Exploring the Mysteries

Our celebration continues with the Great Fifty Days of Easter. Our liturgy continues to invite our exploration of the Christ Mystery by which we are saved. We continue with white vestments, with colorful spring flowers, and with our Easter anthems.

Our liturgical journey, which began in Lent and intensified during the Triduum, brought us the hopeful feast of Easter last week. Easter opened up the Paschal Mystery for all believers. The Paschal Mystery is the memorial and experience of Christ passing over from death to life. We have moved with him through his suffering and death. We have kept vigil at the tomb awaiting the Resurrection, not only to find the tomb empty on Sunday morning, but Jesus alive, talking with his disciples, eating and drinking with them. This is the central mystery of our faith, the death and rising of the Lord.

The first place where we continue our Easter journey is at the Eucharist on the Lord’s Day. From an historical perspective, Sunday is the weekly celebration of the Lord’s death and rising. Each Sunday reminds us of Easter as we gather as Church. Sunday, for the Christian community, is the first day of the week. The early believers also saw it as the beginning of a new age of grace or the so-called “Eight Day”, the completion of all things in Christ.

From Table to Table
In our remembrance of Jesus’ death to life action, we began with the disciples on Holy Thursday at the Lord’s Supper. There, Jesus set the stage for the saving deeds of God in his life and ours. He sat at the table with his friends. We read Paul’s words of how he “took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it” to his friends. We remembered that after the supper he did the same thing with the cup. This breaking and pouring action were prophetic announcements and causes of his being broken and poured out in death for all. This table gathering is described in the Easter Acts of the Apostles as the Breaking of the Bread. It was that Breaking of the Bread which the Church community gathered to do in Jesus’ memory on the Lord’s Day.

The celebration of Sunday is the first way for us to remember the Lord’s Day. It is when we

remember the Lord’s death and his rising to new life. In that memory we share in that Christ mystery. How we do that is in the story-telling of God’s Word, in which we proclaim, hear, and celebrate the Father with us in Christ.

Frequent in the post-resurrection stories is this same story-telling. In Luke’s gospel, for example, two disciples meet Jesus along the way. They are down cast without hope. He invites their stories about this Messiah in whom they had hoped. They told him of his death and the empty tomb and stories of his being seen by some women. Jesus engages them with stories of God’s fidelity through the scriptures along with the numerous rescues of God’s people. They begin to understand. Jesus plays along with them and they invite him to stay with them. Later, they will describe how “their hearts burned within them”.

Their faith journey brings them to table fellowship again. At the table, Jesus again “took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it” to them. Luke tells us that in these memorial gestures and words of blessing, the disciples “recognized him.” His presence was real and sufficient, and then he “vanished from their sight”. The disciples knew him risen from the dead, eating and drinking with them as before, but now made new.

Newly Baptised at the Table
The Easter Season continues to welcome the newly baptized at the Eucharistic Table. Through their baptism, they have moved with Jesus from death to life. Their story and our story is the same, Passover from death to life. The Christ mystery is so grand and enormous, that the Great Fifty Days of Easter are provided to explore and understand what “to rise from the dead” means.

They--and we--continue to keep the Lord’s memorial at the Eucharistic Table with the Sundays of Easter. We continue to listen to his voice in his Words of life. We engage in those memorial actions of communion: taking, blessing, breaking and pouring, blessing, and drinking. In that blessed communion we discover the same Lord, once dead, now raised by the Father to new life. This Great Fifty Days of Easter is communion with the Lord and with one another. We are risen with Christ!

CDH