Triduum/Easter Message, 2011

The three-day celebration at the end of Holy Week and Lent is the highest liturgical celebration in Catholic Christianity. It is the pinnacle to which everything else points, and from which all else flows. Out of the Triduum it is Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus that in turn takes the highest precedence. It is the point of the cross, but only through the cross do we find real resurrection.

During the Triduum we journey with Jesus through the intimacy of the Lord’s Supper, and the institution of the Eucharist and presbyterate, or what we the church came to call the priesthood. We then experience the betrayal of a Friend by a friend in Judas and the denial of all but one of the closest disciples in the arrest, the religious and secular injustice of the trial, the humiliation of the way of the cross, the defeat of death through death in the crucifixion, a mother’s love in the pieta, the friend’s tenderness in the burial, and the absolute joy of the resurrection. It is a journey rightly called, “The Passion,” due to its complete incorporation of nearly every human emotion ranging from joy and sorrow.

This year we face some special challenges in modern Catholic Christian experience in the United States. Probably more than ever before in my lifetime we are facing life and death issues for us as a people. It is a cultural “passion.” We are trying to bring hope in the face of some real discouragement and despair through our JMT itinerant ministry. We bring Jesus as the lasting spiritual wealth in the face of national financial crises, Jesus as the bringer of the Living Water of the Spirit as we face the political polarization of “ coffee or tea,” and Jesus who remains faithful and ever present in a church where scandal and shortage of ordained priestly ministers seems common place. As I say, popes, bishops, clergy, consecrated religious, and, praise God, even the parish council comes and goes! But Jesus remains the same yesterday, today, and forever the same!! Jesus will never desert us.

Jesus is with us through every intimacy, betrayal, denial, disappointment, and death of anything near and dear to us. It is by clinging to Him in these times that we find a whole new way of facing crises, and a whole new way of being that brings resurrection to us, spirit, soul, and body! It is by embracing these things when they cannot be avoided, and not trying to run, that we find a mystical and practical way to overcome them all. By embracing the death they bring, we overcome all death. By losing ourselves we find out who we really are.

By letting the old self fall away through the dying of Jesus, the person God originally made us to be is finally resurrected from the tomb of the ego attachments to possessions, relationships, and self that bring us such pain. Then we are truly born again, and set free to liberation in every experience, good or bad. We find out how to rightly use every possession, relationship, and indeed even our very self in a whole new way that is more loving, and more real than we ever knew before. We discover love, joy, and peace in all things. This is the good news of Easter! But it can only be found by making the journey with Jesus through the entire Triduum.

This year I pray that you have a blessed Triduum, and a most joyful Easter. God bless you all in Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life in every joy or sorrow of life.   

In Jesus,

John Michael Talbot
Founder, Spiritual Father, and General Minister,
The Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage