Month: April 2017

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

Tenebrae is the Latin word for darkness and shadows. The term is applied to the ancient monastic services of Matins and Lauds of Triduum Sacrum which in medieval times were celebrated in an anticipatory fashion on the preceding evenings. One dramatic feature of the service is the gradual extinguishing of the candles until only one candle remains lit, itself a symbol of Christ. Then, it, too, would be hidden, symbolic of Christ’s death and the apparent victory of the forces of evil. Finally, a very loud noise is made symbolizing the earthquake at the time of the resurrection. The hidden candle would be restored to its place and all would depart in silence.

Darkness and shadows. Holy Week is the pageant of the darkness of our humanity. Our hearts of darkness are fully on display. We turn to God in Christ to learn about the darkness and the shadows of our hearts. The Lamentations of Jeremiah are read as the lamentations of Christ, Christ sorrowing for our sins which are about our turning away from God and his will and his truth. That turning away is our life in the shadows, our life in the darkness as opposed to the light.

But Tenebrae is, above all else, about God turning to us in Jesus Christ, his turning to us to convict our hearts. Nowhere is that more graphically seen than at the end of The Beginning of the Passion According to St. Luke read on this day. It is the scene of Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Luke’s master touch, his painterly and dramatic touch, if you will, is to have Peter’s third betrayal and, then to say, “The Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” Light in the shadows, light in the darkness. That look convicts Peter. It is the look of divine compassion, not angry judgement. Peter confronts himself through Jesus turning to him at the moment of Peter’s third betrayal. He remembers in that moment what Christ had predicted. His own conscience is convicted. “He went out and wept bitterly.”

The Lamentations of Christ read tonight and also on Good Friday are seen through the lens of Christ turning and speaking to us just as he turns and looks upon Peter. The effect should be the same – the tears of repentance. The light of Christ illumines the darkness, the shadows of the human heart, our heart of darkness.

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae
Wednesday, April 12, 2017

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

It is Joel’s word to us, his word shaping our thinking about the Passion of Christ. Turn unto God but to do what? To be cruel and brutal? To do evil? What we contemplate today in the continuation of the Passion is the continuing brutality and folly of our humanity. It seems that we turn to Christ only to betray him in one way or another. We turn to Christ only to contemplate our own brutality and evil. Yesterday we had the picture of Judas’ kiss of betrayal and Peter’s bitter tears poured out like the precious ointment from the broken box of alabaster. And today? The further spectacle of the miscarriage of justice in which we see the whole pageant of the injustices of the world. We see the cruelty of mob violence and the brutality of abuse. Christ is mocked and beaten and led out to be crucified. Where are we in all of this spectacle? We are in the crowd in one way or another. We confront the darkness of the human heart, our hearts. If we have hearts, they shall be broken, and only so shall we be whole.

He goes the way of the Cross bearing the burden of our sins. No one comes to his aid. Everything is focused on the human rage to destroy; such is his crucifixion. When he stumbles under the weight of the cross itself, his persecutors compel – force – one Simon of Cyrene to bear his cross. He is completely abandoned. Christ is the object of all our discontent, our hatred and enmity, our will to destroy. Everything that belongs to the disorder and disarray of our human hearts is on display in his Passion.

The one word from the Cross in Matthew and Mark’s account is the word which voices the utter desolation of human evil. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is a line from the psalms and yet it captures something of the real nature of human evil which is about our self-willed separation from the goodness and truth of God. Yet his word is a prayer, a prayer to God out of the depths of the reality of human sin. That is what is made visible to us. Only if we face the cruel brutality of ourselves can we learn something of the greater goodness of God. The lesson for us is learned by one who was part of the spectacle, a Roman centurion who looking upon the dying Christ says, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

We contemplate in the crucified Christ something more than just the brutality and cruelty of our hearts. We contemplate the God who seeks to make our hearts clean and new. We can only come to that through the spectacle of the Passion. We confront the evil of ourselves to learn the greater goodness of God. Such is the turning, our turning away and our turning back again and in the hopes of a deeper understanding of sin and love. Such are the deep and profound lessons of the Passion. If we will turn and see. Our turning is our repentance, at once moving us to contrition and confession even the confession of Christ as the Son of God. That is the only good of this spectacle.

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week
April 11^th, 2017

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

And so it begins. Holy Week immerses us in the Passion of Christ from all four of the Gospels. We turn from The Passion According to St. Matthew on Palm Sunday to the beginning of The Passion According to St. Mark today and its continuation tomorrow.

That Passion begins with the woman who breaks open “an alabaster jar of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and pours it out upon his head, as Mark tells it. This beginning of his account of the Passion ends with the tears of Peter. Both stories are about turning to Christ, the one in anticipation of his Passion and its meaning; the other in the awareness of his sin and betrayal. “She has come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying”, Jesus says, indicating that her action already participates in his Passion.

His words are the counter to the complaint that this breaking open of the alabaster box was a “waste of the ointment” which might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, a reasonable point, we might think, but one which misses the deeper point of the Passion. It is not simply about our projects of worldly improvement as if the world in itself were the goal and purpose. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus famously says, but adds more profoundly, “and whensoever ye will ye may do them good,” encouraging a strong sense of our obligation to help those in need. “But me ye have not always”. Something more is before us, namely the redemption of the world by its being turned to God in Christ. The events of the Passion disabuse us of any idea that we of ourselves can fix the problems of the world. After all, the Passion reveals that we are the problem.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the prophet Joel serve as one of the mantras for the season of Lent, a recurring refrain which shapes the Lenten journey. But even more it provides the matrix through which to contemplate the Passion of Christ which is set before us with great intensity in Holy Week beginning today, Palm Sunday.

It is the holy business of this Holy Week to be constantly turning us to Christ who has turned to us. In a way, it is really one long liturgy that begins today and ends on Easter, a kind of circling around and around the mystery of God in the work of redemption. “Rend your hearts,” Joel exhorts us and “not your garments.” It is the business of Holy Week to break our hearts. In our turning to God, we are invited to learn two necessary and interrelated ideas. The one is the truth and dignity of our common humanity as found in our being with God; the other is the disorder and disarray of our humanity which is equally common to human experience. How will we learn to think these two contraries together? Only by immersing ourselves in the fullness and completeness of the Passion of Christ as set before us in all four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels. Such is the intensity of the logic of Holy Week.

That logic is set before us today. We turn to Christ who enters Jerusalem triumphantly. Palm branches are strewed before his way and garments, too, are laid out before him and yet he enters riding, as Zechariah prophesied, “upon an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass,” in other words humbly and in meekness. Here is no cavalcade of high-end cars and limousines, no great retinue of the rich and the mighty; instead there is the sense of joy and expectancy on the part of the common people who turn to Christ, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David.” It moves the whole city. “Who is this?” they say, to which the multitude answer, “Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee”. Part of the project of Holy Week is for us to realise with “the Centurion and they that were with him” that “truly this is the Son of God,” God with us to redeem us. And that means confronting the sad and sorry realities of our faults and failings, not to mention the sad and sorry realities of our broken and disordered world.

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