As I shared in the last issue of this article, I truly believe, and our Church exhorts us to believe, that in worship we encounter our living God. Through worship, as I shared with you, God makes Himself present and active in our time. Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection constituted the essence of His redemptive work. The narrative of these salvific actions of the Incarnate Son of God formed the oldest part of the Gospel tradition. The solemn celebrations that we just recently experienced again, are centered on these events. The divine services of Great and Holy Week, crafted long ago in continuity with the experience, tradition and faith of the first Christians, help us penetrate and celebrate the mystery of our salvation. The prayers and the ritual of these special services are meant to help us experience, in some way, these salvific acts. Of course in order to experience this we must psychologically and spiritually fully enter into these rituals. This means we must reflect upon what we pray and do.

The prototype of Pascha is the Jewish Passover, the festival of Israel’s deliverance from bondage. Like the Old Testament (OT) Passover, Pascha is truly a festival of deliverance. But its nature is wholly other and unique, of which the Passover is only a prefigurement. Pascha involves the ultimate redemption – deliverance and liberation of all humanity from the malignant power of death – through the death and resurrection of Christ. Pascha is the feast of universal redemption.

Of course a person can only experience this if he has a sense of being in bondage – limited and captive to the things of this world. The fears that we have as humans are a sign of this bondage. God has indeed freed us even from the fear of death.

Our earliest sources for the annual celebration of the Christian Pascha come to us from the second century. The feast, however, must have originated in the apostolic period. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine otherwise. The first Christians were Jews and obviously conscious of the Jewish festal calendar. They truly could not have forgotten that the remarkable and compelling events of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection occurred at a time in which the annual Passover was being observed. These Christians could not have failed to project the events of the passion and the resurrection of Christ on the Jewish festal calendar, nor would they have failed to connect and impose their faith on the annual observance of the Jewish Passover. St. Paul seems to indicate as much when writing to the Corinthians, (1 Cor 5:7-8) “purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

If and when we enter into these celebrations with a desire to become more aware of their true meaning, we will be rewarded with great insight.