Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week
admin | 31 March 2021“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Wednesday in Holy Week sets before us “The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Luke.” In our liturgical customs, Wednesday in Holy Week also includes the service of Tenebrae. Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. It is essentially the Psalm offices of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of the Passion, prayed in anticipation of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Once again, we see something of the power and significance of the Psalms as belonging to the forms of our participation in the Passion. It all belongs to the intensification of the Passion in us and in the awareness of our brokenness. Tenebrae is the shadowing forth of the Passion.
Each account of the Passion has its own special voice and emphasis. Luke is perhaps the most literary of the evangelists and offers an especially intense, dramatic and intimate sense of Christ’s Passion. The beginning of his account of the Passion highlights the Passover meal of Christ with his disciples which becomes the institution of the Holy Eucharist. But there are two other scenes in this beginning of his Passion which are especially moving.
One is Luke’s account of what is known as the Agony of Christ in Gethsemane. His account of the prayer of Christ is graphic and intense. He withdraws about a stone’s cast from the others and kneels down and prays, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” That prayer highlights for us the underlying movement of Christ’s will for our salvation. He wills to undergo the Passion. His Passion is grounded in the interchange of prayer between the Father and the Son. In the continuation of the Passion on Maundy Thursday we will note that Luke alone of the four evangelists gives us the first and last word of Christ from the Cross. They are both words of prayer to the Father.
Here in anticipation of the Passion, he prays to the Father. But Luke gives us a graphic and poetic sense of the intensity of this prayer. “And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” The agony in Gethsemane anticipates explicitly his Passion on the Cross. His prayer anticipates explicitly the outpouring of his blood on the Cross. It highlights for us the deeper meaning of the Passion. It cost the heart-blood of the Son of God to redeem us, as Jeremy Taylor reminds us. Luke shows us the heart of Christ.
