Sermon for Tenebrae
“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. Part of the intensity of Holy Week is captured in an ancient tradition of the solemn recitation of the psalms and lessons of the Mattin services of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, sung on the evenings before each of those days. Less common, perhaps, in our time, Tenebrae now happens, if at all, on the Wednesday evening. The readings are those of the Mattins of Maundy Thursday while the psalms and canticles anticipate the whole drama of human redemption. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection are the central events of salvation; they illumine each other. Tenebrae helps us to appreciate something of the weight and the intensity of Holy Week and Easter.
The darkness is the deep darkness of spiritual betrayal, captured most profoundly in the figure of Judas. Luke’s account of the Passion is read on the Wednesday in Holy Week and on Maundy Thursday. It is Luke who gives us these poignant and yet heart-rending words of Jesus to Judas, the question that in its scope and meaning catches us all. “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
The kiss is followed by Christ’s capture; it is a scene of violence. They have come out against him with swords and staves. In the melee, one of the servants of the high priest has his ear cut off but Jesus intervenes to prevent more violence and “touch[es] his ear and healed him.” Such things deliberately signal the contrast between human violence and destruction and divine grace and healing. In a way, Luke’s account accentuates this contrast. Judas’ betrayal, too, is seen to include all of us. We are all implicated, in one way or another, in the betrayals of Christ. Jesus’ words to Judas and his captors in the maelstrom of the confusion of his captivity are his words to us. They convict us of our neglect, read ‘betrayal’ of his teaching, our betrayal of the Word made flesh, we might say, whose words are meant to take flesh in us. We betray the words of his teaching and we betray the Word who is Christ.
