Preaching and the Paschal Mystery

The homily is the only part of liturgical celebration for which the ritual books provide no prepared texts. Unscripted by nature, it is the source of both freedom and anxiety: because I have such latitude of choice, what in fact should I say? The homily, however, does not exist in a vacuum. Knowing its setting can perhaps help mitigate the discomfort.

The homily’s home is the highly ritualized setting of liturgy; its purpose is to interpret and actualize the good news for the gathered assembly. Since all Christian liturgy celebrates the paschal mystery of Christ, the homily always has as its main focus the paschal mystery. How and why is this so? What are the implications for preaching? To answer to these questions, we will first sketch a definition of the paschal mystery and point out its relationship to liturgy. Then, focusing on the Sunday eucharist, we will describe the how the liturgy of the word seeks to articulate various facets of the paschal mystery. These two steps will provide the context in which to situate the homily, and thus allow us to explore its role in proclaiming the paschal mystery.

The Paschal Mystery

The paschal mystery is simply another, perhaps more evocative, name for the mystery of redemption: in the fullness of time, God, moved with divine passion to save humankind, inaugurated the end-time victory over the powers of sin and death through the obedient life, sacrificial death, and glorious resurrection and ascension of Jesus. As a result, all people have access to grace leading to fullness of life.

This saving act of God on humanity’s behalf is called paschal because the death and resurrection of Jesus occurred during the annual springtime Jewish festival of Pesach (in English, “Passover”), from which is derived the adjective paschal. Early Christians came to realize that Jesus’ death and resurrection at Passover time was not fortuitous. The ancient Jewish festival, centered around the sacrifice of a lamb in commemoration of God’s destroying angel passing over the houses of the Israelites on the eve of their crossing the waters of the Red Sea to freedom, provided Christians the right key and the essential motifs in which to articulate their understanding of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Just as the sacrifice of lambs spoke of God’s saving act toward Israel, the sacrificial death of Jesus, his passing from this world to the Father, has become the new Passover. In his paschal mystery, he overcomes the powers of sin and death, thus opening the way for all people of faith to pass through the waters of death to new life, that is, to pass from this world to the Father.

Over the years, as they continued to deepen their appreciation of the saving event of Christ’s Passover, Christians began to perceive that the paschal pattern, so deeply inscribed in Jesus’ story, in fact permeates all reality. God’s way of dealing with the world and with humankind always takes on the configuration of the paschal mystery of Jesus. It takes flesh in the giving of self for others, through which is effected the passing over from sin to grace, from darkness to light, from death to new life. Thus the paschal mystery is at work transforming the world wherever people behave toward themselves, toward others, and toward the world according to what we could call “the Jesus pattern.” The paschal mystery, therefore, is not just for Christians, as the words from our liturgy so clearly insist: Jesus is the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” All people of good will are embraced by God’s passion to save, a desire that comes to us in the form of Jesus, crucified and risen.

The Paschal Mystery at the Heart of Liturgy

The evidence in the New Testament shows that the early Christians considered their assembling for baptism and for eucharist to be the occasions par excellence for celebrating the paschal mystery. Paul, for example, provides us with one of the clearest expressions of the “paschalization” of the rite of baptism when he writes in his Letter to the Romans: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (6:3-4, NRSV; this passage is read at the Easter Vigil, the Church’s prime occasion for celebrating baptism). In addition, the Sunday eucharist, celebrated on the first day of the week in commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection, by its very nature proclaims the paschal mystery. Christ’s body broken for us and his blood poured out for us is the sacrifice that broke the power of sin and death, and opened the way to the fullness of life.

By the end of the first century (and probably earlier), Christians introduced the reading of scripture in their Sunday celebrations, as the Emmaus story suggests. In this episode, the risen Lord chides the two disciples on the way to their home where he will break bread with them: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27). Thus, the risen Christ himself points out that the paschal mystery, his suffering and his entering into glory, is contained in the scriptures. Read within the context of the Sunday assembly, the scriptures take on a paschal shape and therefore necessarily lead to the eucharist.

The Sunday Lectionary

Christian liturgy, therefore, flows out of and points to the paschal mystery. The church celebrates the paschal mystery through ritual so that what is proclaimed in the word and enacted in the sacrament might also be realized in us. It stands to reason that the scriptures selected to be proclaimed in such a Christ-charged setting should also, like iron filings near a magnet, take on the delineation of the paschal mystery. That is why the Sunday Lectionary, which contains the repertoire of biblical passages selected to be proclaimed at the Sunday eucharist, is entirely oriented to the paschal mystery. It is not primarily for catechesis, or for moral exhortation, or for teaching scripture; rather, the texts are chosen “to proclaim the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, fully realized in him and being realized in us who, through faith and baptism, have been joined to him.”(1)

Two aspects of this Lectoniary’s structure shows how this is so. First, the three readings of each eucharistic celebration, no matter what their specific content, always play the same fundamental role. The first reading from the Old Testament evokes the history of salvation, of which Jesus, proclaimed in the gospel passage, is the center and fulfilment. The second reading from the New Testament Apostolic Writings shows how the early Christians interpreted the paschal mystery of Christ and how they appropriated it in their lives, providing us as a model to do the same. Secondly, the Sunday Lectionary puts flesh on the bones of the annual liturgical calendar. It selects and distributes biblical passages to articulate those aspects of the paschal mystery each liturgical season emphasizes. For example, the season of Lent underscores Jesus’ passage through suffering and death, which we appropriate through baptism and deepen through repentance. The season of Advent prepares for the commemoration of Jesus’ coming among us in his incarnation to accomplish God’s desire to redeem humankind under the thrall of sin and death, and looks forward to Jesus’ second coming to bring to fullness the redemption already begun. Each liturgical season refracts particular facets of the paschal mystery.

The Homily

All that we have said so far, moving from the general to the more specific, sets the context or the framework within which is situated the homily. Working in reverse order, from specific to general, we would say that the homily is a constitutive element of the Liturgy of the Word, whose purpose is to proclaim the paschal mystery; the Liturgy of the Word in turn is a constitutive part of the Sunday Eucharistic celebration; the Sunday Eucharist is always a celebration of the paschal mystery. That is why the 1981 edition of the Introduction to the Lectionary for Mass explains the role of the homily in this way:
The purpose of the homily at Mass is that the spoken word of God and the liturgy of the eucharist may together become “a proclamation of God’s wonderful works in the history of salvation, the mystery of Christ” (citing the Constitution on the Liturgy, nos. 35, 2). Through the readings and homily Christ’s paschal mystery is proclaimed; through the sacrifice of the Mass if becomes present. (ILM, no. 24)

Thus, the homily, because it is part and parcel of the Liturgy of the Word, is proclamation. Given the location of the homily within the liturgy, the homilist adequately prepares by attending to such questions as:
• What is the paschal mystery? How does the liturgy celebrate it?
• What aspects of the paschal mystery does a particular liturgical season emphasize? Here, the descriptions of the liturgical seasons found in the document entitled The General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, usually printed in the introductory section of the Sacramentary, can be of great help.
• How do the three readings proposed for a particular Sunday or Solemnity, with its stories and images, refract the paschal mystery?
• How can these readings, as part of the liturgical season, help us better recognize, perceive, and understand the paschal mystery at work in our lives and in the world? Where do we notice the fundamental Christ pattern of self-giving, of healing transformation from sin to grace, of faith-filled passage through death to new life? Where and how is God transforming us and the world into the image and likeness of Christ, crucified and risen?
• How can the homily help shape our paschal vision of life? How can it lead us to lift our hearts and join in the great prayer of thanksgiving which is the eucharist?

Conclusion

When all is said and done, there is in fact no recipe or formula for preaching the paschal mystery. Instead, preaching the paschal mystery presupposes a way of seeing, the cultivation of a habit of being. It requires attentiveness to the scriptures, which suggest multifarious aspects of the Jesus pattern, and a vigilant eye on life around us, where God is constantly at work shaping and moulding all things into the image and likeness of the crucified and risen one. Then indeed homilies will fulfil their task of proclaiming the paschal mystery.

^[1]William Skudlarek, The Word in Worship: Preaching in a Liturgical Context (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981) 34.

By Normand Bonneau, OMI