Words for the Lent & Easter Season by Bishop Hugh Gilbert, OSB
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Ash Wednesday: The Grace of Lent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Lent - a Preparation for Exodus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Lent - a Preparation for Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Station Mass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Palm Sunday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Chrism Mass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Maundy Thursday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Good Friday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Paschal Vigil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Easter Sunday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Second Sunday of Easter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Fifth Sunday of Easter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 The Ascension of the Lord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Pentecost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 All rights reserved. First published 2015 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Š 2015 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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Introduction
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he liturgical year - with its Sundays and weekdays, Easter and Christmas, Advent and Lent, ferias and feasts - is one of the great givens of the Christian life. We live our lives within it. This is true even when we are not consciously averting to it. It’s a framework, a mould, a supporting rhythm, a background that at some peak times becomes the foreground. It has, too, been one of the great facts of European and Western cultural history. We’re familiar with the civil year (which comes to us from the Romans), the financial year, the academic year… But there is this other presence too - still hanging on even in semi-pagan Britain - and every revolutionary attempt to conjure it away (1789, 1917) has itself foundered. In the Roman rite now, we have a liturgical year both luminously intent on the essentials and rich in its details. “By means of the yearly cycle”, says the Calendarium Romanum of 1969, echoing Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, “the Church celebrates the whole mystery of Christ, from his Incarnation until the day of Pentecost and the expectation of his coming again.” Central is the Easter Triduum - from the evening Mass of Maundy Thursday to the Compline of Easter Sunday. Out of this flows the Easter season, with its fifty days culminating
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in Pentecost, and towards it flows the critical season of Lent. Such is the “Easter cycle”. Second to it in stature is the “Christmas cycle”, with its similar pattern of a season of celebration, running to the feast of the Lord’s Baptism, and a season of preparation, much-cherished Advent. There is the fine Byzantine phrase for all this: “the winter Pasch”.
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Ash Wednesday: The Grace of Lent
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faithful, let us receive with joy the divinelyinspired announcement of Lent. Let us wash ourselves with tears for its divine purification. Let us pray to see the fulfilment of Easter, the true Revelation. Let us prepare for adoring the Cross and Resurrection of Christ our God! O lover of man, do not deprive us of our expectation! (Byzantine Liturgy) Being prepared by Christ for Christ
On his first Ash Wednesday as Pope John Paul II said: “Jesus Christ himself is the greatest grace of Lent.” We can get caught up in ourselves and in our work. We could get caught up in Lenten practice. But “the greatest grace of Lent”, beyond anything we may do or try to do, is Jesus Christ himself. It’s Christ who gives the pattern of the forty days, who establishes Lent in a sense, and it’s in a succession of great Gospel-passages (especially in Year A) that He comes to his Church: the temptation in the desert, the transfiguration, the meeting with the Samaritan woman, the healing of the man born blind, the raising
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of Lazarus, the entrance into Jerusalem, and the Gospel of the Passion. A “good Lent” entails being touched by those Gospels. There couldn’t be a better preparation for Easter: being prepared by Christ for Christ. Lent is a time of mercy and grace, or to use Paul’s image, it’s the ambassador of mercy and grace. And Christ is that mercy, present to us in word and sacrament. “Jesus Christ himself is the greatest grace of Lent.” What next? Lent is “the school of repentance”. “Do you not know that God’s patience is leading you to repentance?” (Rom 2:4). Lent is God’s patience as well, quietly waiting for us to turn round. “Repentance is the renewal of baptism and is a contract with God for a fresh start in life. Repentance goes shopping for humility and is ever distrustful of bodily comfort. Repentance is critical awareness and a sure watch over oneself. Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair… Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the performance of good deeds which are the opposites of the sins” (St John Climacus). Temperance and offering
According to St Benedict (ch.49), ideally we should always be living Lent, but we’re weak, so let us at least try to keep our life in all purity during this season and “wash away the negligences of other times”. One could see in that a call to the renewal of our baptism. Catechumens
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throughout Lent will be preparing to receive baptism; we can be preparing to renew it. Then he goes on to the practice of Lent, giving us three “lists” of good works. “We will do this [keep Lent] worthily if we refrain from, temper, all vices.” So, Lent is about that, first of all: refraining from vices. There is a wider meaning here: it really means to govern with wise moderation. In our eating and drinking, our work, our relationships, our good desires even, we need to be “temperate”. We need to give what’s strong in us something to strive for without frightening off our own weakness. “Temperance,” says the Catechism, “is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honourable” (1809). It means regaining dominion over ourselves. Then: “Let each one, over and above the measure prescribed for him, offer to God something of his own free will in the joy of the Holy Spirit.” Some commentators on the Rule think that Hebrews 5:7 lies behind this portrait of the monk in Lent: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.” During Lent, then, we should seek to associate ourselves with Jesus in Gethsemane, offering his prayers etc. in him. It’s a free-will offering, and therefore, made “with the joy of
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the Holy Spirit”. Again, we can go beyond the immediate application, beyond the private acts of devotion we take on individually. Shouldn’t everything we are and do be an offering and prayer to God, deliberately united to the saving sacrifice? To be temperate suggests Lent is for recovering our kingly character as Christians, to offer, our priestly character. Most of all, offering takes us back to certain great texts of the New Testament concerning the baptismal priesthood: “Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God.”(Heb 13:15) “Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Pt 2:5) Eagerly waiting for him
Lastly, we look forward: “and with the joy of spiritual longing let him look forward to holy Easter”. This makes it all dynamic, and brings us back, if we need bringing back, to Christ. “To desire eternal life with all spiritual longing” is one of the tools of good works in the Rule. Here, it is expecting holy Easter with the joy of spiritual longing. Eternal life is Christ, and so is Easter. St Benedict, quite possibly, is inspired by a phrase in one of the ancient Mass-books, more precisely by a prayer he’d have heard in Lent: “Grant your faithful, O Lord, both to receive the Easter sacraments without ceasing and to
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look forward to the coming feasts with desire, so that persevering in the mysteries by which they are reborn, they may be led by doing this to new life.” I think it’s true that we will catch the desire for Easter, for Christ, for resurrection and new life, from the liturgy - just as that is where we express it. Again, though, it’s good to go back to the New Testament, where expectation, so often, refers to the ultimate Easter: “So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.” (Heb 9:28) “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” (2 Pt 3:14-15) So, we “look forward” to the holy feast of Easter, because it anticipates the fullness of redemption. It augurs the second coming and final salvation. We fall rather short of the longing of the early Christians, I suspect. Easter is the Lord’s bait to help us on, help us catch up. But if this Lent, we become a little more kingly, a little more priestly, and - in the sense of looking forward in hope - a little more prophetic, then the grace of our baptism will have been deepened, we’ll be a little closer to Christ, and Lent won’t have been wasted. “O Lover of man, do not deprive us of our expectation!” Amen.
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Lent - a Preparation for Exodus
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A glimpse of glory to come
he Gospel of the Transfiguration has been the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent since at least the fifth century. Last Sunday we were in the desert, this Sunday we are on a mountain.1 Last Sunday Christ was under assault from Satan. This Sunday he is transfigured: “the aspect of his face was changed and his clothing became brilliant as lightning”. It is a glimpse of the glory to come. The account we have just heard is St Luke’s. Each Evangelist has his own touches. The three Evangelists who tell this story all mention that Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus. But only Luke goes on and says: “and they were speaking of his passing which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Now, the word “passing” translates the Greek word for “exodus”. Moses (who stands for the Law) and Elijah (who stands for the prophets) were talking with Jesus about his exodus. “Exodus” is a loaded word. It is a key to what we 1
(Sunday 2 Year C) (Gn 15:5-12, 17-18; Ph 3:17-4:1; Lk 9:28-36).
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are doing through Lent and Easter, to what our Lord accomplished in Jerusalem, and to our own lives. So let’s explore this word a little. It refers in the first place to the series of events that took place some 1300 years before Christ. The Exodus was the liberation of a group of Hebrew slaves from the grip of the most powerful empire in the ancient world, located in the valley of the Nile. It launched them on a journey over the Red Sea, through the desert and on towards the Promised Land. It brought them into a new relationship, a covenant, with God, sealed at the foot of Mt Sinai. It made them into a people, bound to God and one another by a God-given Law. It grounded a new liturgy, Passover, and a new place of worship, the Tent of Meeting. It was all at once historical fact, epic story, a book in the Bible, and an extraordinary revelation of the name (the nature) and the power of God. Suddenly, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob remembers their descendants. He hears their cry. The Supreme Power intervenes in history in defence of the powerless, turning the world upside down. And over time this Hebrew, Israelite, Jewish “thing” has become something that belongs, even unconsciously, to everyone. It’s still with us. It has shaped our mentalities and our history. Why is Palestine so fraught a place? Why is freedom the great ideal? Why do we demand justice for the oppressed? Why so much history of revolutions and movements of
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liberation and calls for emancipation? Many reasons no doubt, but first of all because the story of the Exodus is part of our collective memory, because once upon a time God freed his people from Egypt. To put it another way, no Exodus, no Israel, no Jews. No Jews, no Jesus. No Jesus, no Church. Without the Exodus, we wouldn’t be here and this cathedral wouldn’t be here. There’s an unbroken chain. And, at the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus about the “exodus” he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. Clearly there is more than one Exodus. One might suggest there are four. The meaning of Exodus
Let me share a fancy of mine. It may be quite wrong. But if, as the current thinking is, humanity began to be in Africa, in East Africa specifically; if the geography was not utterly different from now: then when the first human beings migrated north, into the Middle East and Europe and Asia, they presumably anticipated more or less the route of the later Exodus - from the mouths of the River Nile round into the Levant. There would have been this first, prehistoric exodus. And it would have marked a major moment in human history. Perhaps… Secondly, with no “perhaps”, there is Israel’s Exodus, commemorated every year at Passover. This was something more than a mere migration. It was liberation
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from slavery into a new relationship with God. It was the birth of Israel’s vocation. Much biblical history, often far from happy, then followed. There was exile, and there were new forms of oppression. The prophets spoke of a new exodus. And the thoughtful Jews of Jesus’s time shared such a hope. They were looking for social and political freedom, from Rome immediately, but for more too. They sensed that a closer, purer, less compromised relationship with God was called for. They had a feeling that their deepest need was freedom from the slavery of sin. When Moses and Elijah, great symbolic figures of Israel’s past, were talking with Jesus on the mountain, it was about the exodus he would accomplish in Jerusalem. They were speaking about the third exodus. This was the final and definitive one, the true and lasting one, completing what had gone before. On Maundy Thursday, we’ll hear the Gospel of John: “It was before the festival of the Passover, and Jesus knew that the hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.” This is his Passover, his exodus, the one we commemorate in our Paschal Triduum and our Paschal Vigil. This is the exodus that went through the Red Sea of death, into the desert of the tomb, and then out into the sunlit Land of Resurrection. A passage from this world to the Father. An exodus from the “Egypt” of sin and death to the Land where God is known and immortality reigns.
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The universal ‘exodus’
Already Israel’s Exodus was an exodus made by one people on behalf of everyone else. Jesus’s exodus, Jesus’s Passover, was one man’s, the God-man’s, made for all of us. It made possible the fourth exodus: ours joined to his. Life is full of little exoduses, surely. Each of us, as we grow up, leaves the garden of innocence and learns the sad knowledge of good and evil. Then, “a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife.” Parents have children and children change their parents’ lives. We pass from place to place, situation to situation, even country to country. And in the end we leave this life. Exodus is part of being human. But all these little exoduses cry out for another - the exodus our heart most longs for. An exodus away from everything that weighs on us into freedom of spirit, an exodus from meaninglessness into meaning, from a chaos of desires into purity of heart, forgiveness and peace. And if we link our lives to Christ’s, this becomes our exodus. Our changing life is joined to his. We needn’t pass away with this passing world. Instead, we pass over with him from this world to the Father and find the world again transfigured by him. We begin this exodus here below. We begin it in two ways: by sharing in the sacramental life of the Church, crossing the Red Sea of baptism and eating the fruit of the Promised Land, the Eucharist, and by living lives of faith, hope and love, acknowledging our sins, taking up
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our cross and following him. We have a horizon now of a radiant Face and shining clothes, a glorified Body. And, please God, when the exodus of death is upon us, our faith will be speaking in our hearts of the exodus of Jesus, accomplished in Jerusalem, working out in us. And the Church will be praying beside us: Go forth, Christian soul, from this world in the name of God the almighty Father, who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you, in the name of the Holy Spirit who was poured out upon you. Go forth, faithful Christian. May you live in peace this day, may your home be with God in Zion, with Mary, the virgin Mother of God, with Joseph and all the angels and saints.
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