The Easter Triduum and Three Essentials
By Carl E. Olson
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” — St. Paul, Galatians 2:20
“Victory is won through defeat; a crucified body frees us.” — Bishop Erik Varden, Healing Wounds (p. 168)
“Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself.’” — Bishop Varden, Fourth Conference of the 2026 Lenten Retreat
“Lent Confronts Us with Essentials”
That direct sentence launched the eleven Lenten addresses, or conferences, given by Bishop Erik Varden at the Vatican in late February 2026. Those familiar with the growing body of Bishop Varden’s works—books, essays, and various pieces (many published on his personal website)—were both happy that he was chosen by Pope Leo XIV to give the Lenten retreat and not surprised at how rich and challenging his remarks have been.
In Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lent Book (Bloomsbury, 2024), Bishop Varden had focused on the three themes of “Affliction,” “Transformation,” and “Flourishing.” His recent addresses at the Vatican are more wide-ranging, masterfully interweaving spiritual insights, theological observations, strong exhortations, and the words and lives of various saints, especially St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
But the focus on healing and wounds is very present, as seen in these two remarks, which adroitly capture the deep Incarnational and soteriological currents that run throughout the Lenten conferences:
In Jesus God reveals his saving purpose, pouring it forth upon mankind as fragrant, healing, cleansing oil. (Ninth Conference)
Lent shows us that God, suffering the wound of his philanthropy, is at his most active in his Passion. (Eleventh Conference)
In re-reading Bishop Varden’s eleven addresses, three essentials caught my attention. And all three are prominent during Holy week, forming a connective theological tissue between Lent and the Easter Triduum.
Holy Thursday and True Freedom
In his fourth conference, titled “Becoming Free,” Bishop Varden observes that the “notion of ‘freedom’ has become contentious in public discourse. Freedom is a good to which we all aspire; we rise up against anything which threatens to curtail or confine our freedom.”
But, what makes freedom good? And is freedom best understood as freedom “from” or freedom “for”? And what are the immediate goals and ultimate telos of freedom? The pathological obsessions today with identity, actualization and such are unmoored exercises in “freedom,” but without any more sense of origin and final purpose than one’s own passions and desires.
“This state of affairs poses a challenge for Christians,” says Bishop Varden. “It is essential to qualify what we mean when, in the context of faith, we speak of becoming free.” Referencing the great Cistercian, he remarks:
For Bernard it is evident that true freedom is not “natural” to fallen man. What seems natural to us is to have things our way, to satisfy our desires and realise our plans without interference, to flaunt and be vaunted for our own brilliant lights. Bernard, addressing man in this state of delusion, is deliciously sarcastic: “What do you fancy yourself as, you smatterer?! You have become a beast for which captors’ snares are laid.”
Speaking of snares laid, the Gospel Reading for the evening Mass on Holy Thursday presents us with two contrary examples of freedom—one flowing from sacrificial love and the other from self-absorbed snares:
Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. (John 13:1–2)
Jesus’ knowledge of his hour was not a matter of abstract or detached acceptance, but of perfect humility and active love. It was knowledge revealed in both word and deed. This is famously expressed, with startling power, in an early Christological hymn recounted by the Apostle Paul:
Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6–8)
As Bishop Varden emphasizes, “Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself.’”
How often do we think, “If only this were so or that was in place, I would be free to choose the good, rebuff what is bad, and to love well”? That is, I suggest, the thinking of Judas, who used his freedom in an attempt to force into existence what he thought was best. Like Adam in the Garden, walking with God, Judas in the Upper Room, in the presence of the God-man, freely chose to believe that his prideful desires were for the good of all—beginning, of course, with himself. Judas apparently wrapped his greed and self-importance in a cloak of political aspiration, as if the worries and trials of this world could be overcome through the ways and thinking of the world. Such is the road to ruin, where all vanity and rot are revealed in unsettling ways (cf. Acts 1:18).
Jesus, after instituting the profound mystery of the Eucharist, freely moves toward the Cross, taking Peter, James, and John with him to Gethsemane. There he experienced deep agony, precisely because we, as sinners, have misused and abused our freedom. “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done” (Matthew 26:39).
True and perfect freedom is found in the painful embrace of the Father’s will—not because the Father demands suffering but because love in a fallen and broken world is perfectly revealed in suffering and demonstrated in death: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12–13).
“Rooting his understanding of freedom in the Son’s Yes! to the Father’s will,” writes Bishop Varden, “Bernard works a revolution in our grasp of what it means to be free. Christian freedom is not about seizing the world with force; it is about loving the world with a crucified love magnanimous enough to make us freely wish, one with Christ, to give our lives for it, that it may be set free.”
Good Friday, Ambition, and the Saving Truth
Bishop Varden opened his fifth conference, “Splendour of Truth,” with a consideration of temptation and ambition, noting that while we dread temptations, “God submits us to them because they are useful.”
How so? Because, in resisting temptation, we are strengthened in our commitment to the truth. Like athletes who use resistance to develop and hone particular muscles, the proper approach to temptation aids our spiritual fitness.
Ambition, insists Bishop Varden, “represents a particular form of capitulation to untruth. Ambition is a not very subtly sublimated form of cupidity.”
This reference to “cupidity” is an excellent, even ingenious, use of a mostly neglected word. The word “cupidity” sounds inviting and beguiling (roll it on your tongue!). But it is poison, for it is greed, avarice, covetousness, rapacity.
Judas again comes to mind, for he was clearly ambitious. Drawing further upon St. Bernard, Bishop Varden notes that ambition is “an artisan of deceit; it is the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the origin of vices; it is kindling for crimes, causing virtues to rust, holiness to rot, hearts to be blinded. Remedies it turns into illnesses. From medicine it extracts apathy.’”
He then goes a step further, in a blunt and remarkable remark:
Ambition springs from an “alienation of the mind.” It is a madness that comes about when truth is forgotten. The fact that ambition is a form of insanity makes it ridiculous in any instantiation, but especially so when it occurs in persons given to a state of selfless service.
Bishop Varden said this in the Vatican to bishops and priests, but we cannot ignore the fact that every one of us—ordained, religious, single, married—are called to a state of selfless service. We are, in other words, all called to be holy: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
Ambition is the pursuit of perverse perfection. The madness of ambition can often take overt and dramatic forms—think of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, or Hitler. But it can also be hidden deeply, in the bowels of a destructive life; it can fester for years and decades, with truth slowly being corroded, crushed, and deconstructed. “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16).
At the beginning of the lengthy Gospel reading for Good Friday, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, who walked with the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus, the New Adam, stands in the Garden—innocent and completely free. Judas, the willing slave of the serpent, brings soldiers, guards, priests, and Pharisees—he is ambitious and now devoid of freedom.
The next act and question by Jesus deserve more attention than we usually give them: “Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’” (John 18:4).
Who, indeed? Are we looking for truth? For who is Truth? And, when we stand before Him, do we say His name and then fall to our knees in love and adoration? Or do we, like Judas and those with him, turn away and fall to the ground, our cupidity and ambition exposed?
Or do we, like Pilate, ask:
“Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38)
Much has been written about Pilate’s famous question. I’ll simply note that Pilate was also consumed with ambition. He comes across as cold, efficient, ruthless, calculating—and he was all of those things. But, more importantly, he was insane. He looked into the very eyes of the Logos—the Word—and with pristine, secular political intelligence, he chose the wisdom of this world. In doing so, he clutched at the gilded robes of ambition and fell into the darkness of spiritual madness.
We, however, are called to truth and holiness. “We need our best resources,” says Bishop Varden, “to uphold substantial, essential, freeing truth against more or less plausibly shining, more or less fiendish substitutes.”
He reminds us of a core teaching of Vatican II too often ignored:
Was not the universal call to holiness, the call, that is, to embody truth, the strongest note struck by the Second Vatican Council? It resounded splendidly like a gong throughout its deliberations. The Christian claim to truth becomes compelling when its splendour is made personally evident with sacrificial love in sanctity, cleansed of temptations to temporise.
Easter Sunday, Paradox, and the Promise of Glory
Which of the disciples were at the Cross? In his seventh conference, Bishop Varden reminds us, “Two followers only remained: his Mother and John, the Beloved Disciple.” Why so few? Do we think that we would have stood beside them?
“John,” notes Bishop Varden, “gives a stark account of Jesus’s kenosis. It plays out at two levels: that of divine, compassionate love crushed in the wine-press of the Cross; and that of the betrayal of human loyalties. Yet John insists that this scene of dereliction manifests Christ’s glory.” The Cross is a profound paradox. “The cross cannot be defeated,” remarks a character in G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross (1909), ‘for it is Defeat.” Or, as is sung repeatedly in Eastern churches on Pascha: “By death He conquered death!”
From Christ’s death and apparent defeat shines forth eternal life and glory. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul wrote, “When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3–4). The Resurrection is, as I’m fond of saying, the cosmic “big bang” within history itself; all is made new—if only we die to ourselves. In his kenosis is our theosis.
The Church, Bishop Varden observes, “reminds women and men of the glory secretly alive in them. She shows us that present mediocrity and despair, not least my despair at my own persistent failures, need not be final; that God’s plan for us is infinitely lovely; and that God, through Christ’s Mystical Body, will give us grace and strength, if only we ask.”
This “hidden glory,” he emphasizes, is manifested in the saints and in the sacraments. The Eucharist, in particular, instituted in the darkness of Holy Thursday, shines with dazzling power for those with eyes to see. This is one reason, I think, that the Gospel Reading for the Easter Sunday afternoon/evening Mass is St. Luke’s famous account of the two disciples journeying to Emmaus.
The two disciples were talking about the death of Jesus. Distraught and distracted they were kept from recognizing him when he joined them on the road. But this failure to see was not so much physical as spiritual; it was a failure to “know the truth concerning” the real nature of Jesus, his life, and death (cf. Luke 1:4). He said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25).
Here again are the three essentials of freedom, truth, and glory—united in and flowing from the Paschal Mystery.
Jesus did three things for the two disciples going to Emmaus, all of which he offers to do for every one of us: he walked with them, he spoke with them, and he broke bread with them. In walking with them, he demonstrated his patience and care; in speaking to them, he imparted his wisdom and words; in breaking bread for them, he gave himself to them in love—a Eucharistic act.
And that is what we need now. That is the healing the world needs now. As Bishop Varden stated in his eleventh and final retreat at the Vatican:
Our time is crying out for the Gospel in fullness. The young lamenting in our parks with heavy hearts hunger for it. They do listen when it is presented “with authority” by Christians able at once to expound and display the truth of it without compromise, showing Christ’s gracious power to renew and to transform lives.
Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. His recent books on Lent and Advent—Praying the Our Father in Lent and Prepare the Way of the Lord—are published by Catholic Truth Society. Follow him on Twitter @carleolson. Read Carl’s other WWNN essays.