We are not on a bible land history tour this week. We could say that these days celebrate the last days of Jesus’ life from the Last Supper onward, but that would be to shortchange the meaning of the days. They are not reenactments, but they are at the heart of the Mystery of our Faith. We are not weeping and wailing on Friday and pretending we don’t know the end of the story. We experience (not feel) the death of Jesus through the eyes of the resurrection; we experience the resurrection through the eyes of his death.
This kind of remembering is called Anamnesis. Anamnesis comes from a Greek word meaning recollection or remembering. If you look carefully at the word, you see that the ending of it looks like the word amnesia. Putting the prefix “an” at the beginning of the word amnesia means we are looking at something that is the opposite of having amnesia.
Anamnesis is about remembering. We do not remember the death and resurrection of Jesus in the same way we recall other events from the past, such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or the life of Mother Teresa. Christ is not a dead person we remember with fondness. He is the living Lord. Christ is present in our lives today and will be present into the future. We do not time-travel back to the days of Jesus to witness his death or resurrection. The original event becomes our event today as we celebrate the Mass together. The sacrifice of Jesus becomes our sacrifice. The bread and wine become the living Body and Blood of Jesus which we consume.
Past, present, and future come together as we celebrate that “Jesus Christ is risen today” – not 2,000 years ago. The past event has meaning today and draws us into a future reality, God’s banquet in the heavenly kingdom. “What do these past events mean in my life today?” We know that today is not the same as one year ago because we have had another year of experiences (good and bad) and growth. We have changed, and there is an invitation from the Church to let the “latest me” grapple with the age-old concepts of sin and redemption, of life and death, of life after death.
Triduum is a word from the Latin for “three days.” It refers to the celebrations that lead us from Lent into the Easter Season of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. In the way we currently structure time, that is from midnight to midnight, that is four days. But time used to be counted from sunrise to sunset. The Triduum begins at sundown on Holy Thursday and continues to sundown on Easter Sunday: three days. This time period celebrates the Paschal Mystery of Christ, not as a re-creation of Jesus’ life and death, but as an occasion to ponder the meaning of that life, death, and resurrection in the past, in our present lives, and in the future to come.
