Easter in a Time of Plague (Trinitarian article)

 

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

“Easter in a Time of Plague”

April 2020

 

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ.” (Phil 4:6-7)

 

In the last two and a half weeks of physical distancing and isolation intended to reduce the rate of pandemic contagion, we have experienced great loneliness and fear.  One of the hardest things for many parishioners is that we have been on an enforced Eucharistic fast.  There has been a great discussion among theologians, liturgists, and clergy of all three orders about how best to worship when we cannot physically gather.  A few have thought that a priest could pray remotely over bread and wine in the homes of viewers or even that the primitive church practice of lay presidency of the Communion should be revived in this crisis.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, some priests have resumed the medieval practice of “private masses,” consecrating the gifts alone while being viewed remotely, with the people performing some prayer of “spiritual communion.” Most have agreed that since the Eucharist is a communal sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, where we gather, hear God’s word, offer and then break bread and share wine, and then are sent into the world to feed it, it is best to defer consecrating the Bread and Wine as the Body and Blood of Christ until we can meet again.  And so most of us have worshipped online with Morning Prayer or Ante-Communion (the liturgy of the word without the liturgy of the table).  This practice respects the rubrics and keeps a comprehensive theology of ministerial priesthood and the Eucharist. 

 

But this has left many of us hungry for those sacramental elements and the gathering wherein the real presence of Christ is found. Some had hope that we might resume at Easter, keeping this Eucharistic fast as part of a Lenten discipline.  But alas, this is not to be.  When the Black Plague first came to Italy in the late middle ages, they initially enforced isolation of people exposed to the illness for thirty days.  When this proved insufficient to control the contagion, they settled on forty days, from where the word “quarantine” comes.  It looks like this isolation will be longer even than a medieval quarantine.  I heard one of you tell me of a family member who asked, “No Easter?  So Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead after all, huh?”

 

Most of us are used to commemorating Holy Week as a movable liturgy starting on Palm Sunday, through the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, his passion and death on Good Friday, and then celebrating the Lord’s resurrection in the Great Vigil of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday Eucharist.   It seems impossible to us to do that without sharing the bread and the wine, without physically gathering.   

 

Part of the problem is a theological misunderstanding of these rites, confusing somehow the emotions and feelings they work in us with the actual events they remember.  Sacraments are not play-acting. Nor do they recreate in real time Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection.   We have to remember that all along as we commemorate Holy Week and Easter, or the Eucharist itself, Jesus has already died, once and for all, and has already come forth victorious from the grave. Even as we in normal times strip the altar and find ourselves bereft on Maundy Thursday and grieving bitterly on Good Friday, Jesus is already in glory.  It’s there in the Creed: “and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” It’s there in the Memorial Acclamation of the Eucharist itself:  “Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!”   The Holy Week rites, and indeed, the Eucharist itself participate in the eternal present of God by presenting for us again, re-presenting, the Mystery of Faith, a mystery we must not forget actually took place in what appears to us to be the past.   They are sacraments—they participate in that real mystery and make its promises effectual for us.  But they are not magic or well-told mythology. 

 

But while sacraments partake of the timelessness of God, they also take place in the here and now.    When we have a funeral during Lent, we bring out the Paschal candle and say “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia” even at the grave.  The reality of our life and death takes precedence over the churchy custom of burying the Alleluias during Lent.   

 

Christians have been celebrating Easter for two millennia, often in circumstances much worse than those in which we find ourselves:  in catacombs sheltering from the persecutions of Rome, during plagues and devastating wars, hiding from the Japanese Shoguns who outlawed Christianity, in concentration camps of the Nazis alongside their Jewish brothers and sisters who observed their own feasts in their own ways, and in Mao’s cultural revolution’s banning of all religion.  Through it all, they found ways to celebrate the joy and hope at the center of our faith, the resurrection of our Lord.  These may have differed from the glorious pattern set by St. Cyril in 4th century Jerusalem in his Palm Sunday-Maundy Thursday-Good Friday-Holy Saturday-Easter Sunday rites.  But they had one thing in common—they expressed the heart of their faith, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!”  Celebrating even in grim conditions gave expression to the hope and love we Christians see growing out of that mystery.

 

We will be sending out in the next few days suggestions for putting together a small sacred space or shrine in your home for Holy Week, together with the bulletins of the services (without Communion) we will be posting on-line for you to participate in.  I encourage all to make this Holy Week particularly sacred.  And I look forward to that day when we will be able to share in the Body and Blood of Christ again. 

 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+