Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Shadows are a feature of Luke’s account of the Passion and complement the ancient service of Tenebrae on the Wednesday of Holy Week. It is a largely the psalm offices of the Triduum Sacrum sung in anticipation of the three great Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Through the psalms in particular there is a kind of shadowing forth of the events of the Passion and their meaning.
The Psalms are the Prayer Book and Hymn Book of the Church. How to read them? How to pray them? Sometimes as the words of Christ to us; sometimes as our words to God; sometimes as our words of violence and vengeance. Yet the psalms help us to enter more fully into the Passion of Christ. They are super-charged with a feeling intensity and a deep insight into both human character and God. Their intensity is complemented by The Beginning of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, and especially, it seems to me, the scene of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.
Luke looks at things in a more inward way. He provides us with an imaginative feel for what is going on inside the heart of Jesus. With Luke, more than any of the Evangelists, we feel the Passion of Christ. “Being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It is a most compelling and powerful image that suggests something of the mind of the Evangelist, the mind of Luke, who is so powerfully moved by the scene itself. He paints a picture of the agony of Christ.
It is Luke, too, who gives us an even more intense understanding of the Peter’s betrayal of Christ. “The cock crew,” Luke tells us in an economy of expression. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” It is an exquisite moment. What is the look? A look of contempt, of judgement, of despair? No. I think it is the look of loving compassion. “For this is a true saying, and worthy of all to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Peter, remembering the word of the Lord and so confronting his threefold betrayal, himself as a sinner, “went out and wept bitterly.” Just so do we learn how to be defined by the word of God. Sometimes it is through our tears. Discovering something of the deep love of Christ in the shadows of our lives. We see “in a glass darkly” but at least we see. Here is a look that springs from the heart of Christ in his suffering for us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, 2018
