Holy Triduum Homily
We have been praying Stations of the Cross every Wednesday during Lent. Today we were able to pray outside, using large sketches by artist Anthony Visco for our Stations. Mr. Visco kindly donated these sketches years ago when we visited the St. Rita shrine and his studio for a Frassati Friday.
Today's meditations focused on how we can unite our suffering with Jesus's suffering. Spiritual life is not only suffering - for example, gratitude and joy for many gifts and blessings matter too - but there is no mature spiritual life unless we reckon with Christ's suffering and death.
Jesus does not magically exempt us from sin and its consequences. At the heart of the Christian faith is an honest acknowledgement that bad things will happen to good people. Jesus's situation in this Holy Week makes that obvious.
But Jesus redeems his and our suffering. His deep desire is to transform our sin and suffering, so that our short lives can become spiritually significant and our souls can be radiant and beautiful. Suffering is not an obstacle to this transformation, but rather one of the essential ingredients.
If we want to become like Jesus - if we want to have a spiritual life, if we want to follow him into intimacy with the holiness of the Triune God - then what happened to him will have to happen to us. When we follow him, we allow ourselves to be configured until we become like him in all things, including his passion and suffering. This configuration happens through the sacramental life, discipleship, prayer, devotions like Stations of the Cross, and this week's Holy Triduum.
In these coming High Holy Days, Jesus faces betrayal, humiliation, agony, sin, and death. He faces the worst that the world can throw at him. And yet he never lies or evades. Instead he loves anyway. He forgives anyway. This is the nature of God. This is who we were created to become.
The glory of Easter is that God stands by his Son and redeems His suffering. God does not let the horror amount to nothing. On Thursday, Jesus will wash feet and give us the Eucharist - and he'll lose his friends anyway. On Friday, he will walk the way of the cross, he will be humiliated and tortured. On Saturday, he will descend into Hell, harrowing the depths of depravity. But on Sunday, he will return victorious.
He invites us to follow Him in all this. We can follow Him in this resurrection. Jesus's way is the most really real way.
In the end, following Jesus is the only authentic life. It is possible - it is a common and universal temptation - to try and deal with sin and suffering through our human strategies of evasion, denial, resentment, diversion, and bargaining. But in the end, our pride and attempts at self-medication only perpetuate the cycle. In the end, the only way to defeat sin and suffering is to follow Jesus through it with love, hope, and confidence in the Easter promise.
God is merciful and good! What human beings do to one another, what happens in our fallen world, Our Lord can redeem. Jesus knows darkness, but he turns it into love and beauty. Let us confess our situation with honesty and without fear. The holiest days of the year are now upon us. May God bless you and keep you! May we enter into His Passion, uniting our suffering with his. May we invite him into our lives, and see our lives through his eyes. May we trust and invest our selves in this mystery, and raise our faces to the Lord. May we love and serve anyway, even when it hurts and is hard, and let us see the beautiful things that He can do with our offering. Amen.
