Triduum: Three Days of Gift

It is striking for me to think just how incredibly good and generous our God is to us. This isn't an aloof god who is far-removed from our needs, our desires, our hopes, our dreams, and our failures. This God - our God - is the living God who chooses to dwell among us amidst our personal histories, with warts and glory and all.

In Jesus, we have encountered God-among-us in the most intimate way. Through our sinful inclinations, we have proven time and again that we do not always share in this desire for love, life, and intimacy. Still, our poorest choices do not deter our good and generous God. During these three holiest of days, the Triduum, we remember and enter into the most profound mystery of God's love in Jesus. During these days, we are given the very gift of God.

On Holy Thursday, Jesus was determined to show his disciples the depth of God's love and goodness. "Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave" (Phil. 2:6-7). At this Last Supper, Jesus tied a towel around his waist and washed the disciples' feet. Jesus did not disdain the feet of these liars, cowards, and betrayers. He loved them with the greatest love, a love that was willing to lay down his own life for them and for all of humanity, even "while we were still sinners" (Romans 5:8). Jesus saw the worth of every disciple, despite their sins.

As if this gift of Jesus the Servant was not enough, Jesus then took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples as his very Body. And then with the cup, he blessed it and shared it, giving it to the disciples as his Blood poured out. From that moment, Jesus perpetually gave us his Eucharistic Body and Blood as a lasting memorial of this gift of God's love. This love of Christ Jesus is willingly sacrificed for each of us - for the whole lot of humanity: cowards, liars, and betrayers. This gift of Jesus' very self, a gift of love and an offer of salvation, always remains freely available for us to take, to eat, to drink.

This love, however, has a cost. We could not accept the immediacy of this love. All of us - Jew and Gentile - have rejected this gift. It seems paradoxical to call this day Good Friday. This is a day of injustice, arrest, torture, and death. We see the darker side of humanity in Peter, Judas, Pontius Pilate, the Roman guard, and the Temple officials. Yet, this day is indeed good because we also encounter a love that is stronger than the forces of death. Jesus forgives the repentant thief (cf. Luke 23:43) and asks forgiveness for those who have done this to him (cf. Luke 23:34). Jesus gives testimony to the Truth without violence or revenge (cf. John 18:37).

Jesus dies at the hands of sinners. Jesus is buried. Jesus is swallowed up into the earth. In the gift of his great love, God in Jesus experiences our humiliation, our suffering, and our death.

"Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness," begins one ancient Holy Saturday homily. "The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep." Even in death, Jesus provides us with another gift of love: the gift of silent waiting and anticipation. We wait for God to act, just as those disciples waited with much pain and anxiety. As the world remained wrapped in long silence, Jesus was at work, restoring all things in God. Death could not silence the power of love. Jesus descended into the very depths of hell, of isolation, and death. In the silence of the tomb, God's love was at work.

It would only be on the third day - on Sunday - that this silence  would be broken by the words of life and love triumphant over the grave: "You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Behold, the place where they laid him!" (Mark 16:6). Jesus, who had given us the gifts of his service, his Body and Blood, his death, and his sacred silence, now gives us yet another gift: new life!

Our good and generous God is the giver of many gifts. These are not abstract nor are they generic gifts. But in Jesus Christ, God gives us those gifts for our lives that carry us from sin to forgiveness, from darkness to light, from suffering to freedom, from death to new life.

All paintings used in this post are by Sieger Köder.