PASCHAL JOY

 No season of the Christian Year is so beautiful or joyous as Eastertide. The liturgical celebrations are full of beautiful expressions of the joy flooding the world through the Risen Lord’s triumph over sin and death in his Paschal Mystery. The notes of paschal joy – gaudium paschale – ring out in many beautiful hymns. Thus, in the second stanza of the hymn, At the Lord’s High Feast, which goes back to the 7^th century, we raise “Hymns of glory, songs of praise” to the Father and to our Saviour-Lord for his victory:

Where the paschal blood is poured,

Death’s dread angel sheathes his sword;

Israel’s hosts triumphant go,

Through the wave that drowns the foe.

Christ the Lamb, whose blood was shed,

Paschal victim, Paschal bread!

With sincerity and love

Eat we manna from above.

The imagery refers here to those crucial events of Israel’s Exodus that foreshadow and lead to the freedom Christ brought to all humankind.

This joy, like the peace that Jesus promised at the Last Supper to bestow on his followers, whom he calls ‘friends’ because he conveyed to them all that he heard from his Father, is beyond anything the world can offer or give: “Peace I leave you; my peace I give you; not as the world gives… Theses things I tell you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full” (Jn 14:27; 15:11). This same joy is the Gaudia paschalia of our Easter Greetings welcoming one another to enter fully into the spirit of this new springtime of grace. Our faith restored, our hope invigorated, in grateful love we rejoice since through Christ

Hell’s gloomy gates yield up their key,

Paradise door thrown wide we see;

Never-tiring be our choiring, alleluia.

(Ronald Knox’s translation of Simphonia Sirenum [1695])

St Augustine pointed out that the worth and highest dignity of the whole Christian life consists in being given by God a share in the freedom of heart, since he who created us without our help will not save us without our cooperation and response in love. This response finds best expression through a life of worship in the joy of praising and giving thanks to God as his children. On numerous occasions this zealous pastor expounded the significance of the Church’s joyous song of praise of God, Alleluia, as an incentive to rise above life’s commonly experienced frustrations. “In what does your praise consist?” –he asks, and explains in a sermon commenting on Psalm 101: “It consists in believing that Christ is risen and in hoping that you will rise through Christ. This is the praise of faith.” Christians, therefore, should be an Alleluia from head to foot, that is, they are joyous praise-singers, becoming the song they sing. The singing of Alleluia during Eastertide, he says, awakens us from our drowsiness; it buoys us up through the drudgery of our present condition; it stimulates and in a certain sense already even satiates our longing for being at home with the Lord:

When the glory of Christ, now hidden from you, appears then you also will appear with him in glory (cf. Col 3:4). Then Alleluia will be real, whereas now it is a matter of hope. Hope sings it, love sings it now, love will sing it also then. But love sings it in yearning now, then love will sing it in joy. (Sermon 255)

Quoting words attributed to this greatest convert to Christianity, who was baptized on Easter night 387, St John Paul II said in his address to a group of African Americans at Harlem, New York, on 2 October 1979:

Are not Jesus’ words still true today? If we are silent about the joy that comes from knowing Jesus, the very stones of our cities will cry out! For we are an Easter people and “Alleluia” is our song. With Saint Paul I exhort you: “Rejoice in the Lord always, I say it again, rejoice” (Phil 4: 4). 

This quality of world-transforming Easter joy that Christians sing in Alleluias is truly the Word made Eucharist, thankful praise of God for the wonderful work of his love in every season of the year! It is rooted in our living faith in Christ Jesus being alive, raised up by the Father’s love. Otherwise all existence would not only be dull and drab, but also submerged in an empty outlook without perspective or vision, bound to a future of doubt, uncertainty and fear. St Paul’s challenge to the Corinthian Christian community remains true today to our materialistic-minded times: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain… your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:14, 17).

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Easter memories

            Fragments hold us together,

some memories of times past

-         the way we were,

the ways we walked,

the turns our talk took

the thrill we felt

to hear we were called

to follow wherever he’ll lead us.

All this shaped the vision we shared -

still present vividly, though recalled

in handling broken bits of bread

and the cup blessing us with a joy

that gathers us in memory of him.

These fragments bind us together,

re-membering us being rich, but costly

-         for a price must be paid

to triumph over time’s game

that tricks us to think fancifully

the bitter taste of the tomb

can be bypassed by allowing it

to lapse sweetly in silence,

yet this quiet bestirs in us new hope.

This fresh breath frees our hearts

from clutching at dusky shadows

that like cobwebs distract our desire

from looking outwards to peripheries

to which true memory of him points.

His fragments invite us to be at-one,

betokening more than mere relics

-         like those flimsy keepsakes,

treasures some keenly seek

to preserve lest they forget

what is left of his life

in a pile of linen clothes

no longer able to hold him bound.

While he’s now no more, his gift of self

leads even yet further into searching

to explore and penetrate the mystery

of his presence, though beyond sight,

beheld embracing poor humankind.

© Michael L. Gaudoin-Parker,

     Assisi, Easter 2017.

The seven last words making that Friday Good

the Word made flesh

The “seven last words” are phrases Jesus uttered on the Cross as recorded in the four gospels. Taken as a whole they express Jesus’ total identification with humankind, thus indicating the full extent signified in that densely rich phrase of the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel regarding Jesus becoming one with us in our human condition of sheer weakness: “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

 Because that day of his dying is God’s Day of showing the Good News of his Goodness, that Friday was made Good. The Anglican priest-poem George Herbert sums up the mystery of the divine merciful Goodness of God’s Love articulated in the Incarnation: “The Word is all / If we could spell.”

 Jesus’ seven words on the Cross have been seen by some authors in relation to the seven days of creation recounted in the Book of Genesis (cf. Gen 1:1-24). The number seven from the time of the Fathers of the Church has been regarded as symbolic of Christian perfection: “God creating the world in seven days... the seven deadly sins; the seven virtues... last words of Christ from the Cross; the seven seals of the Apocalypse etc.” (Stephen Costello, Hermeneutics and the Psychoanalysis of Religion, p.212.) In the end as in the beginning there is ultimately only one word, God’s creative Word of Merciful Love, which is summed up entirely in Jesus Christ’s whole life and death and resurrection that brings about the New Creation, as depicted in the splendid Mosaic in the apse of the Church of St Clement in Rome.

The true Meaning of Maundy Thursday

Everyone a minister of Christ

 

Holy Thursday is a day comprising two important liturgical celebrations: the Chrism Mass in the morning and the Eucharist commemorating Jesus Last Supper in the evening. In both of these the focus is on the theme of ministry, meaning service which pertains as a responsibility entrusted by Jesus Christ to everyone, without exception, to show his tender caring love “without end”. Hence, this day is called “Maundy Thursday,” which is derived from the Latin word “mandatum” referring to the “new command” lived out, that is, exemplified by Jesus himself: “love one another as I have loved you” (cf. Jn 13:34). Only by endeavouring to keep this command, we will be recognized as his true disciples (cf. Jn 13:35).

 During the morning celebration following the ancient tradition of the Church, three sacramental oils are consecrated in the Cathedral by the bishop: the oil of catechumens, that of the infirm and that of Chrism. It is from the latter that this is called “Chrism Mass.”

 The sacred oil of Chrism, a mixture of olive oil and sweet scented aromatic resin or balsam, is used in the rites of baptism, confirmation, ordination of priests and bishops. The significance of this anointing refers us to Christ Jesus, whose name ‘Christ’ means the “Anointed One” par excellence in his divinely appointed threefold role as being Prophet, Priest and King. Because we are called and consecrated to participate, as members of his Body, the Church, in his reality as children of God, all of us have the name ‘Christians’. St Paul expressed the implications of witnessing to his reality in us as spreading the fragrant “aroma of Christ” to all people (cf. 2 Cor 2:14ff.).

 It is not only bishops and priests who have the responsibility to proclaim the Gospel, but also every Christian, who must show before the world the Gospel, meaning “the good news” of Christ alive in us. We must express Christ’s truth and beauty of his healing reconciliation and joy-giving attractiveness. To quote again St Paul regarding being Christ’s witnesses: “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts, to be read by all people… you show that you are a letter… written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor 3:3).

This must be the effective change that is brought about by our baptismal anointing and particularly by Confirmation. Through this sacrament all of us, albeit “vessels of clay,” become strengthened in the very concrete details of our lives not to lose heart to be ministers of the transcendent and transforming power of God’s mercy (cf. 2 Cor 4:1ff.). In virtue of this strengthening by the Holy Spirit all Christians have the privileged task of being faithful and reliable, as the Apostle Paul says, “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries” (1 Cor 4:1f.). While this latter phrase certainly applies in a special way to priestly ordination, nevertheless, it also concerns, as the Second Vatican Council taught, all the lay faithfuls’ participation in the universal priesthood of Christ.

Carrying out Jesus' command of love 

Maundy Thursday comes into its own at the celebration of the Eucharist in commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. The Gospel of the Mass from St John’s account describes Jesus’ act of washing the disciples’ feet on the occasion of his parting meal with his disciples (cf. Jn 13:1-20). It may seem strange, at first sight, that this does not mention anything about Jesus’ instituting the Sacrament of the Gift of himself, as in the other three Gospels. This maybe because John presents in Chapter 6 of this Gospel not only Jesus’ challenging promise to give his flesh and blood in the forms of living Bread from heaven for the life of the world and the New Wine of the kingdom of God (cf. 6.47ff.), the partaking of which ensures abiding in him and being raised up on the last day (cf. 6:53ff.). It maybe also that John considered that this promise and the response required to realize it are a sufficiently extended mystagogical catechesis of the sacramental sacrifice of Christ Jesus. Or then again, the omission of the institution of the Eucharist may have been because this was familiar to the Christian community.

On the other hand, the author of the Fourth Gospel in depicting details of Jesus’ stooping down to perform the humble attitude of a servant would seem to be making the important point regarding the significance of what is entailed in sharing the Eucharistic Banquet. This means that only in following Jesus’ example in becoming servants of others, like him, can we be his true disciples having part in his life (cf. Jn 13:8).

Indeed, this Sacrament expresses the life of faith in his immense Love. Its implications are vast! The notion of ministry, meaning service (diakonia) is the heart of participation in the Eucharist. This ministry or service takes many forms, apart from the taking part in the liturgy, such as through the ministerial priesthood, diaconate, or through being acolytes, readers. Through partaking of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood we are all nourished and filled with his spirit of humble and lovingly giving ourselves wholly in service to others. Every kind of work takes on a deeper meaning if undertaken in an unselfish and unstinting love for our neighbour, whom we recognize as members of Christ’s body. In all aspects of our lives of being servants of one another, thus, we give expression to what we celebrate at Mass.

Our entire lives become an existential liturgy of the worship of God and respectful recognition of our brothers’ and sisters’ needs. This service in humble love outflows from and leads back to the liturgy we carry out in the Eucharist. Both the Eucharistic liturgy and the offering of our various deeds in concrete service faithfully carry out in the obedience of faith and love Jesus’ command: “Do this in memory of me... whatever you do to one of these my least brethren you do unto me.”

 Image above:

Painting by the Mannerist artist known as Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) 1575-80, now in The National Gallery, London. This theme of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet was a favourite of this artist, who painted six of them, commissioned by churches in Venice.

A fool for Christ’s sake

The Greatest Week of the whole year is called “Holy” because during these days we’re called, indeed challenged to celebrate, to focus intensely on God’s condescension to the level of our lowly condition of abject poverty. This poverty consists particularly in an incapacity to imagine, leave alone comprehend, the extreme lengths to which divine mercy goes in reaching out to us to move our hearts, which have become dulled, listless and insensitive because inured by so much violence. Boredom has become a symptom of the raging disease of indifference affecting the heart of modern society, in which there is sadly all too often, as T.S. Eliot put it:

                                  Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration” (Four Quartets: Burnt Norton III).

If anything could shake us out of our accustomed religious nonchalance it must be the shock, as it were, that we should receive during these days of Holy Week as we perform and contemplatively enter into the realism of the scriptural texts presented in the liturgy. Here what is strikingly evident with a great poignancy is particularly the sublime condescension of divine mercy. This divine condescension is utterly different, wholly other than our manner of regarding the situation of suffering in the world, a manner that so often takes on a patronising outlook or leaves us frustrated about the impossibility of doing anything to change or alleviate the enormity of problems reported by the Media. This otherness of divine mercy is the tender love revealed by the sheer meekness of Jesus in complying faithfully to God’s design as his obedient Son. This is strikingly expressed in the second reading of the Mass of Palm Sunday taken from what was perhaps an early Christian hymn adapted by St Paul about the mystery of Christ’s kenosis, that is, descent in his self-effacing humility of love (cf. Phil 2:6-11).

The theme of this mystery is beautifully expressed in the hymn My song is love unknown, written by Samuel Crossman in 1664:

No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
in Whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Yet how is it possible, unless our hearts remain so cold and unmoved – “hard-hearted” as Jesus reproved people of his time – to remain unfeeling regarding the pathos evoked by Christ’s passionate dedication of self in the face of such hostility not merely to his message but especially toward his person, whose entire life was given in deeds of kindness and care towards lightening the burden and yoke of human misery?

The purpose of the liturgy especially of these days of Holy Week is to stir and disturb both our minds and emotions – our whole selves - to compunction and conversion. This is fostered through the dramatic realism of everything being celebrated in the proclamation of the word involving participation of the congregation’s response in sacred songs and likewise processions, such as that of Palm Sunday or as that of moving to kiss the Cross on Good Friday. A sense of active participation in the moving events of this sacred time was expressed in medieval times through certain para-liturgical performances of the ‘mystery plays’ of the Passion and the processions of penitents, the latter still carried out in Latin Catholic countries where various local cultural features are integrally incorporated. While these seem to a modern, Anglo-Saxon rationalistic mentality and to non-believers somewhat exaggerated in their too theatrical and artificial aspects, nevertheless, as Richard Viladesau, a theologian of art, states:

“Pathos remains an intrinsic element in the human situation. Catholic Baroque art was able to embrace pathos because of its confidence in the meaning of Christ’s cross as the prelude to an ultimate triumph of God’s love. In this sense, if we are to take it seriously, it speaks to us about the meaning of pathos and challenges us to ask what basis we have for a response.” (The Pathos of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology of the Arts, p.121.)

Whatever means are employed to induce in us a genuine pathos for the Saviour enables us to perceive how to realise the mystery of restoration and reconciliation that he brought about by his intense ardour of love for humankind. Contemplation of artworks of the Passion likewise can cultivate a sense of the identity between the world’s vast condition of misery and Christ, who entered fully into it. Thus, in contemplating the many paintings of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, such as Giotto’s fresco depicted above, we are drawn to share the sentiments of the crowded scene of people, to greet him with our Hosannas. Our perception of artistic representations of this event must be not merely motivated by curiosity, like those two figures presented as climbing into trees to behold the spectacle of his passing. But, rather, these representations invite and may encourage a truly deeper participation in the great work of divine redemption really being carried out in our midst sacramentally. Nevertheless, it is also crucial for us to recognise in honest humility that our devotional sentiments are not far from the fickleness of the motley crowd. As Crossman put it in the hymn mentioned above:

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
And for His death
they thirst and cry.

     A sense of humble honesty about our waywardness would take us further into the depths the mystery we are celebrating. G.K. Chesterton would seem to point to this as the secret realised by that dumb donkey, a simple creature which, perhaps symbolising anyone who in contrasting reversal of worldly values is not ashamed to become a fool for Christ’s sake (cf. 1 Cor 4:10), had the high privilege of bearing the full weight of the Saviour-Lord’s burden of love:

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Image above: Palm Sunday by Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel Padua

 

Humankind unbound

 

The constant question that St Paul poignantly asked persists hauntingly about who will deliver us from this body of death (cf. Rom 7:24). This question can perhaps be detected as implied in Martha’s words to Jesus that if he had been there her brother wouldn’t have died. The dialogue that follows, however, leads beyond Jesus offering the distraught sister only words of consolation and comfort of sympathy, for he shares her grief expressed in the fact that he wept, as this passage of the Gospel records. The significance of this, while certainly indicating that he was no stranger to human feelings for his close friends at Bethany, must, nevertheless, also be seen in relation to that other occasion when he wept over the city of Jerusalem because of its lack of faith in him (cf. Lk 19:41). The New Testament also states that he offered prayers with tears because of the destructive evil in which the world is held bound (cf. Heb 5:7f.).

Jesus’ sharing the grief of the two sisters over the death of his friend Lazarus, thus, was not merely out of sentimental pity. While it is true that the great tragic dramas of the ancient Greeks celebrated an awareness of pity for the desolate state of human beings, Simone Weil pointed out that a seeking for mercy arises from God, not the sufferer, and it is an offence to God to neglect or ignore the sufferer (cf. Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, London: Routledge, 1998, p.71). The crux of Tolkien’s great work may be seen in Bilbo Baggins sparing the life of the wretch Gollum through pity. On the other hand, the sentiment of pity may sometimes easily slide into a loathsome standoffish posture of self-congratulatory complacency rather than in reality wanting to or fearing to get involved in another’s suffering. Jesus, however, showed something far higher than the sentiment of pity. His was genuine empathy, that most noble attitude of compassion akin to the godly virtue of merciful caring.

In sharing utterly that soul-anguish in the depth of every person – namely, that of facing up to the inevitable condition of death - Jesus came as the Wounded Healer to be God’s suffering-Servant to liberate all humankind as foretold by the prophet Isaiah (cf. Is 53:3). As the Messiah, God’s anointed one or Christ, he alone can declare: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” By this statement Jesus proclaims his identity with Yahweh the unique Life-Giver. As on other instances, this self-affirmation is the heart of the Christological teaching of the Gospel of John (e.g. Jn 6:35; 8:12; 8:58; 10:9; 10:11; 14:6; 15:5). In virtue of being the unique revealer of the New Humankind, Jesus issues the command to release Lazarus from the bands of death: “Unbind him; let him go free.”

Because spoken with authentic divine authority, by this command Jesus proclaimed the effectiveness of the entirely new order of humankind – something that could never be introduced despite the beauty of language such as the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley endeavoured to articulate in his drama Prometheus Unbound, which was a work composed in the aftermath of and inspired by the slogan of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The last two lines of this poem may be taken as summing up the ideals celebrated throughout the whole work:

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

 

     Pope Francis has on many occasions pointed out abstract ideologies get us nowhere; ultimately the Gospel is not a theoretical refuge from the pain of living amidst people, but plummets us into the realistic task of encountering Christ in our neighbour as brothers and sisters, children of the one God and Father of all humankind. To employ a phrase like “human race” or even “masses” misses the point, dodges the crucial issue of looking into individual person’s faces and eyes.

    “Humankind” is a word on the other hand that encapsulates far better the relational reality entailed, ‘kind’ suggesting the significance both of being kindred and also the befitting attitude of kindness. Beyond this and above all, however, a civilization of love stands or falls unless it is inspired and guided by our Lord’s great challenge about showing a ray of God’s loving mercy: “Whatever you do for one of these my little ones, you do unto me.” In expressing this we become enabled to share already and truly in the abundance of eternal Life revealed by Jesus, whose dominion as the Risen Lord is foreshadowed in calling Lazarus out from the tomb and, moreover, commanding that he be released from being bound in what seem like swaddling clothes restricting the movement of an infant’s limbs from expressing the new life of freedom in grace. The commemoration of this event on the fifth Sunday of Lent is a prelude preparing us already to enter more deeply into the communion of joy and freedom and fraternity of humankind unbound in the Paschal Mystery of Easter.

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