Bishop Corrada and Deacon Rowland
During the spring, Ordinary Time is interrupted by Lent, Passiontide, the Easter Triduum, the Octave of Easter and the Easter Season. Easter is concluded on Pentecost Sunday. You will be aware that Easter can be early, or it can be late. Why? Because we have it on good authority that Jesus died at Passover. We cannot forget the fact that Jesus was a life long practicing Jew. He went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover – the ultimate Jewish feast. At the Easter Vigil, the account of the first Passover from the Book of Exodus is the only obligatory Old Testament reading. It has to be read as part of the liturgy.
Because Jesus died at Passover, the Church celebrates the Passion and death of Jesus at Passover time. Passover is celebrated on the first full moon after the Spring equinox. We celebrate Easter on the following Sunday and because Passover is calculated on the lunar calendar, it can be early or late in the Gregorian calendar that we use every day. From that, we work backwards through Holy Week and the forty days of Lent. If you count the days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday you will find that there are more than forty days. What should be kept in mind is that every Sunday is a celebration of the Lord’s resurrection and is not counted in the forty days. Excluding Sundays brings Lent down to forty days. Alternatively, in the liturgy of the Church, Lent finishes when Holy Week (or Passiontide) commences – include the Sundays and it remains forty days.
Lent is much more a season of penance than Advent is. Lent is about the lengths and efforts that God has gone to in order to coax us back to his saving love. Lent is about Good Friday and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. If we were not sinners, Jesus would not have been crucified. If we were not sinners, there would be no salvation required, there would be no Incarnation, no Son of God as truly human, because it would not have been required. If we had not sinned, we would now be in perfect communion with God, as are the saints in Heaven. Lent is about the remorse for our sins and the sins of our ancestors that have forced God, in his mercy and love, to become incarnate – truly human.
As we progress through Lent, we become more focused on Jerusalem, the Upper Room and on Calvary. We commemorate on Holy Thursday morning the institution of the presbyterate with the celebration of the Chrism Mass by the bishop with the priests of the diocese. Thursday evening, we celebrate the Institution of the Eucharist, Friday – Jesus’ death, Saturday – the tomb.
The Thursday evening Mass is celebration of mixed emotions. After the austerity of Lent, we celebrate with music, bells (during the Gloria), incense and so forth, because it was the first ever Mass, the same Mass that we attend every Sunday and Holy Day.
After the Thursday evening Mass the Church goes into mourning. The Blessed Sacrament is removed, altars are stripped, crucifixes and statues are removed or are covered over – and most telling of all, no sacrament (except Penance and Annointing in extremely urgent circumstances) is allowed to be celebrated. The Church enters into her darkest hour.
All through Friday and Saturday we wait. Friday is interrupted for the celebration of the Lord’s Passion and death. This celebration is a starkly simple one – only unaccompanied singing is permitted – and the focus is on the reading of the Passion and the veneration of the Cross. Saturday is, personally, the longest and slowest day of the year. Time stands still. There is prayer, the celebration of the Liturgy of Hours, but no sacraments and no Eucharist and no adoration. The church building is noticeably lacking a sense of the Divine.
After dark, however, all this changes. The People of God assemble to keep vigil by the tomb, in eager anticipation of Christ’s resurrection. Christ has died once only, Christ is risen now and for all time – but in the Easter Vigil we link ourselves back to the time when God made man was really dead; dead for our sins; because of the choices and decisions that we make. Sometime during that Saturday night, nearly 2000 years ago, the dead God-made-man rose from the dead and lived again. This explosion of new life is commemorated by the Pascal Fire. When all was dark, when all was lost, Jesus’ resurrection provided light, hope and warmth. All is not lost, there is hope and God is good.
This celebration of light is followed by the Liturgy of the Word. God’s incarnation is the final act of salvation in a long line of acts of salvation and the seven Old Testament readings recount the major instances where God has acted to save his people. After the readings, we celebrate our own baptism and the baptism of others before moving on to the first celebration of the Eucharist of Easter.
Throughout Easter we remember, meditate and pray about what Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection means to us and to the Church. We listen to the accounts of how the apostles and disciples went about proclaiming this wonderful news. We also remember the trials, sufferings and afflictions that the first martyrs underwent.
Following Scripture, Jesus’ Ascension into Heaven is commemorated on the Sunday following the forty days of Jesus’ life on earth after the resurrection. The following week, sees the celebration of Pentecost and the birth of the Church as she comes to us today. It is also the end of the fifty day celebration of Easter Sunday.
Ordinary Time picks up where it left off prior to Lent, but with a twist. All through the remainder of the year, Ordinary Time is literally peppered with celebrations of what can be termed ‘Mysteries of Faith’. The Sunday after Easter is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after again is Corpus Christi – a celebration of the Eucharist, the following Friday sees the celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, when we remember the great love and mercy of God for each of us. August 15th sees the celebration of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven and September 14th sees the celebration of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
All these feasts are reminders to us of the various aspects of God’s final act of salvation. They place an emphasis on particular aspects of the Paschal Mystery, but the real purpose of these feasts is to break down what God has done for us by becoming man, suffering, dying and rising from the dead in order to make it more comprehensible to us. It can be overwhelming to meditate on what God has done for us, it can be overwhelming to think about the depth of God’s love for us, it can be overwhelming to consider the stability and constancy of God’s love for each one of us.