The Paschal Mystery: Our Exodus from Death to Life

Do you feel stuck in the spiritual life, like something is holding you back? Did Lent fall short of bringing about deeper conversion?

Holy Week, as the culmination of Lent, seeks to resolve these dangling tensions, as we celebrate the Paschal Mystery, the new Passover initiated by Jesus. It’s about experiencing liberation, the freedom that comes from being saved from deadly forces we can’t control. It only takes death.

Just as the angel of death passed over the house of the Israelites, which had the blood of the Passover lamb spread over the lintel of the door and down its sides, so the blood of the new Passover Lamb, Jesus himself, saves us from eternal death. Instituting a new Passover implies that there has been a new Exodus as well. At the Transfiguration, Luke describes Jesus’ descent to Jerusalem to undergo his Passion and Death as his “Exodus”: “And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure (exodon), which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:30-31). His surrender to death became the source of freedom, enabling us to enter his new life.

The first Passover was celebrated annually to renew the memory of liberation from slavery in Egypt so that each generation could experience, as if anew, the salvation God had given to Israel. This is why we, too, practice forty days of fasting every Lent, and remember the Resurrection on one particular day each year (extended as an octave, just as the Passover was followed by the feast of unleavened bread). It is an invitation to enter into the gift of salvation. Although its grace also comes to us in every Mass, as Jesus’ Death and Resurrection are made present, the annual memorial represents the historical reality of the moment of the new Exodus, calling us to leave worldliness behind for the Kingdom of God.

We can’t take this gift for granted, or it will simply pass us by — a sort of negative passover of neglecting grace. Jesus’ fasting in the desert reminds us especially of the Israelites’ forty-year wandering in the desert, as if he were reversing its effects. Those who left Egypt should have been able to enter the promised land immediately, but because of their hard-hearted rebellion, they must wait for the Exodus generation of adults to die out. They actually longed to return to their slavery, wanting the basic earthly security it brought over disorienting abandonment to God. It’s a warning we should take seriously, as St. Paul told the Corinthians:

“I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same supernatural food, and all drank the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things are warnings for us, not to desire evil as they did” (1 Corinthians 10:1–6).

He’s telling us that even if we have passed through the water in Baptism and received the supernatural food and drink of the Eucharist, we cannot simply presume on our salvation unless we truly accept and cooperate with the grace of God in a way that transforms us.

We might get to the end of Lent and feel the same way, not quite ready to enter into the gift of the resurrection as the true promised land. St. Paul, however, tells us exactly what we need: “But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Romans 6:8). We must undergo the transformation of moving from death to life as the key to making a spiritual exodus (something top of mind in my work for Exodus 90).

That sounds inspiring, but what does it actually mean? Jesus made his new Exodus by dying and rising again. For us, too, it’s a matter of dying to ourselves so that Jesus can live in us. If we haven’t died, if we still live according to self, our own thoughts and desires, we cannot live according to the new life of Christ.

My pastor encouraged me to read for Lent a newly translated book, The Courage to Be Afraid, by a twentieth-century Dominican, Father Marie-Dominique Molinié, O.P. His message of surrender can help us understand why we may feel unsatisfied and unfilled as we complete our Lenten exercises.

“We are like swimmers,” he says, “who are sinking and desperately struggling to come back to the surface. But this is precisely what we must not do: we must sink, we must let ourselves fall right to the bottom — only then can we go back up de profundis, from the depths. We are never deep enough down.”

This passage really struck me and became a focal point for prayer. Father Molinié’s teaching on humility only deepened the impact of letting go of self to rely more on God.

“Humility means fundamentally that we look at God before we look at ourself,” he wrote, and “you measure your humility by your confidence because to have confidence, we cannot look at self, but simply at God and what He is wanting to do.”

We haven’t let ourselves be carried along by God, missing what God would do for us if we simply allowed him.

Each day is a new invitation into Jesus’ Exodus. We live in slavery to this world, and the devil, like Pharaoh, wants to keep us oppressed in busy tasks that keep our minds from God. We get used to this setup, becoming comfortable and making peace with the status quo. We can forget Jesus’ radical call to take up our cross daily to follow him. This daily act of surrender entails dying to our will in all the things we encounter that day, enabling everything to become a means of offering ourselves to the Father as Jesus did. Fr. Molinié explains to us, “we who are useless,” that we must “pour out our forces in a libation, which is to say, for nothing, to give joy to God, letting them be used up and consumed by the fire of God.” If we feel like a spiritual failure, it’s because we want to accomplish something of our own. Instead, let’s surrender like Jesus to give all that we are and all that we do in self-emptying charity.

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