Triduum: Three Days, One Love: Poured Out, Laid Down, Raised UpPart ISunday: The Church’s First Note: Singing the World into Resurrection

Let’s start at the very beginning.

A very good place to start.

When you read you begin with

A, B, C.

When you sing you begin

With do-re-mi.

When beginning with the Great Three Days—the Triduum—

you begin with Sunday, Sunday! You begin with the concept of Liturgy in

general.

Before all else, liturgy is the most important activity that we do together as

a Church. It is that celebration of the Sacred Mysteries when the Church is

most fully actualized; that activity which makes people holy, builds the Body

of Christ, and gives worship to God; the “summit toward which the activity

of the Church is directed [and]. . . the fount from which all her powers flow

(Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10).” It is “like a parable [that] takes us by the

hair of our heads, lifts us momentarily out of the cesspool of injustice we

call home, puts us in the challenging reign of God, where we are treated

like we have never been treated anywhere else . . ., where we are bowed

to and sprinkled and censed and kissed and touched and where we share

equally among all a holy food and drink” (Robert W. Hovda, “The Vesting of

Liturgical Ministers,” Worship 54, no. 2 (March 1980): 105.). It is a time to

“sing a new song unto the Lord.” (Psalm 98.1)

In the liturgy Christ speaks to each person and each community in their real

lived situations. As Saint Augustine reminds us: “He [Christ] has ascended

without leaving us. While in heaven he is also with us, and while on earth

we are also with him” (Sermon on Ascension, Mai 98,1-2; PLS 2, 494-495).

The liturgy also encourages the People of God, nourished by Christ’s Body

and Blood and filled with his Holy Spirit ( Eucharistic Prayer III, Acts 2:33),

to approach the future with hope and trust. Even though the future is

unknown, faith guarantees that Christ will be there. This confident hope

embraces everyone’s personal history as well as the future of the world.

Believers realize that their faith in Christ makes them conscious that they

must do everything they can to overcome personal problems and world

discord, to be a living sacrifice of praise (Eucharistic Prayer IV; Romans

12:1, Ephesians 1:14). It is this Christ event without which we cannot go on

living.

Furthermore, liturgy celebrates the landscapes of human experience:

happiness, sadness, renewal, and grief. Liturgy provides rites of passage in

human life: birth, maturity, vocation, commitment, old age, death. Liturgy

also celebrates the universal human need for communion, healing, and

reconciliation. Christian liturgy, however, is celebrating far more than these.

Christian liturgy embraces all these and more by celebrating the new

meaning that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ gives to the

lives of all people. In the liturgy, the Church proclaims the Paschal Mystery

(the dying and rising of Jesus Christ), that most awesome event that

transforms the past, the present, and the future.

It is this Paschal Mystery—the dying and rising of Jesus—that we celebrate

at the height of the liturgical year on those three days we call the Triduum

which is simply a Latin word that means three days. In our Triduum, we

celebrate the entire story of life in the very midst of suffering and death.

We remember Jesus who entered the hell of the human history of suffering

and pain and gave it voice. He himself was born under a hellish

government—Caesar ruled Rome, Pilate presided in Jerusalem, and Annas

and Caiaphas, the high priests had no time for that old time religion. He

was born in a hellish condition—there was no room for him in the inn and

he had no bed, but a manger; no pillow, but a pile of straw. He lived in

hellish poverty—the birds of the air had nests, the foxes had holes, but the

Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. He met hell on every corner. He

fed a multitude who groaned with hunger. He brought wholeness and

health to those whose bodies were racked with pain and sickness. He

beheld a weary widow, sick with grief and brought her dead child life. He

sat down to table with those whom society shunned from its sectors. He

clutched the stumbling blind man and gave him sight. He beckoned to the

deaf man and opened his ears to the good news of God’s lavish love. He

wept over Lazarus whom he called forth from the stinking tomb.

We remember Jesus. We remember Jesus who was betrayed by a friend’s

kiss, tossed in a Jerusalem drunk tank, splattered with soldier’s spit,

crucified on calvary, Jesus who wept bitterly for a drink when dying, who in

the midst of his passion, cried, “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken

me” and gave up his spirit. Let’s just stop there for a moment and tremble,

tremble, tremble. We remember how a passionate Abba-God, wet with

tears, crouched over the dead body of the Son and kissed his forehead,

and kissed his eyes and kissed him full on the lips and said, “Beloved, the

story has not ended. Death is destroyed and life conquers.” And early one

Sunday morning, Jesus rose up out of the grave, out of the jaws of death

and put on incorruptibility. This is what we celebrate.

And in our weary world where pain and suffering are met on every side,

where crack babies tremble with seizures, where those who wither before

our eyes, where our streets run red every night, where unemployment

makes the thought of tomorrow’s dinner more a dream than a reality, life in

the very midst of suffering and death is a mighty message.

That’s what we do Sunday after Sunday.

For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and

country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in

every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human

need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from

the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the

caves and dens of the earth. We have found no better thing than this

to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the

scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little

country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of

wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a

sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or

for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole

provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my

father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted

to return to fetish because the yams have failed; because the Turk

was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the

settlement of a strike; for a son of a barren woman; for Captain so-

and-so, wounded and a prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the

nearby amphitheater; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of

scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of

the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of

his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day

in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of

St. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why we

have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all,

week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand

successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of

Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs

sancta Dei—the holy common people of God (Gregory Dix, The

Shape of the Liturgy [London: Dacre Press, 1945], 744–745.).

Ain’t-a That Good News !

Justin Mercy