As We Enter Into The Paschal Triduum

“Jesus did not live his life for himself but for us… In all of his life Jesus presents himself as our model. He is ‘the perfect man’ (cf. Rom 15:5, Phil 2:5) who invites us to become his disciples and follow him.” “For this reason Christ experienced all the stages of life, thereby giving communion with God to all men”. (St. Irenaeus). “Christ enables us to live in Him all that he himself lived, and He lives it in us”. (CCC 519-521) “We must (therefore) continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church… For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us.” (St. John Eudes)

This is the meaning of our Christian life, a participation in the mysteries of Christ– a LIFE IN CHRIST.

But how precisely and concretely do we commune/participate in the mysteries of Christ's life? At Baptism we have already been assimilated into Christ. We have already died with Christ and rose to a new life with and in Him, sacramentally. But it is not a one-time event. All through our life we are to continuously and progressively be united to Jesus’ mysteries. Already as baptized infants we enter into the mysteries of his infancy. In our ordinary daily life we enter into fellowship with him in his hidden life at Nazareth. In our striving toward holiness to be found in a daily life marked by prayer, simplicity, work, and family love, we unite ourselves to Jesus in his hidden life. (Cf Compendium #104).

[We also unite ourselves with Jesus in His public life of proclaiming the Kingdom-- by the witness of our lives. “True witness is expressed by the silent, pure, radiant example of the sanctity of our life.” (Cardinal Sarah)]

Most of all, we unite ourselves to the Paschal Mystery of Jesus– his Passion, Death, Resurrection, (and Glorification), by which he definitively redeemed us. Our daily trials and sufferings, offered in union with Jesus’ Cross is a communion with his passion. Every little suffering, every little pain or inconvenience, can be part of this. Our little self denials, and any
mortification–all add up to dying to ourselves and dying to sin, and can be joined with the death of Jesus, (a death to sin on our behalf). All these lead to a deepening of that new life in our Risen Lord, which is ours already even now, as we already share in His life through Sanctifying Grace. [The more we die to self, the more we live to Christ.] As regards our present joys, they are here and now, [we may say], a sharing and an anticipation of the fullness of joys and glories to come. [All these have to be lived of course in the state of grace.]

And what if we fall to sin, weak as we are? Then we rise in genuine repentance and approach the throne of God's Mercy in the Sacrament of Penance. This, too, is a dying to sin and a rising to new life. Every good confession is a spiritual resurrection.

Such is our life, a series of dying and rising, a continual passion through the sufferings and privations we endure, united with that of Christ– and a deepening of that divine life we now
share, and therefore a continuous growth in the manifestations of this God-life in us, through charity. As St Paul puts it: for ‘to me TO LIVE IS CHRIST’ (Phil 1:21).

Now we punctuate this participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus everytime we assist at Mass, when we offer all that we are in union with the sacrifice of Jesus for us– “Through him,
with him, and in him…”. What a most meaningful life! Whether in suffering or in joy we are IN Christ. We ought not to allow ourselves to live even for a ‘second’ outside of Christ.

What more? In all these we participate in the redemptive work of Jesus. Our sufferings, joined to that of Christ can be offered for our own salvation and that of others. This is what it means “to fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1:24). "Of course, in one sense, there's nothing lacking in Christ's sufferings… the ‘lack’ is on the side of sinful humanity… Through our sufferings, lovingly united with Christ's, we can obtain for people the grace to accept his gift of salvation.” (Fr. Gaitley, MIC, 33 Days to Merciful Love)

[Indeed, through all these we are being transformed from ‘glory to glory’, until our full divinization on the last day. (cf 2Cor. 3:18)]

May we deepen our participation in the Paschal Mystery, so that we will be able to join most meaningfully in the liturgical celebration of the Paschal Triduum. Then will ‘Easter’ be (for us) truly a ‘rising to’, or a ‘deepening’ of that new life we have IN CHRIST.