Next Sunday will be Palm Sunday. A few days later, we will enter into the Triduum, which will bring us to Easter Sunday. The liturgies of these coming eight days will place the last days of Our Lord before our eyes: his passion, death and resurrection.
And so, there is something interesting in the readings for this week, worth considering in some detail and with an eye to the liturgy. Each reading tells us to forget what lies behind, to forget the past. Isaiah tells us: “Thus says the Lord … Remember not the events of the past” (43:16, 18). Yet, is this not precisely what we desire to do in the coming days — to remember, and to remember in a most vivid, attentive way?
The Old Testament so often exhorted Israel, just as it now exhorts us, to remember what God has done for them in the past. Remembering God’s activity is how we come to know God, to understand God, to befriend and become like God. Indeed, the prophets constantly reminded Israel of God’s mercy and recall us to God’s merciful ways. In the coming days, we will remember and even reenact God’s ultimate gift of mercy: We will bear palms, wash feet, celebrate the Last Supper, keep watch at the tomb in adoration and venerate the cross. We will do as Christ did, and then we will embrace his ultimate gift of love, saying “Amen!”
| April 3 – Fifth Sunday of Lent |
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Is 43:16-21 |
For this reason, Isaiah adds: “See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers” (43:19). Here, Isaiah seems to speak to the present, to exhort us to see how God makes things new now. Even today, he makes the desert of death into a river of life.
This, friends, is the work of the liturgy. In the liturgy, the past and the present unite; they totally transcend time as we know it. The salvific and sacrificial deeds of Christ that we remember in the liturgy were efficacious in history and remain so. Thinking of the Last Supper and the Eucharistic liturgy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put it this way in his book “Spirit of the Liturgy,” writing: “The Lord could say that his body was ‘given’ only because he had in fact given it; he could present his blood in the new chalice as shed for many only because he really had shed it. This body is not the ever-dead corpse of a dead man, nor is the blood the life-element rendered lifeless. No, sacrifice has become gift, for the body given in love and the blood given in love have entered, through the Resurrection, into the eternity of love, which is stronger than death.” Put differently, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we remember the Last Supper, and we receive into ourselves the love that is stronger than death, crucified and risen.
But that is not all! The liturgy lets us transcend the present by moving toward the future, too. Remember the one thing Paul tells us about forgetting and remembering in his epistle for Sunday: “[strain] forward to what lies ahead” (Phil 3:13).
In line with Paul, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that “the future, too, is present in what happens in the liturgy.” We are to become like God, more and more. Or, as Paul puts it elsewhere in his letters, we are not just to recognize God’s merciful activity in history, but to configure ourselves to it every day, becoming a “living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1). We receive God’s self-gift in every Eucharistic liturgy, not just in remembrance but also as an act of being joined efficaciously to the Love that is stronger than death — yesterday, today and always.
Catherine Cavadini, Ph.D., is the assistant chair of the Department of Theology and director of the master’s in theology program at the University of Notre Dame.
