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April 10, 2022Today we welcome and hail Jesus as he enters Jerusalem; on Thursday evening, we will dine with him one final time; on Friday we will nail him to a tree, lifting him up for the world to see; and on Saturday night, he will repay us by walking out of the tomb, destroying our death along with his own…
The Paschal Mystery - the story of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection - is not merely meant to be retold, remembered, and learned from. That would make it but one great story among so many others. The story of Jesus’ suffering, death, and rising is the Great Story of God’s saving and divinizing action on behalf of all creation. It is the Story that reveals Who God Is, a God Who saves the world out of cosmos-reordering love.
The Paschal Mystery is the story of a New Creation, the fundamental pattern of our share in the very life of God, bestowed on us through Baptism. It is therefore fitting that our Passion Sunday and Holy Week liturgies have the immersive impact of a week-long Passion Play: We begin by holding aloft our palms and singing “Hosanna,” to just a little later shout “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Through our embodied remembrance of the story, Christ the Bridegroom invites his Bride to join his descent on the wood of the cross: We descend with our Spouse through his betrayal and arrest, his trial and denial, down the winding way of Calvary to the Place of the Skull, and down with him to the abode of the dead.
Then, in the silence of Holy Saturday night, we begin the journey of his - and our - glorious ascent, his triumphant procession into the New Jerusalem, his Bride a radiant mirror of his glory, as captive sin and vanquished death are paraded in tow…
