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.
We do so in the attempt to feel the thinking, to experience the meaning, if you will. The Office lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer aid us in that endeavour. At issue is whether we have the hearts and minds to think and feel the redemption of our humanity being restored to its truth and dignity through the Passion of Christ for us and in us.
There is a great richness to the scriptural images that Holy Week sets before us. So many different ways to enter into the meaning of the Passion. That is why the most important feature of Holy Week is the reading of the Passion along with the other Scriptures which help us in our understanding. The real preaching is not my poor efforts. The real preaching is the proclamation of the Passion itself.
Among the images in the accounts of the Passion, there is one in particular that stands out for me as pointing so beautifully and profoundly to the underlying spirit of Holy Week in all of its intensity. It is found in the beginning of Luke’s account of the Passion read today. It is Luke’s telling of Peter’s betrayal and the form of his confronting himself in his betrayal of Christ. A most powerful scene, it shows Peter in the shadows of the high priest’s house where he denies that he even knows Christ. As Luke puts it, “and immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew.” For Matthew and Mark, that is enough to make Peter remember and to call to mind the word and the saying of Jesus, enough to occasion his tears of contrition. But Luke adds a masterly touch, I think, and one which goes to the heart of the whole project of Holy Week. On the one hand, it is very much about our attention to Christ in his passion such that in looking upon the crucified we might cry out with the Centurion “Truly this man was the Son of God,” but on the other hand, it is very much more about Christ looking upon us; in other words, how we are known by God.
Luke gets that point poignantly and most movingly. “The cock crew” and Luke simply adds “and the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” Everything is in that look. That look occasions Peter’s remembrance of the word of the Lord. What is that look? It complements, I suggest, certain moments of Christ on the cross when he looks down upon Mary and John and bids them behold him and one another, when he looks across to the penitent thief crucified with him who asks Jesus to remember him, when he looks up to the Father and places himself in his Father’s hands. The look is the Christ’s gaze of compassion, his look of love.
Nothing can move us more perhaps that such a look of loving compassion. It moves the heart of Peter to repentance and contrition. Will it move us? The meaning of this service, the meaning of Holy Week, is that we be moved by the love of Christ for us. Sometimes it is a word, like the lamentations of Christ speaking to us out of the intensity of the Passion, as it were. But sometimes it is just a look.
What mean ye by this service?
Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, Wednesday in Holy Week