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
C Sacrosanctum concilium, Vatican Council II, Constitution of the Sacred
Liturgy
S

commemoration of Israels first passover in Egypt. This passover is the

charter event for the Jews because it recalls and marks their peoples
liberation from bondage. The Jewish pasch is the memorializing of Gods
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 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 Gods 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 Gods 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 Gods 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 churchs
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 ones 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 Christs own death. He freely embraced death
to do the will of God and to establish more clearly Gods 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 Christs 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

P Ordo paenitentiae, Vatican City: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1974

Komonchak, 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.
O
1