“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.
“When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.” The power of darkness. Jesus goes into the darkness of human sin and death; he alone can turn darkness into light. Even the darkness is light to God, we might say, an image of how God is beyond the contradictions and oppositions of the finite world, let alone the world of sin and evil. Yet it is through the symbolic force of darkness that we come to know the light of God’s truth and mercy. Tenebrae takes us on a night journey through the darkness of the Passion and into the early morning light of the Resurrection.
Our service of Tenebrae telescopes the events of the Triduum Sacrum, intensifying the idea and experience of our participation in the Passion. The Psalms and Canticles, along with the Scripture lessons, concentrate the whole of the Lenten journey into one interwoven liturgy of the Word. We come out into the light but only by going through the darkness. In this way, Tenebrae is not only anticipatory but illustrative of the meaning of our pilgrimage at the point when it is most intense – on the eve of the Triduum Sacrum. The literal and metaphorical darkness is the darkness that belongs to our wills in disarray, our hearts in betrayal, to the Judas within us for whenever we turn away from the truth, we are in darkness.
Tenebrae, like the Triduum Sacrum itself, would have us feel the intensity of the darkness of sin and evil. It is not a matter of easy indifference, a kind of naïve confidence about how everything is good. In a way, Holy Week is meant to help us sense how we are out of place, how things are not alright with us at all, and to make us think about how things are not always getting better either. In short, we are being told to contemplate the worst.
The English novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy, reflecting in part upon the changes to the rural landscape of England through the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the bleakness of the human condition in general, something which the vast destructiveness of the First World War would bear more than ample testimony, wrote three poems entitled In Tenebris I, II, and III. The poem, In Tenebris II, especially challenges any sort of easy complacency about our capacities for evil. If there is a way towards things being “Better,” he argues, “it exacts a full look at the Worst.” It requires going into the darkness. It means, too, that if there is any good or delight to be found, it is, he suggests, “a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear.” Each poem begins with a quote (in Latin) from a psalm; the one for In Tenebris II, is from Psalm 142.4. “I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me; … no man cared for my soul.” It is an image of the darkness of desolation and abandonment, the very things that belong to the Passion in the journey from Gethsemane to the tomb.
The great mercy of Holy Week, here concentrated for us in the service of Tenebrae, is that the darkness of our betrayals of Christ are made a critical part of our journey to God.
“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, 2013