The holiest of weeks

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
April 3, 2012

The Holy Week is, of course, not just like any other week. It is THE week, the mother of all weeks, the most important week in the liturgical year, when we end the long penitential preparation of Lent and celebrate nothing less than the climax of Christ’s redemptive work with his passion, death and resurrection.

When we say “celebrate,” we are referring to a liturgical celebration where the events celebrated are not simply remembered, but are actually made present. This is the essence of liturgy, as taught by the Church that in turn received this truth from Christ himself.

In the liturgy we become contemporaries of Christ and direct witnesses of the events. That’s how the reality portrayed by our faith is. It is a reality that, of course, goes far beyond what our senses can capture and what our intelligence can grasp. That is why we have to work out our faith. Otherwise, we would be hanging in the air.

It is this passion, death and resurrection of Christ, also known as the Paschal or Easter mystery, that summarizes everything that our Lord taught and did for the sole purpose of saving us, and giving us a way to reconcile ourselves with our Creator and Father, the way to say yes to God’s will for us.

It is in Christ’s passion and death that all the sins of men, past, present and future, are assumed by Christ himself, dying to them so that all these sins would be dashed to nothing, and then resurrect.

What we are invited to do is to somehow share in Christ’s passion and death, so that dying with him, we too can resurrect with him. Christ takes up what is ours so that we can take up what is his. A liturgical hymn describes this as a “happy exchange.”

There is no sin too big or grave enough that cannot be part of Christ’s passion and death. The only sin that can elude this universal mercy of God is the sin against the Holy Spirit, when we precisely reject this truth of God’s omnipotent mercy.

Now all these events of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ, is made into the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, instituted at the Last Supper of the first Holy Thursday.

It is this sacrament that makes present these saving events of the paschal mystery. These events are not simply recalled and dramatized by some ceremony. They derive their vital and perpetual character from our Lord’s words, “Do this in remembrance of me” (or “in memory of me”)

When Christ said these words, he said it not as man only, subject to time and space, and therefore unavoidably swallowed up in the past, in history. But being our redeemer, he said them also as God who is eternal.

Therefore, these words acquire an eternal value where all things are made present. Eternity is not simply a vague sense of having no beginning and no end. Eternity is also about making everything present. What happens in time with its flow of past, present and future becomes all present in eternity. Eternity transcends time.

This is the very lofty, mysterious truth that is at play when we celebrate the liturgy, especially the Mass that has its beginning in the Last Supper that in turn anticipates and perpetuates what happened in the first Good Friday and the first Easter Sunday – our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection.

That’s why the Holy Week culminates with the Easter or Paschal Triduum, starting evening of Holy Thursday with the celebration of the Mass of the Last Supper then goes to the passion and death of Christ on Good Friday, then to his resurrection Easter Sunday.

There is a certain unity in the celebration of the Easter Triduum which we all should try to capture. That’s why we need to pause, reflect and meditate. We should be wary when we convert the Holy Week into mere holidays of fun and vacation.

The way the world is evolving these days when we are pressured to be practical and to go for material and temporal goals, we need to apply the breaks to feed our soul and to strengthen our grip of the spiritual and supernatural realities in our life.