of Sea Anna Maria Cánopi

Holy Week is the heart of the liturgical year, since from the Paschal mystery, solemnly celebrated in it, flows the river of grace, the gift of salvation.
Every Christian who during the weeks of Lent has committed himself to the fight against evil and who, in the effort of his own purification, has kept his gaze simultaneously turned towards God and himself, is now invited by the Liturgy to have eyes only for Christ. It is only his Person - his words, his gestures, his silences - that fills all this sacred time and attracts all our attention, to the point of identifying with Him, to share His Passion in an impulse of authentic empathy, of profound "compassion".

The Virgin Mother stands before us as a sublime model of this "com-passion". In her Liturgy we hear her moan in the same moan of her Son, but even more the strength of her adoring silence which she fully embraces, with love, the divine will. She is entirely a yes to the Father, a consent that expands her motherhood of grace into an immeasurable dimension. Like her and with her, every Christian is called to follow Jesus on the way of the Cross animated by a strong and generous desire to offer himself to the Father, in solidarity with all his brothers for whom the blood of Christ was shed.
This happens not only by virtue of an act of faith and love that unites us with Christ by immersing us in the grace of his liturgically renewed mystery, but also by bringing every pain of today within the sphere of his Passion, both our personal pain and that of society in which we live and of the entire human community. If we consciously live our "hour" and the "hour" of the current world as an offering, we too, as Saint Paul stated, bring "fulfillment to what, of Christ's sufferings, is missing in [our] flesh, in favor of his body which is the Church" (Col 1,24:XNUMX). And we do this in the certainty of faith that from suffering and from death itself a very pure and imperishable joy will arise, for us and for many of our brothers.

From the singing of Hosanna to the jubilation of Alleluia

The liturgy of Palm Sunday presents surprising aspects. In fact, Jesus, who had decidedly set out with his disciples towards Jerusalem (cf. Luke 9,51), now reaches his goal and enters the Holy City to be sacrificed there as an innocent Lamb and to establish from the Cross the universal kingdom of he. Almost by divine inspiration, the common people meet him joyfully, acclaiming: «Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! This proclamation resonates, convinced and festive, in the rite of commemoration of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem which precedes the Holy Mass.
While the echo of the "Hosannas" still resonates in the air, the Liturgy of the Word invites us to meditate to present the true reality of the King acclaimed with such fervor: He is the suffering Servant, who became obedient "until death and to death on the cross" (Phil 2, 8): here is his throne! The solemn proclamation of the Gospel - the story of the Passion - takes us through all the stages of the Via Dolorosa, from Gethsemane to Calvary. By keeping in our hearts the last words of Christ - words spoken for us - and immersing ourselves in his silences of the "meek lamb" - also lived for us - we can enter into the mystery of this Week: a mystery which, celebrated over time, transforms it from kronos in kairos, from chronological time, which passes, to time which expands into eternity, precisely because it contains Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever.
The liturgy of Holy Monday takes us out of Jerusalem and leads us to the calm atmosphere of Bethany, to the home of our friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus, where Jesus, for the last time, goes to seek some physical and emotional refreshment. moral. The exquisite refinement of these friends has its highest and purest expression in the gesture of Mary who, almost foreseeing the fate that the Master is about to meet, pours a pound of perfumed oil of real nard on the feet of Jesus and dries them with his hair (cf. Jn 12,2-3). She is blamed, but what seems to Judas to be a "waste" to be condemned is still little to her. The poured perfume means, in fact, the gift of self as a response of love to the love of her Lord who is going to die for her and for everyone.
Even today Jesus is looking for a place to rest... Each of us can be his welcoming Bethany.
With intense drama, the liturgy of Holy Tuesday makes us foresee the approaching hour in which, in absolute solitude, Jesus will complete his redemptive sacrifice. On this day, in fact, he presents us with the disconcerting fact that the apostles, and Peter himself, fail in faithfulness. The Gospel passage ends with words full of a disturbing omen that Jesus addresses to the first of the apostles: «Will you give your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the cock will not crow until you have denied me three times" (Jn 13,38:XNUMX).
Will you give your life for me? It is a question that challenges us personally and also causes the many tears of repentance that Peter shed after his triple denial to flow from our eyes.
The darkness becomes even darker on Holy Wednesday, the day in which, in the Gospel passage, we hear the announcement of Jesus' betrayal. The passage opens by highlighting how much Judas is maturing in secret: his is not a betrayal caused by fear – like Peter's denial – but premeditated and kept hidden until "the right opportunity". Jesus himself, however, who knows hearts, reveals the presence of a traitor: "Truly I say to you, one of you will betray me" (Mt 26,21), one of "his", with whom he shared and confided All. An inexpressible pain grips all the guests. Deeply troubled, the disciples one by one begin to ask him: Is it me, Lord?
Who among us could avoid asking ourselves this dramatic question?
The Holy Triduum begins with the evening Mass of Holy Thursday - Mass in cena Domini. The liturgical color white, which replaces purple, the presence of flowers and the song of the Gloria express the joy of a real wedding banquet: with the institution of the Eucharist, in fact, Christ forever unites himself to the Church, his wife, with the bond of an indestructible love. We are gathered to enter into communion of life with the Lord and with each other, eating that one Bread and drinking that one cup that Christ, on the night he was betrayed, established as a new Covenant between God and men.
The ritual of the washing of the feet - which takes place after the proclamation of the Gospel (Jn 13,1-15) - is a wonderful and moving practical lesson in humility, which shows us firsthand what it means to "do Easter" with Jesus. He asks to “his”: «Do you understand what I have done for you?». And he immediately adds: "I gave you an example."
Do you understand…? And do we understand the love that Jesus pushes us to love everyone as he loved us?
«After saying these things, Jesus went out with his disciples beyond the Cedron stream where there was a garden» (Jn 18,1): there he lives his anguished agony of Gethsemane in a night that seems to be moving towards a day without dawn, immersed in darkness.
The Good Friday liturgy has a serious trend; hour by hour the clash between light and darkness becomes more evident and dramatic.
The culminating moment of this day is the Celebration of the Passion with the proclamation - in dialogic form or with solemn Gregorian chant - of the Passion of Jesus according to the evangelist John. The Christian community ideally gathers on Calvary to make the sacrifice of the Cross its own and actualize it, that first and only redemptive sacrifice which is renewed every day, throughout the world, in the Eucharistic celebration.
In the Church on Good Friday an atmosphere of intense gravity reigns. All is silence: silence of the heart, full of attention and pain before the reality of Christ's death on the cross, a death for which we are all responsible because of our sins. The bells are silent, the altars bare, except for the final moment of the celebration in which Eucharistic communion takes place with the consecrated hosts in the evening Mass of Holy Thursday.
It is a silence that continues and fills the whole of Holy Saturday, defined as the "day of sacred silence". Something enormous and terrible has happened: the violent death of the Righteous One. Startled, the earth is silent before the impenetrable mystery. But it is also a silence of vigilant waiting, in faith and hope. All attention is in fact directed to the One who had predicted his resurrection.
The transition from Holy Saturday to Resurrection Sunday does not happen through a night, but through a prolonged and anticipated dawn, through the Vigil, the mother of all vigils. Gathered in the darkness outside the church, the Christian assembly, in mysterious communion with the entire cosmos, places itself almost symbolically on the threshold of the history of salvation, starting from afar, from the night of primordial chaos, from the dark distance of death to walk towards the light of Life, which is the risen Christ. And it's not empty symbolism. The anguished night of the absence of God, the night of evil, the night of solitude which is a closure to communion still looms over humanity today. Everything screams a need for light.
This is what the liturgy of light expresses, which opens the Vigil. While the candle is solemnly placed in the presbytery, the song of the Exsultet breaks out, celebrating the splendor of the risen Christ, liberator of the human race from the darkness of sin and death. Immersed in the new light, the assembly listens to the great stages of the history of salvation, thus remembering the "wonders" that God has worked in favor of his people and of all humanity, up to the culminating point: «Christ risen from the dead it dies no more... So you too must consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus." From the hearts of the faithful the "Paschal Hallelujah" now erupts like a river of joy.