My Dear Friends,

We are entering Holy Week; a week devoted to our meditation of the suffering and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. We start today, Palm Sunday, with the reading of the Passion account from the Gospel of St. Mark (Cycle B of the three year cycle of readings for the Mass). Then during the next three daily Masses we hear about the plans to betray Jesus, culminating on what is usually called Spy Wednesday, when Judas the Iscariot approaches the chief priests and offers to hand over Jesus to them for thirty pieces of silver.

Thursday we commemorate the Last Supper when Jesus celebrates with his twelve Apostles, and proceeds to wash their feet, a humble of act of a servant. At the end of Mass we process with the Blessed Sacrament to an altar of repose for a period of silent adoration, watching with the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where Peter, James and John accompanied the Lord and fell asleep.

On Friday, we celebrate the Passion once again, this time taken from the Gospel of John, and we venerate the sacred wood of the cross. It is the one day of the year that Mass is expressly forbidden to be celebrated, which is why we consecrate extra hosts on the night before so that we can offer Holy Communion outside of Mass.

As I mentioned last year, from the singing of the Gloria on Holy Thursday to the singing of the Gloria on the Easter Vigil, the musical instruments go silent and the silence of an empty church (the Blessed Sacrament removed from the Church on Thursday night) overwhelms those who come to pray, especially on the day of our Lord’s death.

On Holy Saturday, we enter into a dark church and the priest blesses the fire, from which we light and bless the Easter Candle, processing into the dark church and lighting the smaller individual candles that you will be holding. Then after the singing of the Exultet, we extinguish our smaller candles, while the Light of Christ (Lumen Christi) remains burning. The seven Old Testament readings will be proclaimed in the dark church, and after each reading a psalm is chanted. After the seventh psalm, the lights goon, the Gloria is sung and the musical instruments come alive. There is a sense of the Easter joy that begins at that moment, followed by the Resurrection account from the Gospel followed by the renewal of baptismal promises by all present and culminating in the great Eucharistic prayer and Holy Communion.

But before we experience this Easter joy this coming Saturday, we must first enter into that passion and death of our Lord, who died for our sins. God bless.

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