Why these three days are significant

Good Friday is the first of the Triduum, or most holy “three days” of the church year.

Actually, they started last night on Holy Thursday evening, with Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.  Because the Jewish day starts in the evening, historically and theologically the Three Days go from Holy Thursday evening into the dark dawn of Easter morning.  (Think of the three days as starting on three successive evenings–Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.)

Did you notice verse 10 in the Mark 11 gospel reading for this past Palm Sunday? And he entered Jerusalem, and went into the Temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Why did Jesus come to look around the Temple on the evening before his Passion Week?

Because, said some of the Fathers, he was fully man.  In his humanity he knew that he was about to start the battle of the aeons, and that he would have to get ready for the greatest powers of the devil that would try to smash him.

So Jesus needed time alone for prayer with his Father.  He came to what he had said earlier was “my Father’s house” (John 2.16).  He was preparing himself spiritually for spiritual battle.

I would submit to you that we in the Church are also facing spiritual battle, though of course on an infinitely smaller scale than what faced Jesus.  In what could be a reversion to the second or third century AD, the powers of the world and the flesh and the devil are taking positions against the Church that we have not seen in the West for seventeen centuries.

We too need to prepare, just as Jesus needed to prepare.  Just as Jesus wanted time alone in God’s house, we need time alone now in God’s house.

We don’t know what lies ahead, but it is probably stormy.  The clouds on the horizon are dark and menacing.

We need not fear, because Jesus has overcome the world.  But we do need to prepare, just as he prepared.

What better time to be among God’s people to prepare than during these Three Days?  Reliving these three epic Days with God’s people in God’s house.

I really mean “reliving” in a sacramental sense.  For when we recounted the Exodus last night in the first Holy Thursday readings, and when we do the same tomorrow night in the Easter Vigil, we should be thinking as Jews have thought historically at the Passover.  They believed that as they celebrated Passover, they were not simply remembering what had happened ages before among Moses and the six hundred thousand.  No, in some mysterious way the past came forward into the present, or the present into the past, so that in God’s eternity they were becoming contemporaries of the Passover, reliving it with God’s people of all ages.

That is what Paul means when he writes that we should do what Jesus did at the Last Supper but now in “remembrance” of him.  The Greek word Paul uses is anamnesis, which has the same Jewish sense of bringing the past into the present, so that we are not just remembering but participating in those events.  This is why Paul said that when we bless the cup we are “participating” in Jesus’ blood, and when we break the bread, we are “participating” in the body of Christ (1 Cor 10.16).

So during our liturgies of the Three Days, let us open our eyes and ears to see and listen to Jesus in our midst.  He speaks through the narrated and preached Word, and gives himself to us through the sacraments of eucharist and baptism, which were more special in these Three Days than at any other time in the historic church.  We participate with him in the sacred events of the Three Days as they are reenacted.

So as we go through the stations of the cross today, we are joining the disciples as they tearfully and fearfully look on.  Tomorrow night at the vigil and Sunday morning we join the disciples in their amazement and joy.  For we are there.