PASCHAL MYSTERY

This term is repeatedly used by theologians and by the Second Vatican Council as a way of designating the essential aspects of Christian redemption. It is an abbreviation for the Easter mystery of the passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It implies salvation as prefigured in the Hebrew scriptures, the gift of life through Christ, the beginning of the church and its sacramental life. In a narrower sense it refers to the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. The whole Christian life is considered to be Paschal because it is through these two sacraments especially that Christians are inserted in the passover of Christ and by which they continue to reenact in their daily lives his saving death and resurrection. The Paschal mystery is what every Christian liturgy celebrates. It is what marks every Sunday as a little Easter or what marks Easter as the great Sunday. The Paschal mystery is the meaning of Christian initiation. It is brought to expression in reconciliation with the church. It is the primary image of the sacrament of anointing. It is the purpose of Christian ministry. It is the dominant symbol of Christian marriage. It is that in which Lent culminates and it is what the Easter triduum memorializes.

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy says of Christ: “He achieved his task principally by the Paschal Mystery of the blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and glorious ascension, where by dying, He destroyed our death and rising, He restored our life” (SC 5). But the Paschal event cannot be limited to the death and resurrection of Christ alone. It cannot be understood except in terms of the whole history of salvation, of which it is the climax. In the Christian perspective the whole of history leads to it and takes its meaning from it. In that sense Paschal mystery refers to the whole of salvation offered to humankind as an event which converts the whole history of men and women. Here it is possible to distinguish two stages. The first refers to the Paschal event as something which happened in time two thousand years ago. The second refers to the way the Paschal mystery exists in sacramental symbols today. This second way in which the Paschal event is made available to Christians and others takes place through the liturgy and the committed Christian life. Paschal mystery, in sum, means that God has acted to enter the world and this action of God is expressed in several ways. God comes to visibility through specifically Christian symbols. They may be historical, cultic, or those of ordinary life.

The word “Paschal” comes from the Greek term, pascha, which in turn is derived from the Hebrew, pesach. Pesach refers to the annual commemoration of Israel’s first passover in Egypt. This passover is the charter event for the Jews because it recalls and marks their people’s liberation from bondage. The Jewish pasch is the memorializing of God’s covenant with the Israelites by which they were freed from slavery in Egypt. Originally, the feast was a celebration of the season of spring when life comes to the earth again after the death of winter. For the Israelites it took on added meaning beyond that of the revivifying powers of

SC Sacrosanctum concilium, Vatican Council II, Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy

creation. For them it became and remained a festival of redemption. It celebrates the time when God came to them, defeated their enemies, and made them the People of God. It is called passover because God, visiting Egypt on the night the Hebrews were eating the Paschal meal, “passed over” the Hebrew homes. God spared them but brought death to all the other homes in Egypt. The faithful Israelites had marked their homes with the blood of the Paschal lambs.

In passing over Israel, in the sense of not afflicting them with death, God drew them to the promised land. They came under the leadership of God through the Red Sea, through the desert, through the Jordan, to the land of freedom. But the coming to the promised land was more than a geographical relocation. It was a symbol of a new relationship with God. It meant for the Jews then and the Jews today a passage from darkness to light and from death to life. The Jews were the chosen ones, the ones who were redeemed. God had paid the price for them and they belonged to God. Each year at passover the Jews renew this covenant. They make a memorial of the exodus event. But memorial in the Jewish liturgy is a highly symbolic notion. Through their commemoration they believe that they are present to this redemptive event in their history. It is present to them and they are present to it.

In the phrase, Paschal mystery, the word, mystery, is to be taken in its biblical sense. The scriptural understanding of mystery is not something that cannot be understood because it is obscure or unintelligible. It does not refer to some arcane cult or special knowledge available only to an elite group. There are three levels of meaning to the biblical notion of mystery. It means first of all, the mystery of God, especially the plan of salvation that God has for the world. This is not accessible to human beings and so must be revealed. This mystery is tied to God’s wisdom which must be communicated to human beings. For St. Paul, only God is worthy of the name of wisdom since only God knows the pattern of salvation history and only God can bring about this design.

To accomplish this plan God sent God’s son, Jesus Christ. Christ is the key to this mystery. This second level of meaning is the Christ-mystery. In his death and resurrection the wisdom of God is realized and revealed. Christ as the Word of God is the revelation of God’s mystery and in and through him it is finally and fully made manifest. It continues to be revealed in the way that Christ lives in human beings today. But it is especially in the cross of Christ, in his dying and rising that the meaning of the whole of human history is laid open. And it is on the second level of meaning that the word, Paschal, joins the word, mystery. For Christians, Jesus Christ brings to a new order the passover of the Hebrew scriptures. He is the new covenant with God. The mystery which had been hidden for so many centuries now takes human form. In the Christian perspective, Christ is the true pasch. Paul says: “For Christ, our Paschal lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7). The death of Christ on the cross, which may have occurred at the very time that the Paschal lamb was being sacrificed in the temple (John 19:31), has been interpreted as the coming to full reality of all the promises which were connected with the Jewish passover. Through the cross Christians pass from darkness to the light of God, from the death of this world to the resurrection of a future life, from condemnation from sin to freedom of the children of God. In the cross of Christ the glory of God is now made manifest.

The third level of meaning of mystery is the mystery of Christian liturgy. Mystery here refers to the sacramental and ritual life of the church. Paschal mystery now has a liturgical expression. It is the mystery of Christ found in cultic form. In the liturgy the death and resurrection are recalled, not as a mere reminder of things past, but in such a way that the saving mystery of Christ is present to the worshippers. The Second Vatican Council said that in the liturgy not only is the Paschal mystery proclaimed, it is actually accomplished. Paschal mystery is actively present in the church’s celebrations. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy states it well: “Thus by baptism men (sic) are plunged into the Paschal mystery of Christ: they die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him … In like manner, as often as they eat the supper of the Lord they proclaim the death of the Lord until the Lord comes. For that reason, on the very day of the Pentecost, when the Church appeared before the world, ‘those who received the word’ of Peter ‘were baptized.’ … From that time onward the Church has never failed to come together to celebrate the Paschal mystery: reading those things ‘which were in all the Scriptures concerning him,’ celebrating the Eucharist in which ‘the victory and triumph of his death are again made present …’ ” (SC 6).

The Paschal mystery should permeate all of Christian spirituality. It is to be the mobilizing image of the spiritual life of the church. The recovery of the place of the Paschal mystery in the liturgy will be pointless if there is no human experience of this central Christian belief in the worshipper. It is in the human experiences of suffering, pain, and fear of death that this Paschal mystery becomes a reality for most people. Death and resurrection are part of a human passage through life. Death is the climax of passion and suffering. It is the event which calls people to their true humanity. It is in the free and authentic acceptance of human death that the Christian mystery of the risen Christ comes alive. A Paschal spirituality is one in which men and women face death honestly and accept it by anticipating that final moment by undergoing the many daily deaths and resurrections. Christian asceticism is nothing other than the personal integration of human death into one’s life. What the Paschal mystery offers to Christians and others is that death is not merely biological or animal. There is such an event as human death. Christian death is an act of faith in God. Death calls into question the most fundamental beliefs of men and women. It can be a situation of dark despair which people deny and avoid at all costs. It is usually incomprehensible even to the committed believer. But to say yes to human death is to bestow meaning on all death.

This meaning comes from Christ’s own death. He freely embraced death to do the will of God and to establish more clearly God’s kingdom here on earth. In an act of freedom Christ handed himself over to God. He bestowed a saving significance on human death. The program of Christian spirituality is to take on Christ’s own internal attitude, his own commitment to God, and his determination to make himself so totally available. That is the Paschal dimension of spirituality.

The basic pattern of Christian living is Paschal. That means that Christian life is happening in terms of a transition. It is the movement from dark to light, from captivity to freedom, from dryness to growth, and from alienation to union. This passover, this exodus, responds to the deep human need to be saved from death. Moreover, this understanding of

passover gives an enriched meaning to the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not to be seen primarily in negative terms of offering, giving up, self-depreciation. Christian sacrifice is the good Christian life. It takes place wherever Christians live out their spirituality based on the Paschal mystery.

Part of this Paschal pattern of spirituality is that Christians live in the times between the first and second coming of Christ. Christian spirituality and liturgy move back and forth between the two poles of commemoration of the past and future-oriented hope. Both liturgy and spirituality are characterized by a looking back to the death and resurrection of Christ which calls for a response of thanksgiving and praise, and looking forward toward a goal to be achieved which elicits the mood of Christian hope. Both aspects of Christian spirituality and liturgy center on Jesus Christ, whether giving thanks in the eucharist for the great things he has done for us or waiting in joyful hope for his coming again. The Paschal mystery that permeates Christian liturgy and spirituality is briefly and most accurately summed up in the eucharistic acclamation: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

See also LITURGY, PASSOVER, REDEMPTION, SACRIFICE.

————

Bibliography: I.H. Dalmais, OP, Introduction to the Liturgy, Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961. Charles Davis, Liturgy and Doctrine, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960.

JAMES L. EMPEREUR, S.J.1

OP Ordo paenitentiae, Vatican City: Vatican Polyglot Press, 19741Komonchak, Joseph A., Mary Collins, and Dermot A. Lane. The New Dictionary of Theology. "A Michael Glazier Book.". electronic ed., Page 744. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000, c1991.