Central to the celebration of the Easter Triduum is the Book of Exodus.
In this book, we read of the change that formed a group of enslaved people into the People of God, the People of Israel.
The narrative of salvation tells us how this group “who were not a people at all” (1 Peter 2) become a people, a society. This society moved from slavery to freedom through the baptismal experience of the Red Sea. During their journey to awareness in the desert, God fed them with manna and water from the rock. But for this society, God’s gifts were too little. They wanted what they wanted; the past was their comfort and goal.
Without realising it, the past had already become a foreign country, a place of nostalgia that could no longer be entered or enjoyed because it on longer existed.
Those who look for the past are like people who renovate old villas under the illusion that they can recapture past glories. Look at the old, newly renovated villas. They look like a perfect version of their original self on the outside. They are beautifully painted, and all the details of the 19th century are restored to their original beauty.
When you step inside the house, you step into a new and radically different world. There is an indoor toilet, double-glazed windows, wall, floor and ceiling insulation. There are power sockets, central heating and all the cooking is done on modern appliances. Then you realise that the outside is a façade that borrows from the past while not really wanting it.
Lent is the time to face the call to change, renewal and growth; Easter is the time to celebrate it.
Renewal, growth and change are all elements of the transitus at the heart of the Exodus account. To transit, to move, from one old way of being to a new way of living.
Transition, movement or change are not easy experiences because they necessarily entail the experience of death, loss and fear.
The Exodus story will be proclaimed as the first reading at the Mass of Holy Thursday and the Sacred Vigil’s second obligatory reading. On this holy morning, we will sit in the darkness of the unfolding new day, listening to salvation history being spread before us like a lavish feast.
Then we will sing, with the People of Israel:
“I will sing to the Lord, glorious his triumph!
Horse and rider God has thrown in the sea!
The Lord is my strength, my song, my salvation.
This is my God, and I extol him, my ancestor’s God, and I give him praise.”
Fr Joe