THE MYSTERY OF PASCHAL TIME
OF all the seasons of the liturgical year Eastertide is by far the
richest in mystery. We might even say that Easter is the summit of
the Mystery of the sacred Liturgy. The Christian who is happy
enough to enter, with his whole mind and heart, into the knowledge
and love of the Paschal Mystery, has reached the very centre of
the supernatural life. Hence it is that the Church uses every
effort in order to effect this: what she has hitherto done was all
intended as a preparation for Easter. The holy longings of Advent,
the sweet joys of Christmas, the severe truths of Septuagesima,
the contrition and penance of Lent, the heartrending sight of the
Passion-all were given us as preliminaries, as paths, to the
sublime and glorious Pasch, which is now ours.
And that we might be convinced of the supreme importance of this
solemnity, God willed that the Christian Easter and Pentecost
should be prepared by those of the Jewish Law-a thousand five
hundred years of typical beauty prefigured the reality: and that
reality is ours!
During these days, then, we have brought before us the two great
manifestations of God's goodness towards mankind-the Pasch of
Israel, and the Christian Pasch, the Pentecost of Sinai, and the
Pentecost of the Church. We shall have occasion to show how the
ancient figures were fulfilled in the realities of the new Easter
and Pentecost, and how the twilight of the Mosaic Law made way for
the full daylight of the Gospel; but we cannot resist the feeling
of holy reverence, at the bare thought that the solemnities we
have now to celebrate are more than three thousand years old, and
that they are to be renewed every year from this till the voice of
the angel shall be heard proclaiming: 'Time shall be no more!'1
The gates of eternity will then be thrown open.
Eternity in heaven is the true Pasch: hence, our Pasch here on
earth is the feast of feasts, the solemnity of solemnities. The
human race was dead; it was the victim of that sentence, whereby
it was condemned to lie mere dust in the tomb; the gates of life
were shut against it. But see! the Son of God rises from his grave
and takes possession of eternal life. Nor is he the only one that
is to die no more, for, as the Apostle teaches us, 'He is the
first-born from the dead.'2 The Church would, therefore, have us
consider ourselves as having already risen with our Jesus, and as
having already taken possession of eternal life. The holy Fathers
bid us look on these fifty days of Easter as the image of our
eternal happiness. They are days devoted exclusively to joy; every
sort of sadness is forbidden; and the Church cannot speak to her
divine Spouse without joining to her words that glorious cry of
heaven, the Alleluia, wherewith, as the holy Liturgy says,3 the
streets and squares of the heavenly Jerusalem resound without
ceasing. We have been forbidden the use of this joyous word during
the past nine weeks; it behoved us to die with Christ-but now that
we have risen together with him from the tomb, and that we are
resolved to die no more that death which kills the soul and caused
our Redeemer to die on the cross, we have a right to our Alleluia.
The providence of God, who has established harmony between the
visible world and the supernatural work of grace, willed that the
Resurrection of our Lord should take place at that particular
season of the year when even Nature herself seems to rise from the
grave. The meadows give forth their verdure, the trees resume
their foliage, the birds fill the air with their songs, and the
sun, the type of our triumphant Jesus, pours out his floods of
light on our earth made new by lovely spring. At Christmas the sun
had little power, and his stay with us was short; it harmonized
with the humble birth of our Emmanuel, who came among us in the
midst of night, and shrouded in swaddling clothes, but now he is
'as a giant that runs his way, and there is no one that can hide
himself from his heat.'4 Speaking, in the Canticle, to the
faithful soul, and inviting her to take her part in this new life
which he is now imparting to every creature, our Lord himself
says: 'Arise, my dove, and come! Winter is now past, the rain is
over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land. The voice of
the turtle is heard. The fig-tree hath put forth her green figs.
The vines, in flower, yield their sweet smell. Arise thou, and
come!'5
In the preceding chapter we explained why our Saviour chose the
Sunday for his Resurrection, whereby he conquered death and
proclaimed life to the world. It was on this favoured day of the
week that he had, four thousand years previously, created the
light, by selecting it now for the commencement of the new life
which he graciously imparts to man, he would show us that Easter
is the renewal of the entire creation. Not only is the anniversary
of his glorious Resurrection to be, henceforward, the greatest of
days, but every Sunday throughout the year is to be a sort of
Easter, a holy and sacred day. The Synagogue, by God's command,
kept holy the Saturday or the Sabbath in honour of God's resting
after the six days of the creation; but the Church, the Spouse, is
commanded to honour the work of her Lord. She allows the Saturday
to pass-it is the day on which her Jesus rested in the sepulchre:
but, now-that she is illumined with the brightness of the
Resurrection, she devotes to the contemplation of his work the
first day of the week; it is the day of light, for on it he called
forth material light (which was the first manifestation of life
upon chaos), and on the same, he that is the 'Brightness of the
Father,'6 and 'the Light of the world,'7 rose from the darkness of
the tomb.
Let, then, the week with its Sabbath pass by; what we Christians
want is the eighth day, the day that is beyond the measure of
time, the day of eternity, the day whose light is not intermittent
or partial, but endless and unlimited. Thus speak the holy
Fathers, when explaining the substitution of the Sunday for the
Saturday. It was, indeed, right that man should keep, as the day
of his weekly and spiritual repose, that on which the Creator of
the visible world had taken his divine rest; but it was a
commemoration of the material creation only. The Eternal Word
comes down in the world that he has created; he comes with the
rays of his divinity clouded beneath the humble veil of our flesh;
he comes to fulfil the figures of the first Covenant. Before
abrogating the Sabbath, he would observe it as he did every tittle
of the Law; he would spend it as the day of rest, after the work
of his Passion, in the silence of the sepulchre: but, early on the
eighth day, he rises to life, and the life is one of glory. 'Let
us,' says the learned and pious Abbot Rupert, 'leave the Jews to
enjoy the ancient Sabbath, which is a memorial of the visible
creation. They know not how to love or desire or merit aught but
earthly things.... They would not recognize this world's creator
as their king, because he said: "Blessed are the poor!" and "Woe
to the rich!" But our Sabbath has been transferred from the
seventh to the eighth day, and the eighth is the first. And
rightly was the seventh changed into the eighth, because we
Christians put our joy in a better work than the creation of the
world.... Let the lovers of the world keep a Sabbath for its
creation: but our joy is in the salvation of the world, for our
life, yea and our rest, is hidden with Christ in God.'8
The mystery of the seventh followed by an eighth day, as the holy
one, is again brought before us by the number of weeks which form
Eastertide. These weeks are seven; they form a week of weeks, and
their morrow is again a Sunday, the glorious feast of Pentecost.
These mysterious numbers-which God himself fixed when he
instituted the first Pentecost after the first Pasch-were adopted
by the Apostles when they regulated the Christian Easter, as we
learn from St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Isidore, Amalarius, Rabanus
Maurus and from all the ancient interpreters of the mysteries of
the holy Liturgy. 'If we multiply seven by seven' says St. Hilary,
'we shall find that this holy season is truly the Sabbath of
sabbaths, but what completes it and raises it to the plenitude of
the Gospel, is the eighth day which follows, eighth and first both
together in itself. The Apostles have given so sacred an
institution to these seven weeks that, during them, no one should
kneel, or mar by fasting the spiritual joy of this long feast. The
same institution has been extended to each Sunday; for this day
which follows the Saturday has become, by the application of the
progress of the Gospel the completion of the Saturday, and the day
of feast and joy.'9
Thus, then, the whole season of Easter is marked with the mystery
expressed by each Sunday of the year. Sunday is to us the great
day of our week, because beautified with the splendour of our
Lord's Resurrection of which the creation of material light was
but a type. We have already said that this institution was
prefigured in the Old Law, although the Jewish people were not in
any way aware of it. Their Pentecost fell on the fiftieth day
after the Pasch; it was the morrow of the seven weeks. Another
figure of our Eastertide was the year of Jubilee, which God bade
Moses prescribe to his people. Each fiftieth year the houses and
lands that had been alienated during the preceding -forty-nine
returned to their original owners; and those Israelites who had
been compelled by poverty to sell themselves as slaves recovered
their liberty. This year, which was properly called the sabbatical
year, was the sequel of the preceding seven weeks of years, and
was thus the image of our eighth day, whereon the Son of Mary, by
his Resurrection, redeemed us from the slavery of the tomb, and
restored us to the inheritance of our immortality.
The rites peculiar to Eastertide, in the present discipline of the
Church, are two: the unceasing repetition of the Alleluia, of
which we have already spoken, and the colour of the vestments used
for its two great solemnities, white for the first and red for the
second. White is appropriate to the Resurrection: it is the
mystery of eternal light, which knows neither spot nor shadow; it
is the mystery that produces in a faithful soul the sentiment of
purity and joy. Pentecost, which gives us the Holy Spirit, the
'consuming Fire,'10 is symbolized by the red vestments, which
express the mystery of the divine Paraclete coming down in the
form of fiery tongues upon them that were assembled in the
Cenacle. With regard to the ancient usage of not kneeling during
Paschal Time, we have already said that there is a mere vestige of
it now left in the Latin Liturgy.
The feasts of the saints, which were interrupted during Holy Week,
are likewise excluded from the first eight days of Eastertide; but
when these are ended, we shall have them in rich abundance, as a
bright constellation of stars round the divine Sun of Justice, our
Jesus. They will accompany us in our celebration of his admirable
Ascension; but such is the grandeur of the mystery of Pentecost,
that from the eve of that day they will be again interrupted until
the expiration of Paschal Time.
The rites of the primitive Church with reference to the Neophytes,
who were regenerated by baptism on the night of Easter, are
extremely interesting and instructive. But as they are peculiar to
the two octaves of Easter and Pentecost, we will explain them when
they are brought before us by the Liturgy of those days.
ENDNOTES
1 Apoc. x 6.
2 Coloss. i 18
3 Pontificale Rom. In Dedicat. Eccles.
4 Ps. xviii 6, 7.
5 Cant. ii 10, 13.
6 Heb. i 3.
7 St. John viii 12.
8 De Divinis Officiis, lib. vii cap. xix,
9 Prologus in Psalmos,
10 Heb. xii 29.
(Taken from Volume VII of "The Liturgical Year" by Abbot Gueranger
O.S.B. published by Marian House, Powers Lake, ND 58773.)
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