Day: April 8, 2020

Our Parish Holy Week custom has been to pray the Service of Tenebrae on the Eve of Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae is the liturgy of anticipation. It is about praying the Matins of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. The word means shadows or darkness. It is a way of going in and through the Passion in part through the psalms with their antiphons. The antiphons are scriptural passages that frame each psalm and provide an interpretative matrix for the understanding of the Psalm in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalm is seen in the light of the Passion through the antiphon even as the Passion is further illumined by the Psalm. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament.

Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of whack, out of joint. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax,” as Psalm 22 so powerfully puts it. But it is about us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, turned in upon ourselves and away from God, incurvatus in se. But it is that sense of darkness and disarray that we sense the transformation of images, the transformation of the nature of our relationship with God. It means going through the Passion in this intensely focussed and rigorous way, constantly exploring a great range of images that turn in one way or another upon the reality of our life with God. The challenge of the Holy Week liturgies is about accepting the rich confusion and complexity of things and finding that what holds everything together is God and God alone. Anticipating the Passion only serves to heighten its intensity and its meaning in us.

Tenebrae is one way in which we pray the Passion and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness something of the light of Christ.

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”

The lesson from Hebrews complements the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. We pray “Our Father” to “forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Forgiveness is a dominant feature of Luke’s Gospel whose Passion account we read on the Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week. Luke gives us the first and the last word of the Crucified. They are both words of the Son to the Father; the first word is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Allied with Luke’s emphasis upon the theme of forgiveness is the idea of sacrifice and healing, the idea of the giving of oneself for the good of others. That theme is critical to the idea of atonement, our being made at one with God. That implies our separation and the overcoming of that separation. The lesson from Hebrews provides us with the deep theology of redemption, at once reaching back to the Old Testament story from Numbers about the bronze serpent being raised up for sinful Israel to see and in seeing healed, and in the idea of sacrifice which requires the shedding of blood.

What is the story of the bronze serpent about? It is about human sin and disobedience. In this case, Israel’s constant complaining against God results in the punishment of serpents which destroy them. They repent and beseech Moses to intercede to God. He does and is told to make a bronze serpent and to hold it up before the people. It makes their sin visible to them at the same time as healing them. Jesus picks up on this image in John’s Gospel. “As Jesus lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Such is salvation, our being healed and made whole.

But only through the brokenness and agony of Christ. Luke, of all the evangelists, gives us the most moving picture of Christ in his care for us. Christ in the agony of Gethsemane prays “as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It anticipates the blood of his passion. What does the shedding of blood mean? Simply the giving of life for the good of others. That is the insight of Hebrews. It sees the former sacrifices as having  their fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice, in the shedding of his blood. It is imaged for us here in terms of his commitment to the will of the Father. “Not my will but thine be done.” We have no life apart from God.

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