As I sat in the chapel on Easter Sunday, reflecting on the profound experiences of Holy Week and the Easter Triduum, a phrase echoed in my mind: “overcome with paschal joy.”
This phrase is found in the prayer the priest prays right before the Holy, Holy, Holy, or the Sanctus at every Mass during the Easter Season.
As I began to consider that phrase, I thought about what the word “paschal” means. I won’t go into detail - I’ll leave that to the biblical scholars - but I was aware that it comes from the word for Passover, referring to the Jewish feast commemorating their deliverance from Egypt. (See Exodus 12 for a detailed description of the instructions related to the feast.)
The deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt is an image for Christians of our own deliverance from slavery to sin and death. The fact that Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead around the time of Passover wasn’t just a nice coincidence or convenient time for Him to arrange that. It was to take the covenant between God and the Israelites, of which the Passover lamb was a symbol, to a whole new level with a new and eternal covenant in His own Blood.
All this was in the back of my mind as I was contemplating the phrase “overcome with paschal joy.” It occurred to me that paschal joy is not just any kind of joy. It is a joy that knows and remembers where I’ve come from and what I was saved from. For the Jews, it is a joy that comes from remembering (in the fullest, richest sense of the word) that I was a slave - in the persons of my ancestors - and now, by the power of God, I am free.
I have had enough experience with being stuck in weakness and sin to know what a kind of hell it can be. For me, then, paschal joy is a joy that remembers how I was bound in sin and how I am now set free through repentance and conversion. It is a joy that does not forget the cross that brought me from there to here. It is a joy that includes the mystery of suffering and sorrow as much as it includes deliverance from these.
It is a joy that understands that the cross is not behind me as a past event now over and done with. It is a joy that embraces the cross and its accompanying sufferings all the more willingly, the more I know with certainty that, “the present burden of our trials is light enough and earns for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17).
To be “overcome with paschal joy” is to stand in the wonderful reality that the resurrection of Jesus Christ doesn’t do away with pain and suffering, but it redeems it, giving it meaning and value. In a world where after Easter, we look around and can think that nothing has changed, we can be sure that paschal joy is a joy no one can take from [us] (Cf. John 16:22)!
- Sr. Mary Catherine Kasuboski, T.O.R.
