From the Heart of the Shepherd
- Church of St. Mark
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
From the bulletin for Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion (2026 March 29)
3/29 - Parish School of Prayer, Pt 23: Passion Tide
The liturgy always seeks to lead us into the mystery of Christ’s work of our redemption, in such a way that this work is accomplished in our lives, through our participation in it. In Him!
In truth, these “mysteries” have always been at work in God’s plan of salvation. Though they are fulfilled in the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Our Lord, they are operative and at least partially manifest throughout salvation history. For example: St. Paul says that the Israelites who lived through the Exodus were “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor 10:2). “All are the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink” (1 Cor 10:3). These are curious statements. They seem to mean, however, that by what they went through during the Exodus–such as the deliverance through water in crossing the Red Sea–these men and women were “plunged” into sharing in Moses’ relationship with God. Moses’ name, after all, means “drawn from the water”; he was the man with whom God spoke face to face, whom God had already delivered from Pharoah’s death sentence as a baby and later as a grown man. Through the Exodus events, God’s people were given to share in the salvation Moses had already experienced, and something of his intimacy with God as well. They all ate the miraculous food–a constant reminder of their dependence on God’s word–and all drank of the miraculous draught drawn, not “from the water,” but from the rock which Moses had struck.
And the rock was Christ.
“These things,” says St. Paul, "occurred as types” (1 Cor 10:6). In one way or another, they contain the “shape” of all that was accomplished in and by Christ Our Lord. Whose Word is true nourishment–it imparts everlasting life. Who gives those who believe in Him living water–the Holy Spirit. Who leads those who follow Him through the “waters of death” (cf. Ps 69:16) into the true Promised Land of Heaven (perhaps after some wandering in the arid regions of Purgatory).
It’s as though the mysteries of Christ’s life shine backward upon all that happened in the Old Testament, revealing the hidden significance of those events in a new light. But the light also shines in the other direction.
We Christians have been baptized in Christ. By that sacramental “plunge,” we come to share in Christ’s relationship with the Father (as sons!) and participate in the deliverance His saving passion has pioneered and perfected. And this is true of all the sacraments of the New Covenant: like the types of old, but in a far more efficacious way, they pour the light of Christ’s life and death and resurrection upon the ordinary events of our lives, bathing them with divine grace and infusing into us saving power. We hear the very words of Christ–those of everlasting life–granting us pardon, eat the same Spiritual Food as the apostles, have the Living Water who is the Spirit poured out upon us as at Pentecost, etc.
In Holy Week, the light shines the brighter. The “shape” of the mysteries of our redemption is all the more apparent in the liturgy by which those mysteries are made present again for us. We relive the institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, the consummation of that Sacrifice upon Good Friday’s Cross, and the dawning of the Light that transforms all of history at Easter. One of the many collect prayers in the Easter Vigil prays thus: “O God of unchanging power and eternal light, look with favor on the wondrous mystery of the whole Church and serenely accomplish the work of human salvation, which you planned from all eternity.” We are praying that that work be accomplished here and now, in this liturgy, and for us!
Let these truths guide our participation in the Sacred Triduum. We delight in the beautiful music; we revel in the symbolism of the rites; we remember all Jesus suffered for us; we rejoice in the exuberance of the newly baptized and confirmed. But at the heart of these celebrations is our being “baptized” all the deeper into Christ–our conscious and active cooperation with Him in the work of our redemption, retracing the hours of His final days in such a way that His Hour arrives for us as well, and we enter into His Day.