The Easter Triduum

This week we celebrate the three holiest days in the Christian calendar. We call these days the “Triduum,” which is Latin for three days. If you want to impress someone, or more likely leave them thinking you’re a little strange, tell them that you’re going to a liturgy that lasts three days!! But that is what we do every Holy Week.

The Triduum (trĭ–do–um) begins with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday evening and continues through Evening Prayer on Easter Sunday. If you look closely at the liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, you will see that they are actually one celebration, not three. We begin Mass as usual on Holy Thursday, but there is no dismissal and no conclusion. Immediately after Holy Communion the Blessed Sacrament is taken in procession to the altar of repose for adoration until midnight – our time in Gethsemane. On Good Friday we come together but our celebration has no beginning and no ending. It feels like we start in the middle of something and it just stops without resolving. It’s like listening for the chord that brings the music to a resolution but you don’t hear it yet. That resolution won’t come until the Easter Vigil.

The Easter Vigil, the mother of all vigils, finds us gathered around the Easter fire. That fire signifies the light of Christ which has dispelled the darkness of sin by the resurrection of Jesus. That's why it's so important that the Vigil not begin until the onset of total darkness. After all, darkness can’t be dispelled unless it's dark! There is no real beginning to the Vigil. It presumes we have been meditating on this great event of the passion of Christ since Holy Thursday evening. It is only at the conclusion of the Easter Vigil that that we receive the final blessing and are sent (Ite, missa est – go, you are sent) into the world to proclaim the Good News of the resurrection of Christ which we have so intensely celebrated. Only now do we hear the resolution of final chord in the masterpiece of the music of our redemption. And what a great resolution it is – the resurrected Christ conquers sin and death forever! Talk about a long liturgy, but oh is it worth it!!

The paschal mystery we celebrate during these three days is not a re-living of what happened some 2,000 years ago. We know that Jesus died and rose to new life once and for all. Anchoring ourselves in that historical event, and with the catechumens as they are baptized into the new life of Christ, we keep our hearts and minds focused on the daily dying and rising to new life to which we are called as disciples of Jesus.

These three days of the Triduum are central to our faith because they lead us to the heart of our identity as the Catholic Church; namely, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ into which we have been immersed at baptism and within which we live and move and have our being. I encourage you to make every effort to immerse yourself in these three most holy days of our life as Catholic Christians.

A Blessed Easter Season.

Fr. Paul White
Director of Liturgy