Triduum Sacrum: Pascha I

Triduum Sacrum: Pascha I 2015 – Cycle B Acts 10: 34a, 37-43; Psalm 118; 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8; Mark 16:1-7

A woman steps out of the crowd,keeping alight the lamp of our humanity,…and wipes his Faceand finds his Face!*

Courageously stepping out of the anonymous crowd, Veronica, in those few terrifying moments encounters Jesus as faceless until compassion impels her to tenderly wipe away the blood, sweat and fear. And behold! – a face.

He had a face… And like you and me he had a human face that gave shape to his life and the lives of other people.**

Pope Francis teaches us that, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.”***

Yet… How many people today have no face!How many people are relegated to the margins of life, exiled, forsaken…*

“[…because many of us, Francis observes] try to escape from others and take refuge in the comfort of [our] privacy or in a small circle of close friends, renouncing the realism of the social aspect of the Gospel;…[wanting] interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command.***

He had a face…and Veronica risked the physical encounter. This face-to-face encounter on the way to Calvary in which as she daubed the hiddenness revealed was not the face of the suffering Jesus but looking out at her the face, the eyes of the risen Christ.

How many of us have yearned and ached to have such an experience, some assurance of our faith?  Is this not the Easter story of Thomas?   Unless we see with our own eyes and touch with our hands we cannot believe, cannot believe fully anyway?**

Since that first day of the week, people have proclaimed that the tomb was empty and that Jesus was alive. But it is not enough, is it? If people are to believe that Jesus is risen in a way that really matters, they must somehow experience him alive themselves. And wherever women and men have so believed in his resurrection, it is because in some sense they have seen him, experienced him alive. It is not his absence from an empty tomb that convinces people Jesus is alive but his presence in our empty lives.***

“…it means”, Francis teaches, “learning to find Jesus in the faces of others, in their voices, in their pleas.” It means, like Veronica to wipe the face of another human being; to encounter them face-to-face and have revealed the Living God, the faces of humanity as the face of Jesus risen from the dead.

*[Angelo Cardinal Comastri, archpriest of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a mediation on the sixth Station]

**[The Life of Jesus, Buechner, Boltin, Weathervane Books, New York, 1974; page 9, 223]

***[Apostolic Exhortation, Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, #88, 91]