by CCW | 31 March 2021 18:00
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.
The second scene which is especially moving in these accounts of the Passion is Luke’s account of Peter’s betrayal. At the moment of the cock crowing, Luke applies his masterly painter’s touch, a true moment of artistic insight. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter,” Luke tells us. The look is everything. It is not just how we look on Jesus but how Jesus looks on us. Nothing convicts us more completely of our broken-heartedness than recalling the look of Christ. “And Peter remembered the word of the Lord … and Peter went out, and wept bitterly.” The look awakens Peter to remembrance, literally calling to mind the word of the Lord.
It is a very moving scene. What is that look? A look of anger? A look of judgment and condemnation? It is, I think, the look of compassion. God in Christ looks on us with compassion. This is Luke’s insight that informs his account of the words of Christ on the Cross. Luke gives us three of the seven last words of the Crucified. They are all words of compassion that convict us of our brokenness more compelling than any other words. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” is the first word. “Today,” he says to the penitent thief crucified with him, “thou shalt be with me in Paradise,” is the second word of the Crucified, the word of mercy and compassion towards another in the throes of agony and death. The seventh word of Christ from the Cross is also from Luke. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” It signals the placing of all things into the divine relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Spirit.
Luke’s account provides us with these intense and intimate moments that belong to our broken-heartedness. He shows us the heart of Christ in the heart of the Passion. Such things can only move us for if we have hearts they must be broken by the compassion of Christ for us. His prayer, like great drops of blood, his look upon Peter and us, the look of deep compassion. Such things can only move us. For such things are the sacrifices of God towards us that then turn us to God in the awareness of our brokenness. A broken and contrite heart, indeed. A broken and contrite heart that not only God, but Christ and the Father, will not despise. Such is light and love in the darkness and the shadows of the Passion.
Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, 2021
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