The Easter Mystery of the Cross: Holy Week 2022

 

Today, as I write, it is Holy Thursday.  This evening the holy Three Days of Easter open with a focus on Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, on the eve of his crucifixion.  The Three Days (Triduum) moves from darkness into glorious light at the Easter Vigil, where we proclaim Christ our Light.

 But the darkness between, filled as it is with Jesus’ intense suffering amid his disciples’ desertion, the trials before Herod and Pilate, the way of the cross that follows, and finally that terrible time when the darkness seems to win out at last.  As Jesus hangs on the Cross, “From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:47).   

 That apparent triumph of darkness over even the Light of the World, Jesus Christ himself, seems appallingly relevant as we read the news of the escalating war in Ukraine, with its horrifying violence.  As people and families are subjected to wrenching separations, hideous torture and agonizing death, we are shaken by the darkness that covers the land, with no immediate relief in sight.  And the victims with and for whom we agonize are only a part of the picture of humanity wiped out.  The perpetrators are the other part.  “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” is prayer we might say with and for victims and perpetrators alike. 

 Those who inspire our prayer and energize it might seem far away and long ago.  Millennia have passed since the events of that first Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday in Jerusalem.  And thousands of miles stand between us and the war in Ukraine.  But a line from the Catholic Church’s Good Friday liturgy seems to me to call us to our very real responsibility in the midst of this tragedy: “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”  Please bear with me as I try to spell out at least bits of the mystery that is really beyond words.

 The Triduum condenses into intense, powerful confrontation with the truth that the Cross, instrument of horrible torture and death, is in fact a not an end to the human story—either Jesus’ or ours or our brothers’ and sisters’ in Ukraine and all other places of violence and war. The Cross is a doorway that opens out into unending life at its full.  At the Easter Vigil, as the lighted Candle, with the sign of the cross drawn upon it enters the darkened Church, the Catholic liturgy invites us we to hail Christ, the light of the world. Those of you from other churches may experience this differently, but it is nevertheless the backbone of Easter prayer for all believers. It is God’s promise that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, the closed container of mortality to which we seem to be confined is broken open into a life we cannot yet even imagine.

 It seems to me that we who acclaim that truth in the safety of our churches and our homes bear a responsibility to carry it into all those places, like Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia, where death seems to conquer all (and in so doing, though we rarely say it out loud, make all our life’s efforts pointless in the end).  The death of faith is death indeed.  The task seems Quixotic—Quixote being that deluded old knight who tilted at windmills, mistaking them for jousting opponents.  And it would be, if it were not for our belief that we, all of us, everywhere, are together members of Christ.  St. Paul assures us that whatever happens to one member of the Body affects the whole body (see 1 Corinthians 12:24-26).  So, if we, even amid our securities, hold fiercely to the claim that the Light of Christ triumphs over every darkness in the end, we are surely feeding that truth into the whole Body, even those trapped in unendurable nigh and, in so doing, offering them the strength to abide.  And, if only at moments, abide without returning hatred for hatred, drawing however briefly and slightly from Jesus on the cross praying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

 Before those of you who have known combat from any perspective--military, medical, chaplaincy— or have done policing tell me this will do nothing for those who live in the neighborhoods become battlefield (and I honor your experience and your courage in embracing it), I own again that it seems Quixotic.  And all of us who have suffered the dark streets of suffering and loss that are not confined to battlefields, can readily agree.  But faith deals in realities we believe exist but cannot see, taste, touch or feel.  And the reality of the Cross as ever-open doorway from awful night into glorious day is the most important of them all.

 So as we sit, stand and kneel in our churches during the holy days ahead of us, or as we sit before the daily news reports, let us at least dare Quixote’s venture and pray with all our strength: “We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world!”  And let us pass it on through the invisible strands that bind us inexorably to all those everywhere held tightly in the unconquerable love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.

 

©2022 Abbey of St. Walburga