In today’s reading from Isaiah,  God calls “To those in darkness, Show yourselves.”  And in the Gospel, worldly authorities demand that Jesus say clearly who he is. They fear he is a threat to the established order. 

Lent is a time when we are again assessing interiorly who we are.  When Lent is done, we will come together each night for three nights to publicly contemplate and dramatize our identity as Christians, through word and gesture, song and silence, sign and symbol in the Paschal liturgy.

Thus far during Lent we have focussed on Jesus’ humanity as portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels.  In the days remaining his identity is portrayed in John’s Gospel as both Son of Man and Son of God.  In John’s account of Jesus’ Passover, Jesus is not a victim but  rather he is the author of life.  He willingly stays his course; death has no power over him.

During the three days between Lent and Easter we will enact our Passover,  too. We begin on Thursday by allowing our feet to be washed, a sign of our dependence on God and on one another.  We will listen again to our history as a people, from creation to God’s call of our ancestors in faith: Abraham, Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and to the entire people down the ages, including ourselves.  It is a story of repeated rescue, of being called from darkness to light, from blindness to sight.   We will be called on to again affirm our role in the story through ritual baptism. 

The  liturgical drama will climax in the Easter Gospel: that Jesus who died is the Christ, the first born from the dead.   And that we, with him, will have also passed over into more abundant life celebrated in our liturgy and carried out our lives.