[An excerpt from Celebrating the Eucharist by Patrick Malloy, pp. 72-73, Church Publishing, 2007]
The Epistle at the Great Vigil of Easter is from Romans: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" (6:3) This biblical passage is the key to the entire vigil, since it brings into sharp relief the fact that the celebration is not about an event that is lost in the past, but a transformation that is accessible in the present. The church does not merely remember what happened at the time of its origins, it experiences it anew in ritual.
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This extended three-day feast is called the Paschal Triduum. It is crucial for pastoral ministers not to lose sight of the origins of these three days. They are essentially the pulling apart into three strands of what began as one event. They are not three days celebrating three distinct historical events, but one three-day-long event celebrating one saving dynamic. As James Farwell writes in his important book on the Triduum, "The liturgies of the Paschal Triduum are the point in Christian ritual practice where the readiness of Christian faith to face human suffering squarely, and to find God working in and through suffering, is simultaneously most in evidence and most easily obscured ... The resurrection is celebrated not as a moment 'after' suffering and separate from it, but as a mystery born in and of suffering."
A responsible pastor cannot preach to real people who live real lives that the day will come when all their suffering will finally end, at least not short of death. Instead, a wise pastor will invite the church to trust that in the very midst of suffering, the transformative hand of God is often most active and most able to change lives. This is the message of the Triduum. When observed not as a sequence of historic commemorations (that began bad and ended well), but as a three-day celebration of the inextricably interwoven realities of suffering and salvation, of death and life, the Paschal Triduum forms the church for living the authentic Christian life. Since the Triduum is the annual ritual enactment (not reenactment) of the core Christian message in all its pastoral practicality –– that even in the midst of death there is life –– the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have set the Triduum apart as its own season "The Three Days" (ELW 14). In many Episcopal congregations the Triduum is kept as a single three-day celebration, through unfortunately the current calendar of the Episcopal Church considers Good Friday and Holy Saturday part of Lent.
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