Triduum Begins

Tonight we begin Triduum with Holy Thursday and the Mass of the Lord's Supper.  For this evening, nearly two thousand years ago, the last supper of the Christ and His disciples took place.  It was on this evening that He instituted the Holy Eucharist and it was on this evening that He would be betrayed. 

As our evening turns to morning, let us all remember how He entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and that hours from now, He would be betrayed by one of His own apostles, Judas.  Early in the hours of Friday morning, Jesus would go with some of His disciples to the Garden and there He would suffer His agony.

He knew what was coming.  He had known ever since the wedding feast at Cana, when His mother interceded and convinced Him to begin His public ministry.  He knew that turning the water to wine would begin the countdown to His death.  Do you know what strikes me most about the Garden?  So often, Jesus seems so far above us, the model of perfection that He is.  But in the late hours of Holy Thursday and the early hours of Good Friday, He was afraid.  He didn't want to die and He pleaded with His Father in Heaven to allow the cup to pass from Him, to let Him live.

It is, without a doubt, the most humanizing moment for Jesus in the Bible, but it is also the one in which His humanity and divinity shine equally through.  He's scared, He's going to be tortured and killed and the flesh is so weak and He knows the temptation to just give up, but He doesn't.  He stares at the temptation and casts it off, offering Himself as our sacrifice for sin, the Todah sacrifice that the ancient Rabbis spoke of, the sacrifice of Thanksgiving, the final sacrifice.  Ancient Rabbinical texts tell us that long after all other sacrifices have ended, the Todah sacrifice will remain; a sacrifice by one who has been spared great peril.  The sacrifice of Christ is the Todah sacrifice of the human race, for we were gravely imperiled by our sin and He gave the perfect Lamb to take that sin from us.

When Judas did come to betray Him, He wiped away His tears and with head held high, accepted the offering and asked him, "Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?"  He embraced the one whose betrayal would sentence Him until death, and in so doing, He placed the will of His Father before His own.  He went to end His life upon this Earth in a noble manner, giving up His life for His friends, and for we who did not even exist yet.

His death would become a timeless event, one prefigured long before it came to be.  Ancient cultures throughout the world hold a single theme when it comes to the concept of the "good" King and that is the King who dies so that his land and people shall be renewed.  Much as Pagan cultures of the era celebrated this concept, so to did Christ the King sacrifice Himself  for the renewal of His people.

Cicero, one of the most famous orators of the ancient world would once quote a Sybil, a prophetess, as saying, there would be a King one day who would need to be recognized to be saved.  It is said that he asked of the seeress, "In quem hominem?"  He wanted to know more about this man and how to recognize him, something which is, admittedly in a bit of a stretch, paralleled when Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea would say to the gathered crowds, in those fated hours after the Agony in the Garden, "Ecce Homo", translated "Behold the Man".

Hermes would, in Greek myths, say to the bound Prometheus, "Look not for any end, moreover, to this curse, until some God appears to accept upon his head the pangs of thy own sins vicarious".   In the creation story of the Bible, mankind fell into sin in a garden and in the Gospels, the beginning of the Todah sacrifice for mankind would begin in a garden as well; the perfect sacrifice would atone for sin.  Prometheus had given mankind fire and knowledge, the snake the knowledge of good and evil; however, in the Garden of Gethsemane a hero would rise, a God who would accept the myriad sins, or as Hermes told Prometheus in Greek myth, accepting upon His head the pangs of the vicarious sins of others.

As this night passes into Good Friday, let us recall that what began with a ritual meal that became far more than that would end with a Man accepting upon His shoulders the weight of the world.  Jesus would face all of the doubts and fears of His impending death and accept the cup of the Father's will, with full knowledge that He would die within 24 hours.  However, He knew something else, that He would rise again.  And now, as Triduum moves from Holy Thursday into Good Friday, we also know a truth.  Though tomorrow we shall hear of how He was nailed to a cross to die, it is not the end, for unlike His disciples we know how His story ends.  He is coming.  Joy is coming.  And after a period of three days of great sorrow to His followers, Light will explode into the world again.