscience,” Pope says

“…God has shown himself, because he, infinite and beyond the grasp of our reason, is the God who is close to us, who loves us, and whom we can know and love.

Jesus prays for the Church to be one and apostolic. This prayer, then, is properly speaking an act which founds the Church. The Lord prays to the Father for the Church. She is born of the prayer of Jesus and through the preaching of the Apostles, who make known God’s name and introduce men and women into the fellowship of love with God. Jesus thus prays that the preaching of the disciples will continue for all time, that it will gather together men and women who know God and the one he has sent, his Son Jesus Christ. He prays that men and women may be led to faith and, through faith, to love. He asks the Father that these believers “be in us” (v. 21); that they will live, in other words, in interior communion with God and Jesus Christ, and that this inward being in communion with God may give rise to visible unity. Twice the Lord says that this unity should make the world believe in the mission of Jesus. It must thus be a unity which can be seen – a unity which so transcends ordinary human possibilities as to become a sign before the world and to authenticate the mission of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ prayer gives us the assurance that the preaching of the Apostles will never fail throughout history; that it will always awaken faith and gather men and women into unity – into a unity which becomes a testimony to the mission of Jesus Christ. But this prayer also challenges us to a constant examination of conscience. At this hour the Lord is asking us: are you living, through faith, in fellowship with me and thus in fellowship with God? Or are you rather living for yourself, and thus apart from faith? And are you not thus guilty of the inconsistency which obscures my mission in the world and prevents men and women from encountering God’s love? It was part of the historical Passion of Jesus, and remains part of his ongoing Passion throughout history, that he saw, and even now continues to see, all that threatens and destroys unity. As we meditate on the Passion of the Lord, let us also feel Jesus’ pain at the way that we contradict his prayer, that we resist his love, that we oppose the unity which should bear witness before the world to his mission.

Pope Benedict XVI

Holy Thursday 2010, excerpt of homily