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Holy Week in Two Minutes
Blessed Triduum!
Sharing the pilgrimage of Young Adults from Northern California who journeyed to Madrid, Spain in August of 2011 for a wondrous spiritual celebration of life and faith.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
His Life Clarifies Our Life
I received this the other day from a dear friend.
HIS LIFE CLARIFIES OUR LIFE
Mario J. Paredes
Holy Week is the greatest week of the year for Christians, especially when
we come to the Easter Triduum. It brings together the liturgical themes of
Lent with the pillars upon which our Christian faith is founded, our Lord’s
passion, death and resurrection, as we commemorate and celebrate, in a
tight unity, these events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The door of entry for Holy Week is Palm Sunday, when we commemorate Jesus’
entrance into Jerusalem. and read the drama of the passion and death of
Jesus in anticipation of the soon to come Easter Triduum. This Passion
reading serves to remind us of the suffering and condemnation of the
Innocent One whose death authenticates a lifestyle that He lives and
proclaims as an example of happiness. We learn to offer our life for those
we love instead of keeping it selfishly since “he that saves his life loses
it, but he that yields and surrenders his life for the gospel saves and
wins it for eternity.…” And we learn to receive the Resurrection, by which
God the Father validated the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth, as “the
way, the truth and the life” in Jesus, for each and every man and woman of
good will.
In the Catholic liturgy of Holy Week the entire life of Jesus is presented
to us as a model of humanity, as the first vocation to which we who
recognize ourselves as creatures and children God the Father in Jesus
Christ should all aspire; for “the mystery that is man is clarified in the
mystery of the incarnate Word: Jesus Christ”. (GS 22)
Thus today, the hopes, the pain, the suffering and the evil that every
person lives out in the daily experiences of life—especially during Holy
Week and specifically on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday— are illuminated
through the pain and the suffering of the One from Nazareth who,
confidently, lays his life and destiny in the hands of the Father (“…Thy
will be done, not mine”). The Easter Vigil, then, illuminates our thirst
for eternity, our hope, our longing for transcendence, our dreams of a
fuller life, our projections for the future that are not fulfilled in the
here and now of temporal living.
The Resurrection, the confession of faith in the triumph of life over death
in Jesus, at the same time proclaims the final and definitive destiny of
mankind, that death does not triumph, but rather life; that desperation
does not triumph, but hope; that evil does not triumph, but the merciful
goodness of God. Yet that confession of faith presses and commits us to
build by our deeds and words, through our attitude and behavior, spaces for
abundant life in the here and now. The fullness of life that we expect in
the future begins in the now of our daily hopes. The new heaven must begin
with a new earth.
Holy Week retraces, as no other liturgical event, the paradox and mystery
of human life in the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with it
comes all the paradox of the Christian mystery, especially power out of
weakness and salvation out of lunacy, both illustrated in the hard wood of
the cross. For we, as Paul says, preach Christ crucified, a scandal for the
world, but for us “power and strength”.
Let us live this Holy Week, not like people who are passing through a
museum of two thousand year old antiquities, but as those who remember the
deeds that occurred in the person of Jesus, which today come to life and
appeal to us because his passion, death and resurrection illuminate our
sufferings, our struggles, our jobs, our projects, our loves, our pains,
our surrenders, our triumphs and failures, our longings for a more just
world, more human and fraternal, our death and our life opened in hope, to
the God of abundant life.
May we derive from this Holy Week, while commemorating what Jesus lived,
and all that happened to Him two thousand years ago, power and strength to
brighten our personal and communal lives and open us to the celebration of
the liturgical Easter and the definitive Easter that we hope for and are
building in the now but not yet of our present history.
http://mariojparedesen.blogspot.com/
HIS LIFE CLARIFIES OUR LIFE
Mario J. Paredes
Holy Week is the greatest week of the year for Christians, especially when
we come to the Easter Triduum. It brings together the liturgical themes of
Lent with the pillars upon which our Christian faith is founded, our Lord’s
passion, death and resurrection, as we commemorate and celebrate, in a
tight unity, these events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The door of entry for Holy Week is Palm Sunday, when we commemorate Jesus’
entrance into Jerusalem. and read the drama of the passion and death of
Jesus in anticipation of the soon to come Easter Triduum. This Passion
reading serves to remind us of the suffering and condemnation of the
Innocent One whose death authenticates a lifestyle that He lives and
proclaims as an example of happiness. We learn to offer our life for those
we love instead of keeping it selfishly since “he that saves his life loses
it, but he that yields and surrenders his life for the gospel saves and
wins it for eternity.…” And we learn to receive the Resurrection, by which
God the Father validated the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth, as “the
way, the truth and the life” in Jesus, for each and every man and woman of
good will.
In the Catholic liturgy of Holy Week the entire life of Jesus is presented
to us as a model of humanity, as the first vocation to which we who
recognize ourselves as creatures and children God the Father in Jesus
Christ should all aspire; for “the mystery that is man is clarified in the
mystery of the incarnate Word: Jesus Christ”. (GS 22)
Thus today, the hopes, the pain, the suffering and the evil that every
person lives out in the daily experiences of life—especially during Holy
Week and specifically on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday— are illuminated
through the pain and the suffering of the One from Nazareth who,
confidently, lays his life and destiny in the hands of the Father (“…Thy
will be done, not mine”). The Easter Vigil, then, illuminates our thirst
for eternity, our hope, our longing for transcendence, our dreams of a
fuller life, our projections for the future that are not fulfilled in the
here and now of temporal living.
The Resurrection, the confession of faith in the triumph of life over death
in Jesus, at the same time proclaims the final and definitive destiny of
mankind, that death does not triumph, but rather life; that desperation
does not triumph, but hope; that evil does not triumph, but the merciful
goodness of God. Yet that confession of faith presses and commits us to
build by our deeds and words, through our attitude and behavior, spaces for
abundant life in the here and now. The fullness of life that we expect in
the future begins in the now of our daily hopes. The new heaven must begin
with a new earth.
Holy Week retraces, as no other liturgical event, the paradox and mystery
of human life in the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with it
comes all the paradox of the Christian mystery, especially power out of
weakness and salvation out of lunacy, both illustrated in the hard wood of
the cross. For we, as Paul says, preach Christ crucified, a scandal for the
world, but for us “power and strength”.
Let us live this Holy Week, not like people who are passing through a
museum of two thousand year old antiquities, but as those who remember the
deeds that occurred in the person of Jesus, which today come to life and
appeal to us because his passion, death and resurrection illuminate our
sufferings, our struggles, our jobs, our projects, our loves, our pains,
our surrenders, our triumphs and failures, our longings for a more just
world, more human and fraternal, our death and our life opened in hope, to
the God of abundant life.
May we derive from this Holy Week, while commemorating what Jesus lived,
and all that happened to Him two thousand years ago, power and strength to
brighten our personal and communal lives and open us to the celebration of
the liturgical Easter and the definitive Easter that we hope for and are
building in the now but not yet of our present history.
http://mariojparedesen.blogspot.com/
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