Preparing Ourselves
I know I have said it before, but there is something important about preparing for company coming over for dinner. We do a deep cleaning of our house, dust the shelves and ceiling fans, vacuum and mop the floors, and wipe down the walls and baseboards, etc. Lent is like this stage of preparation. Nobody likes doing it, but it is important. It is a time when you prepare yourself as well as your house. Lent is a deep cleaning of one's soul. It is preparing us to celebrate the great Feast of the Resurrection of our Lord.
As we enter into Passiontide, our eyes turn towards Jerusalem, and we begin the final days of preparation. During Passiontide and Holy Week, we will have more imagery and rituals in the liturgy than the rest of the year combined. Images of Christ are veiled, the Gloria Patri is omitted, and the music is dialed back. The setting becomes somber and solemn, with glimmers and glints of joy and hope.
Why? Why do we add so much more at the end of Lent? No one is checking on you to make sure you follow the rituals. Just like cleaning your house, if the guests are good enough friends, I am sure they would understand if you did nothing at all or simply tidied up (and there are times for that). But we clean to show them that we care about them. We pull out the candlesticks, pull out our best chinaware, polish the silver, and lay out the nicest tablecloth. All of these things are acts of love. In the same way, during this liturgical season, we are preparing ourselves to give honor, love, and worship due to God. We are also preparing ourselves to receive the love of God and to encounter him and his glorious and saving work.
The Bible doesn't tell us we need to do these things. Nowhere can I recall in all of Scripture the command "thou shalt veil images during Passiontide" or "thou shalt have an Easter Vigil." But St Paul does tell us "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve." (1 Cor. 15:3-5). If Easter is the climax of the Christian year and of "first importance" should it not also be the best we have to give. Additionally, we are told of the importance of how we worship in the Old Testament. God has told his people how to worship him, the sacrifices, the bowls of incense, the clothing of the priests, and the feasts and fasts are commands from God to his people on how to worship him because they convey the deeper reality.
As we come together to worship in the Feast of Feasts, we believe that we participate in these events: this is the climax of the Christian year. We live them out in a way that allows us to embody the love of God. It is real participation, done in a way that confronts the fullness of ourselves with the redemption of Christ in his death and resurrection. If all of this was just for show to pull on our heartstrings to elicit emotion then we are just competing against the megachurch down the road. No, in our liturgy, we are participating in the work of Christ. The liturgy and the ritual point us to the greater reality, the death and resurrection of Christ made present. As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." If we focus only on the rituals, we lose sight of what they point us to, then we are just acting. But if we enter fully into this time and open our eyes and hearts to see Christ present, then the liturgy and rituals of Holy Week and Easter were done correctly.
In the Old Testament, the prophets warned against making worship into a play. They were not rebuking the people of Israel for doing what God asked in their worship, but they only paid lip service to it. For some reason, it has become the norm to flee from lip service by cutting out the things that point us to what should be happening. That is like having people over and not cleaning anything only to say that you were afraid that you weren't going to care about them coming over, so you did nothing. It sounds like the servant who buried the talent his master gave him (Matt. 25). The prophet's critique has always been one of the heart.
I know that Holy Week is a lot. But I encourage you to come to it as much as you can. Remember the Triduum is a single service, try to make it to as many parts as possible. Otherwise, it would be like eating the appetizer, leaving, and only coming back for the dessert. The early Church saw the Triduum (the three holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Paschal Vigil) as so important it has been a part of Christian worship since the fourth century and was seen as the climax of the Christian year. Should we not strip everything back so that we can offer God the best of what we have and the best of our worship, but most importantly, the best of ourselves, our souls, and our lives?
Have a blessed Passiontide,
Fr. Aaron