unless stated otherwise.
The Church, since the beginning of The Easter Cycle, has followed Our Lord in His Apostolic Ministry.
Throughout Passion-Tide, clad in mourning, she contemplates the sorrowful happenings of the last year (Passion Week) and the last week (Holy Week) of His mortal life.
The hatred of Christ’s enemies grows day by day. It is about to break out and on Good Friday we shall be reminded of the most frightful of all crimes, the bloody drama of Calvary, foretold by the Prophets and by Our Lord, Himself.
The Scourging At The Pillar.
Date: 1880.
Artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau
(1825-1905).
This File: 24 April 2005.
User: Thebrid
(Wikimedia Commons)
The Liturgy, too, taking into account both The Old Testament and The New Testament, works out a striking parallel between the teaching of Saint Paul and the Evangelists about Our Lord’s Passion and the clear prophecies of Jeremias, Isaias, David, Jonas, and Daniel.
As the fatal end approaches, The Church’s accents of grief become more and more penetrated with feeling and soon we shall hear her lamentations for her spouse Whom she has lost.
“The sky of Holy Church becomes more and more overcast,” says Dom Guéranger. As when thunder threatens, we see gathering on the horizon clouds presaging disaster and charged with storm.
“Compassion !”.
Artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Date: 1897.
Current location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The thunderbolt of Divine Justice is about to fall and it will strike The Redeemer Who has become man for love of His Father and for us. By reason of the mysterious solidarity existing between all the members of the great human family, He offers Himself as a substitute for His guilty brethren.
As the Prophet says: “He clothes Himself with our sins as with a garment,” and He was “made sin for us” that He might bear our sins in His Body upon the tree and destroy it by His death.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, the sins of every age and of all mankind flowed horrible and repulsive into the most pure Soul of Jesus, Who thus became, “the receptacle of the moral filth of the World”.
Further, His Father doing violence to the love He bore Him is to treat Him as a being accursed, according to the Scripture: “Cursed is He that hangeth upon a tree.”
For “the work of our redemption required” that Our Lord should be set as the Salvation of the World upon The Cross, so that “whence came death, thence might life be restored, and that he who overcame by a tree, might also on a tree be overcome”. [Editor: Preface of The Cross.]
It is an unequal struggle between The Prince of Life and that of death [Editor: Easter Sequence.], but Christ triumphs in the very act of His self-immolation [Editor: Pange Lingua.]
Illustration: GOSPEL OPERATION INTERNATIONAL
Already on Palm Sunday, He advances like a conqueror, sure of Himself, greeted with acclamations and already crowned with palms and laurels, “tokens of the victory which He is about to win.” [Editor: Prayer at The Blessing of Palms.]
“Rejoice, daughter of Sion . . . behold thy King will come to thee,” cries Zacharias, and, as if in fulfilment of his words, the crowd spread their garments in Our Lord’s path, as is the custom before Kings, while men cry aloud: “Blessed be the King Who cometh in the name of The Lord”.
Jesus enters His capital, Jerusalem, and mounts the costly throne which His Blood “adorns with Royal Purple” [Editor: Vexilla Regis], over which Jews and Romans write in the three principal languages of the time, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”.
David’s prophecy is accomplished; God is reigning from the tree, which, from being an object of shame, becomes a “Standard of The King” [Editor: Vexilla Regis], and our “only hope” on this “Holy Passion Day”.
We adore Thy Cross, O, Lord . . . for, behold, by The Wood of The Cross, joy came into the whole World” [Editor: Adoration of The Cross on Good Friday].
It was to show clearly how, from this point of view, The Church regards Our Lord upon The Cross, that, in days gone by, Christian artists changed His Crown of Thorns into an heraldic and royal one.
It was at the end of Lent, when The Church makes remembrance of the death and triumph of Christ, that the ancient Councils required that the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and The Holy Eucharist, should be given to the Catechumens and that public penitents should be reconciled by Sacramental absolution.
In a sense, these Catechumens were “buried together” with Christ by Baptism into death and rose with Him into newness of life.
So do Passion-Tide and Easter, by marking for all Christians the anniversary of the reception of those Blessings, remind them that Our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection were at once the efficient cause and the pattern of their own, and help them as the years pass, to share in these Sacred Mysteries in an ever more full and intimate way.
These Feasts are not, then, a mere Commemoration, concerned only with Our Lord, Himself; they become a reality for His whole mystical Body. The conflict of Calvary extended to the whole World, where, with Christ her Head, The Church gained a new victory over Satan every year at The Easter Feast.
The purpose of Passion-Tide, through its close connection with Easter, is to recall to us the memory of our Baptism, when our Souls were washed in Our Lord’s Blood, and of our First Holy Communion, when they drank of its healing stream.
By The Easter Communion and Confession, survivals of the ancient discipline connected with Baptism and Penance, we are led at this Liturgical Season to die and rise again once more with Christ.
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