Living Lent

One Season: Lent and Easter

In the recent past, Lent has been given much more emphasis than the season of Easter.  There was a sense that once Easter Sunday came, the special time was over.  However, what we have is actually one long season stretching from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost Sunday.  It is the entire stretch of this 90-day season which crystallizes the whole Christian Mystery.

At the core of the season is what we call the Triduum.  This is a Latin word which means ‘the three days’.  These are the days beginning on Holy Thursday night and continuing through to the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night and the Mass of the Resurrection.

These are not three separate feasts, but the one feast split into the three segments corresponding to the three major liturgies of those days.  They together constitute the feast of the Passover of Jesus from life like ours through death into the life of the resurrection.  It is a Passover, a transition from life as we know it to life as it will be in God’s future.  We are taken up into this Passover.

This central feast stretches backwards and forwards.  It stretches back through Lent into Ash Wednesday; and it stretches forward to Pentecost Sunday. 

So Lent sets us on the journey of this Passover and clears a way ahead inside us to take part in it.  Lent alerts us to the things which are of God and those things which are not of God, and which therefore impede our way ahead.

The season of Easter gradually unfolds for us what the resurrection means, that is what awaits us as we join Jesus in his journey through life as we now know it through death into life with God.  Eastertime comes to its conclusion in the feast of Pentecost.  This feast celebrates the gift that we now share, the Spirit of the Risen Christ.  That Spirit has been poured out upon us, the disciples of Jesus, the Church.  This is the down payment we have now on the future which we will receive when we pass through death into LIFE.

The reminder that we are but dust which we receive with the ashes on Ash Wednesday is also a reminder that though made from the dust of the earth, we have had the breath of God breathed into us.  The risen Christ coming to his disciples on the Sunday on which he was raised out of death, breathes his Spirit into them.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

This is the fourth article in the series Living Lent.

Part 3: Living Lent – Ash Wednesday: Repent and Believe in the Gospel

Part 2: Living Lent – Ash Wednesday and Easter

Part 1: Living Lent – Lent is at the door!