The Pascal Mystery

A Grace for This Week:

I  pray for the grace to want to be with Jesus, despite possible inconvenience or suffering.  I ask for the grace to love him more and more.  I ask to follow him wherever he leads.  I ask for the ability to discern his direction in my life—and to follow it.

The Pascal Mystery

The term “Pascal Mystery” refers to the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus—as a kind of continuum.  In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the figure of Jesus is a victim, helpless, under the control of the Jewish and Roman authorities.  He suffers.  His suffering, however, is redemptive—it has a larger purpose and end to it.  In John’s Gospel we have a different portrait of Jesus: Jesus is the Messiah, the king of creation, and nothing happens to him which is not allowed by him.  In both points of view a terrible injustice takes place and his friends, family, and followers are helpless to do anything about it.  We are passersby or onlookers and cannot influence the action.

In Luke’s Gospel, after the Crucifixion comes the death of Jesus.  People are upset.  Even nature is off kilter: darkness came over the whole land.  The Temple itself, the center of worship in Israel, is affected: the veil of the Temple was torn down the middle.  Jesus gives himself into the hands of the Father.  Then the centurion who witnessed it says, “This man was innocent beyond doubt.”  The other people who are witnesses return home beating their breasts in despair.  After the burial of Jesus comes the Resurrection when it becomes clear that Jesus had to suffer, to move through suffering and death, in order to be resurrected.

John’s Gospel is often called the Book of Signs since all the signs point to Jesus as the Messiah—if only we can read them.  In this Gospel Jesus is not a victim but is fully in charge, the central person in a salvation drama.  Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  And Jesus answers, “Are you saying this on your own or did others tell you about me?”  Jesus says, “. . . I was born and entered the world so that I could witness to the truth.  Everyone who cares for truth, who has any feeling for the truth, recognizes my voice.”  To which Pilate responds, “What is truth?”

In the other three Gospels, Jesus is crucified on the first day of the Passover.  In John’s Gospel Jesus is crucified on the preceding day when the lambs for the Passover seder are being sacrificed in the Temple.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the lamb—the new Pascal lamb, the lamb who takes away sin and will save his people for eternal life.  John sees the Passover as a passage from death to life, from sin to reconciliation.

Likewise, in John’s Gospel the intimacy of the Last Supper leads right into service: Jesus strips off his tunic, ties a towel around himself, and begins to wash the feet of the apostles—a task reserved in his day for a servant.  Connecting love and recognition and service is a profound act.  And so when we enter the mystery of the Mass, it should lead us right out of the church cloister and into the street, seeking out the lost and the hungry and the homeless, seeing in them the face of Christ.

We who have lived through the pandemic know about suffering.  But we also know about hope and redemption and healing.  Our capacity to endure—with the help of Jesus—our own suffering rather than take it out on others, our capacity to forgive those who hurt us as well as accept graciously forces beyond our control, is what frees us to follow Jesus’s love through the suffering.  Let us pray that our own suffering will lead us to service.

The Pascal Mystery then is not something to be “solved” as though we were Sherlock Holmes or a forensic detective, but something to enter into, not something to be explained away but something to be experienced.  That love of God—once experienced—propels us into the streets to pass on the love and to serve as Jesus did.  He whom we love we want to be like.  When I look back on my life, I ask, “When have I loved/served Him?”  Today I ask, “Do I love him and serve others?”  My answer shows how deeply I have entered into the Pascal Mystery.

—Fr. Matthew Roche, SJ

Prayer for the Week:

Loving God, as we move through Holy Week, we move deeper and deeper into your passion, death, and resurrection.  Help me not to focus narrowly on my own concerns only, but through your cross and resurrection open me up to the sufferings and wounds of the world around me.  Help me not to lose hope but to be a bearer of hope—and of love—to all those around me.  Amen.

–Fr. Matthew Roche, SJ