When we think about the word “remember” we often associate it with images of VHSs being rewound, or drawing our mouse across the burring bar at the bottom of a YouTube video to “go back” to an earlier part of the video. We tend to think of “remembering” as a kind of replying of a thing which we watch from a distance as on a screen or through the pane of a window.
That is not at all what remembering means. Remembering creates a covenant, it lays a claim to our thoughts words and deeds. To “remember to call you” means to call you. To “remember my wedding vows” means to do more than “replay” the sounds and images of my wedding day in my mind —it means to live faithfully to my wife.
When the Bible tells us that “the Lord remembered Noah” in the ark (cf. Gen 8:1) it does not merely mean that he thought kindly things about Noah even as he let Noah sink and drown. No, “remembering Noah” had real present and future implications for Noah and all the souls on-board the ark.
So also this week when you hear it said “let us remember,” as you most certainly will hear it said often during these holy days, it means more than merely “replaying” the story of Jesus in your mind or on the stage at church. It means being drawn into the covenant enacted by the story. The Gospel of Jesus, Holy Week, is a living thing. It incorporates our stories into itself. It saves us. It heals us. In it the Spirit renews us. By it the Kingdom is re-kneaded into the dough of the world (cf. Matt. 13:33).
These rites and traditions, these words and songs, these signs and symbols, these palms and alleluias and bells and crosses and bright pastels paraded-out before the eyes of the whole world each year are less of a replaying of the events of that first holy week, and far more of a renewing continuation of that first Holy Week. Something mighty and Holy happened and we have not recovered. It is gaining on us. It is working its way in us —like a spell. For this is what the Passion is, as C.S. Lewis suggested: the true magic.
There is a startling admission made by Eliphas Levi, the great 19th century esotericist, in his posthumously published Le Grand Arcane, where he, as a tired old magician, confesses that the catholic faith is the real religion and the true magic against which all other religions and magical systems are but ill-equipped rivals: “Necromancers evokes the dead, the sorcerer evokes the devil and he shakes, but the catholic priest does not tremble when evoking the living God” (2002, 107).
Unfortunately for Levi, I fear he missed the great mystery of the Mystery of the Faith. Our God is not merely the Living God, but the One who died and rose again. And all of our “evoking” exists because by grace we were first evoked, called-out, called-by-name, and invited. Rightly does St. Paul proclaim “great is the mystery of godlinesss” (1 Tim. 3:16).
It is one thing to call upon the dead. It is another thing entirely to hear your name called by the One who died and rose again. One no longer trembles at the voice of the dead when one hears the Voice of the Resurrection.