We have been walking this road together since Ash Wednesday. We have stood at the well in Samaria, knelt at the grave of Lazarus, followed Jesus into Jerusalem knowing what was waiting for him there. Now we arrive at the three days that hold the whole story together.
The Sacred Triduum is not three separate observances. It is one continuous liturgy moving from a table to a cross to an empty tomb. This year, in this moment in the life of our nation, it reads like a document written for us.
Holy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14 | Psalm 116 | 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 | John 13:1-15
The Triduum begins not with a sermon but with a meal and a basin of water. The readings take us to the first Passover, when a people held in bondage ate their meal, ready to move. Paul hands on what he received at the Lord’s table. And then Jesus, the night before he dies, gets down on his knees and washes feet.
This is where empires always miscalculate. They assume power flows downward through force. Jesus demonstrates it flows downward through service. The one at the bottom of the table is the one being honored. The basin and the towel are not symbols of weakness. They are the shape of the kingdom.
In a season when certain people are told they are too foreign, too poor, too other to belong at the table of this nation, Holy Thursday answers plainly: at this table, those are exactly the people Jesus moves toward.
Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 | Psalm 31 | Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9 | John 18:1-19:42
Good Friday carries the final Servant Song alongside John’s full Passion account. A man arrested at night. Tried in secret. Handed to a political authority who found no guilt in him and condemned him anyway because it was expedient. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah bore the suffering of others and was despised for it.
He was despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity; and his look was, as it were, hidden and despised. Whereupon we esteemed him not. — Isaiah 53:3 (CPDV)
We do not have to strain for the contemporary resonance. We are living in a time when innocence is not a reliable protection. When legal process has become, for many people, a performance rather than a guarantee. When those who are foreign or inconvenient to the powerful face consequences that bear no proportion to any offense they have committed.
The Church stands at the cross on Good Friday and refuses to look away. That refusal is itself a political act. To insist on witnessing the suffering of those the powerful would rather make invisible is one of the most subversive things a community of faith can do.
Holy Saturday / Easter Vigil
Genesis 1 | Genesis 22 | Exodus 14 | Isaiah 54, 55 | Baruch 3
Romans 6:3-11 | Matthew 28:1-10
The Vigil is the oldest and most layered liturgy in the Christian calendar. It begins in darkness, a new fire is struck, and the Church tells the whole story from the first day of creation to the empty tomb. Every liberation in human history is gathered into this night.
The crossing of the Red Sea is read at the Vigil every year because Exodus is never just a past event. Every generation of the oppressed has read itself into that water. A people with no legal standing, no rights, and no power over their own fate, pursued to the edge of an uncrossable sea. And then the water opens. Paul in Romans names what baptism means: we have been buried with Christ into death and raised into newness of life. The old order does not have the final claim on us.
Empire says, “There is no way through.” The Vigil says, “We have seen the water open before.”
Easter Sunday
Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Psalm 118 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9
Peter’s Easter sermon begins with words that have rung as a challenge to every sorting system in every age: God shows no partiality. Not by citizenship. Not by country of origin. Not by language, documentation, or the wealth of the nation someone happened to be born into.
In truth, I have concluded that God is not a respecter of persons.—Acts 10:34 (CPDV)
The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Psalm 118 has been an Easter text since the Church’s earliest days, and its central image is permanently subversive: the one deemed unfit and thrown outside the wall is the one on whom everything now rests. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb before dawn and finds the stone moved, and in the middle of all the motion and confusion and astonishment, something is quietly, permanently true. Death did not win. The empire did not win. The tomb could not hold him.
A Word to Close This Series
We began this Lenten series asking what it means to stand with immigrants and to name fascism for what it is as an act of faith rather than partisan politics. Six weeks of scripture asked the same questions the Gospel has always asked: Who do you see? Who do you stay with? Whose suffering do you allow yourself to witness? Whose dignity do you defend when it costs you something?
The resurrection does not make those questions easier. It makes them more urgent. Easter faith is not a retreat into private spiritual comfort. The risen Christ does not tell the disciples to gather safely and wait for better circumstances. He sends them out.
We are sent out too. Into Augusta. Into immigrant communities living in fear in our neighborhoods. Into a political moment that is testing whether the Church has anything to say that is more than performance.
We believe we do. We believe the empty tomb means the most powerful systems in the world do not get the final word over human life and human dignity. We believe that God shows no partiality. We believe that the servant who sets their face like flint is not abandoned. We believe that the one who came to wash feet and share bread is still moving toward the people everyone else is moving away from.
That is the faith we carry out of this Holy Week. That is the faith of Saint Francis Parish and Outreach.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
