Triduum: Three Days, One Love: Poured Out, Laid Down, Raised UpPart IIFrom Memory to Mystery: The Birth of the Triduum

As noted in Part I, Sunday has been and is the prime feast day of the

Christian community. Early Christians gathered on Sunday after Sunday to

encounter Jesus. There was, however, a special commemoration

of the dying and rising of Jesus. It developed from a tangled mess of

watching the moon and figuring out the sun. It was a yearly

commemoration of the conception, incarnation, passion, death,

resurrection, glorification, out-pouring of the Spirit, and second coming of

Christ Jesus. Iin sum, the entire mystery of our redemption by Christ Jesus

was celebrated yearly on the occasion of his Passion (Thomas J.

Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,

1991]).

When our forebears in the faith celebrated this great event, they did it this

way: a short but rigorous fast and an all-night vigil which flowed into a fifty-

day season of feasting.

I think that it is important for us to look at what they did so that we might

remember the past so as to live fully in this present with some wisdom and

integrity.

First, a fast. The reason for such a fast was closely linked to the words of

Jesus as found in Mark 2:19–20

“And Jesus Christ said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests fast while

the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom

with them, they cannot fast. The days will come, when the

bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that

day.”

The fast, then, marked Christ the bridegroom’s departure through death

and burial. As the fast brought on intense pangs of hunger, so also it

accentuated the intense cravings for the Lord’s promised return, which they

believed was near. Or as Gabe Huck has suggested, the experience of the

paschal fast was one of being so filled up with God that there was no room

for anything else (Gabe Huck, The Three Days: Parish Prayer in the

Paschal Triduum [Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1992]).

Second, the vigil. It was an extended nocturnal observance. In our current

liturgical practice it may be difficult indeed to imagine just how engaging

and important was this vigil. It would never have occurred to the earliest

Christians to have a “Holy Week.” For them, it was sufficient to celebrate

the passion, death, resurrection, and strong expectation for the dawn of the

reign of God in one celebration. This all-night celebration was enough to

say it all. An eloquent homily delivered at Pasch around 170 CE is a lyric

witness to the rich and resounding themes of the evening:

The mystery of the pasch is new and old, eternal and temporal,

corruptible and incorruptible, mortal and immortal. Old according to

the Law, new according to the Word; temporal according to the world,

eternal by grace; corruptible by the immolation of the Lamb,

incorruptible by the life of the Lord; mortal by his burial in the earth

and immortal by his resurrection from the dead . . . . O unutterable

mystery! The sacrifice of the Lamb was the salvation of the people,

the death of the Lamb brought life to the people, its blood intimidated

the angel. . . . Through his body which was subject to suffering he put

an end to sufferings of the flesh, and through his spirit, he slew death

that slays our humankind. It is I, says Christ, I who have destroyed

death, and triumphed over the enemy, and trodden hell underfoot . . .

I, your resurrection, I, your Light (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, trans.

Alistair Stewart-Sykes [Popular Patristics Series 20; Crestwood, NY:

St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001]).

These images and metaphors form the root of our Christian celebration:

Lamb of God, the first-born from the dead, the suffering one. It is the

suffering Lord, precisely in and through suffering, who is risen from the

dead. It is precisely death which contains the seed of life. It is a Christ-

centered event, and so the celebration is a celebration of Christ, the new

Passover. This notion of life in the very midst of suffering and death is

crucial to understanding what it is we are doing when we gather to

celebrate Pasch.

Gradually, the vigil became a preferred time for baptism by the third and the

fourth centuries. The story of the Exodus and Paul’s Letter to the Romans

point to the new meanings being brought forth: The first recounts the

passage from slavery to freedom, the passage from Egypt to the Promise

land, the passage through the Sea of Reeds. The second, the passage of

the Christian in baptism:

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ

Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with

him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead

by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if

we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be

united with him in a resurrection like his (Romans 6:3–5).

With the Exodus imagery and the Pauline metaphor, we see not so much

life in the midst of suffering and death, but a passage from death to life,

slavery to freedom, exploitation to liberation, evil to good, darkness to light,

sinful existence to new life in Christ, death to life. The new emphasis was

simply this: a passage must take place to share fully in the saving mystery

of the Lord.

This notion of the passage from death to life became central to their

celebration, perhaps even displacing the notion of life in the midst of

suffering and death. They remembered in the Exodus that pitiful pack of

Hebrews way down in Egypt’s land who were slaving in Pharaoh’s mudpits

who passed through the waters of the Red Sea. They remembered in their

own baptism how they passed from death to life in Christ.

But something happened along the way as the Church grew and developed

that made them lose sight of that reality. What happened can all be located

in the city of Jerusalem. We must first remember that in the fourth century,

the Emperor Constantine, the one who reconciled the Roman empire with

Christianity, embarked on a great building campaign in Jerusalem, the city

where it all happened. Constantine built churches on top of the places

where local tradition claimed significant events in Jesus’ life happened.

Waves of pilgrims flowed into the city, including Constantine’s mother.

Thus, while the core understandings of Pasch we have examined

remained, the people of Jerusalem became interested in going to the

particular place at the particular time where an event of the passion

happened, based on the gospel of Matthew they read. So the familiar

pattern of a Holy Week as we have today was born. Sunday, the Gospel of

the palms was read, and all processed along the path from the Mount of

Olives to the city. Thursday, a lengthy evening gathering came to be held

marking the watch of Jesus. It is important to note that at this stage, there

is no exclusive linking of the Last Supper and its place in the liturgy of

Jerusalem. Only later did eucharist come to be held at Sion and the Last

Supper marked. On Friday, all went to Golgotha to the chapel behind the

cross, where a piece of the cross was exhibited and all venerated it.

Pilgrims took home with them their reports of what was happening in

Jerusalem and began to adapt their own liturgies to the Jerusalem pattern.

What happened in following centuries, especially after the fifth century, is

that Pasch became limited to mean “resurrection,” and it became a one-day

celebration destined to be called “Easter.” So, in the ninth century, the days

themselves are redefined: no longer are we talking about Friday, Saturday

and Sunday as the Triduum, but Thursday, Friday and Saturday since

Sunday stood alone. Nor are these Pasch any more, but preparation for

Easter Sunday. This history forms the context for our revised calendar,

which restores the more original meaning:

The Sacred Paschal Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the

Lord’s Supper, reaches its high point in the Vigil and closes with

evening prayer on Sunday; the Fast is observed Friday and

Saturday(Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the General

Roman Calendar, 19).

The Triduum is thus once more actually Friday, Saturday and Sunday,

beginning in the Jewish manner on the evening before Friday with the

Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

In restoring the primacy of the Triduum the Church has structured the

liturgies in a rememorative way, but the Church has really striven to restore

a unitive approach to our praying and entering into this great mystery. We

do not play at history; we celebrate a mystery! I want to emphasize several

things here: it is not just the death of Christ on a hill far away that we

celebrate; it is not just an historical event that we appropriate and make our

own. But we enter into the Paschal Mystery in the here and now. It is as

startling now as it was then: life in the midst of suffering and death,

passage from death to life. It is the life we live in the midst of suffering, it is

our passage from death to life.

Ain’t-a That Good News!

Justin Mercy