It may have felt like a long Lent this past year. Maybe it feels like a long Lent every year. Fortunately, for Catholics it is always a longer Easter season. The reason for this 50-day season is to commemorate the big events after the Resurrection of Jesus, including the Ascension 40 days from Easter and the descent of the Holy Spirit 50 days after Easter. This should only lead one to ask, “Why group these events together?” Not only is there an important chronological connection between the Triduum, Easter Sunday, the Ascension, and Pentecost, but there is also a thematic one that ties them together. That theme centers around what St. Paul calls Jesus in 1 Corinthians 5:7: “Christ our Passover.”
In the Catholic tradition there is much to be said about the Paschal Mystery as one big event. This mystery is significant for our understanding of it as an act of atonement as well as a sacramental standpoint. Of course, we proclaim this great “mystery of faith” at every single Mass because it is the place where these features of atonement and sacramentality converge. I want to highlight this idea of the collapsing of chronos time into kairos time when considering the original Paschal Mystery, that of Moses and the Israelites in the Old Testament, but also, as we have seen from St. Paul (“Christ our Passover” (1 Corinthians 5:7)) as it is presented in the New Testament, and finally how we participate in it in the life of the Church today, specifically the liturgical calendar.
Don’t Pass Over the Passover
Because so much has already been said about Jesus as the fulfillment of the Passover lamb, one need not belabor this point. However, it does prove to be an important basis for the rest of what I want to say about Jesus not just as a fulfillment of the lamb, but the entirety of the Passover. One finds in various aspects of the Passover celebration as understood since the time of Moses elements of everything that Jesus accomplishes on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Ascension, and Pentecost.
In order for this to happen, we need to suspend our “normal” understanding of time as we experience it on earth. I previously contrasted the ideas of chronos and kairos time. Chronos is where we get the word chronology and refers to the continued succession of moments as measured by a clock or calendar. We are ruled by chronos and it is what we conscious creatures continually work against in order to fully live. Kairos, on the other hand, refers to “the right moment” and “God’s time” because God himself is outside of time and not conditioned by it as we are. It is the present that touches eternity.
While a discussion of time may seem like a foray into science fiction, it is much closer to myth, and not in the way myth is typically used to mean not real. C.S. Lewis, in his “Myth Became Fact” essay, saw mythology as a way to see eternal realities more clearly, similar to how history reveals to us temporal realities. In Christianity, these concepts are not at odds but are united in the person of Jesus, who brought together eternity, being God, time, and being human.
There is an important distinction between chronos time, the time we use clocks to measure, and kairos time, the time that “flies when you’re having fun”—or crawls along when you’re not. The former is that which limits our actions whereas the latter cannot be limited. Chronos is the succession of minutes in our lives while kairos is a “moment” in which entire lives are changed.
It is not an accident that Jesus refers to his entire ministry as an “hour” when speaking to his mother at Cana in John 2:4 and celebrates that “the hour has come” for his Glory in John 12:23 right before his Crucifixion and death. Jesus lived in both chronos time and kairos time. As Christians, we are called to follow suit through our temporal work in the world and our eternal work in the liturgy. We get a glimpse of this meeting in Jesus’ celebration of the Passover.
From Passover to Passion to Pentecost
There is already much scholarship about the Passover meal and the “fourth cup,” which Jesus delays during the Last Supper and finally drinks from the Cross just before his death in John 19:28-29. This extended the Passover celebration Jesus began in the upper room to include his Passion, uniting the offering of his life through his body and blood in the Eucharist to the offering of his life on the Cross. This, of course, is important to sacramental Christians who recognize the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is also emphasized in Catholic liturgical theology, which understands the Mass as a re-presentation of Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross.
Even before Jesus’s suspension of chronos for kairos in the Last Supper extended into the Passion, the Passover was already meant to be something like this for Jewish people celebrating. At the Passover meal, they were meant to think, speak, and act not like Jews in Roman controlled Jerusalem in the first century, but like the Israelites in Egypt on that first Passover. The original Passover, God’s right moment of kairos to save Israel, was meant to extend through chronos to the present day.
Jesus, being the Passover lamb, would participate in every feature of the sacrifice. He would be examined by the high priest, ironically played by the pagan Pontius Pilate, and found clean, fit for offering. He would be killed but his bones unbroken. His blood would be spread on the doorpost of the Cross. His body, like the Passover lamb’s, would be eaten as it was in the Eucharist at the Last Supper and still today.
But this is not the end of the ritual.
Just as God instructed the people to sacrifice the lamb, spread the blood on their homes and eat the lamb, he also instructed them to “burn with fire” the remains (Exodus 12:10). This was less of a practical and more a liturgical action. In Judaism, smoke rising from the offering on the altar represented the rest of that offering, along with the prayers of the community, rising up to God. If Jesus is the Lamb, then he too would participate in this rising up to God after the sacrifice and meal. The Ascension is Jesus continuing in his role as not just the lamb, but the entire Passover. He rises up to God because he is still the lamb that was offered to God on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Now, he rises up to God 40 days later on Ascension Thursday.
Finally, there is Pentecost. Jesus’s departure was confusing to his Apostles and still continues to vex Christians to this day. When we see it through the lens of the Passover, it should make a little more sense. While this line is not said in direct response to a Passover sacrifice, there is a long tradition in Jewish worship that if God was pleased with a sacrifice, he would show it by sending fire from heaven. We see this a couple of times in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition. For example, though not explicitly mentioned, Jewish commentary on Abel’s sacrifice was that God consumed it with fire. We see it mentioned with Moses and Aaron in Leviticus 9:22-24, David in 1 Chronicles 21:26, Solomon in 2 Chronicles 7 and Elijah in 1 Kings 18. If God is pleased with the sacrifice, he will send down fire. Not surprisingly, God could not have received a more pleasing sacrifice ascend to him in his Son, Jesus Christ, so, also not surprisingly, God would send down the Fire of the Holy Spirit.
As we can see, Pentecost is just the last part of the sacrifice that is not subject to chronos because it has the Kryios, the Lord, as its subject. The Incarnation is when kairos stepped into chronos. When we participate in the liturgy, both the Mass as well as the seasons of worship, we are participating in kairos and are no longer subject to chronos. One hour, three hours, three days, 50 days, it is all God’s “hour” because it is all God’s time.
