Sermon for Tenebrae

by CCW | 8 April 2020 22:00

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

Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/04/08/sermon-for-tenebrae-3/

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