Day: April 17, 2019

Sermons

Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week

What mean ye by this service?

Tenebrae means darkness or shadows. It underscores an important feature of our Holy Week observances. They are not about a linear sequence of events. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ in all four accounts of the Passion along with the kinds of scriptural commentary that passages from the Old Testament and the New Testament provide. It is really all a kind of circling around the meaning of the Passion in and through the complex of perspectives that are part of its fundamental and doctrinal unity. Thus the ancient Medieval services of Tenebrae are anticipatory of the events of the Triduum Sacrum. The services of Tenebrae anticipate the Mattin services of each following day: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Tenebrae, then, is a kind of shadowing forth of what we already know but know only in the shadows and the darkness of our minds. We know the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection but only partially, only ”in a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13..13), as it were. Thus Tenebrae reminds us of what the veiled cross signifies, namely, the limitations and incompleteness of our understanding. And yet, Tenebrae is about the passion of our quest to know and to understand more fully the radical meaning of Christ’s passion as the pageant of divine love.

Tenebrae anticipates. We participate in the intensity of the Passion by anticipation. Tonight we read the Matins and Lauds of Maundy Thursday. Our modern Tenebrae services are usually restricted to the Wednesday of Holy Week. But it all belongs to the meaning of the services of this week. We anticipate the Triduum Sacrum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. We do so by our attention to the psalm offices of Matins and Lauds and to the readings which illumine and belong to the deepening of our understanding about Christ’s Passion.

We can only do this in the light of the Resurrection. That is, after all, how all of the accounts of the Passion and by extension the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament have come down to us along with the Creeds that encapsulate the essentials of the Christian faith. We immerse ourselves in the challenge of trying to understand the radical nature of God’s love for us revealed in Christ’s sacrifice.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 April

What mean ye by this service?

The question comes from the Book of Exodus just after the story of the Passover, the story of the Hebrews being spared the death of the first born of man and beast by daubing the lintels of their doors with the blood of the lamb. It is a sign signifying their relation to the God of their deliverance from slavery and bondage. It becomes the defining event for the people of Israel and one which is remembered ritually. The basic Jewish insight about the sovereign will of God as the defining principle of all reality shapes as well the Christian and Islamic understanding. It informs especially Holy Week, the week of the Passion of Christ and our participation in that Passion.

In the traditional Anglican pattern, we immerse ourselves completely in the reading of all four accounts of the Passion beginning on Palm Sunday with Matthew, then on the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week with Mark, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and John on Good Friday. There is an intensity to these readings because we are in the Passion. We find ourselves in the crowds, among the disciples, and amid the authorities both Jewish and Roman. We are with Peter as weeps recalling the words and the tender look of Christ upon him in his betrayal of Christ. We are with the twelve in the Upper Room on the night in which he was betrayed. As Palm Sunday makes so graphically clear, we are those who shout “Hosanna to the Son of David” only to turn about and cry “Let him be crucified,” “Let him be crucified”! Such are the contradictions within our own souls. We confront ourselves in all of our disorder and disarray in the events of Holy Week.

If we have hearts, they shall be broken, for only so shall we be made whole. Holy Week is one long continuous service. We need to become aware of our brokenness in order to participate in the redemption of our humanity. Only so can we go from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” and then to the great “Alleluias” of Easter. God and God alone can make something good out of our evil. That is the meaning of Holy Week. Our hearts are broken, too, at the sad spectacle of the great Cathedral Church of Notre Dame de Paris on fire and now smoldering in ruins. And yet there is some comfort in the powerful image of the Cross at Notre Dame shining forth amid the smoke and the devastations of the fire, a presence signifying hope and redemption and restoration.

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Prayers and liturgy

Wednesday in Holy Week

The collect for today, Wednesday in Holy Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 9:15-28
The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Luke
The Gospel: St. Luke 22:1-71

Nicolaus Knüpfer, Christ before Herod AntipasArtwork: Nicolaus Knüpfer, Christ before Herod Antipas, First half of 17th century. Oil on panel, Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

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