Year: 2021

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy days of Holy Week. It is a day of many events: Jesus washing of the feet of the disciples; the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the upper room; the later traditions of the King’s touch and gift of money to the afflicted; the stripping of the altar; the watching with Christ in Gethsemane; in short, a great cluster and confusion of events that belong to our participation in the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which we confront ourselves in our brokenness, on the one hand, and the ways in which we look upon Christ, on the other hand.

What unites all these events of Maundy Thursday? Simply the term which designates this day, maundy. It is the Englishing of the Latin term, mandatum, meaning commandment. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you love one another” (Jn. 13.34). That word is given by John in his account of the Last Supper which focuses on the washing of the feet of the disciples and the betrayal of Judas and not on the words of institution at all, an interesting point about the Gospel which is, in other respects, the most sacramental in its theology. But it is that concept of a new commandment that is most crucial for this day. For it highlights the theme of sacrificial service. That is the theme that unites all of the disparate elements of the liturgies of Maundy Thursday.

The idea of sacrificial service is profoundly counter-culture and constitutes a profound ethical rebuke to our contemporary culture which is really about the pretense to privilege, prestige, and prominence; in short, the idea of getting ahead in the world which is always about putting others down or at least using others as means to our own ends. Such is the dog-eat-dog world of endless conflict and destruction; the world of the dominance of the few at the expense of the many. What is lost is precisely this ethical sense of the common good. Maundy Thursday provides the most radical picture of the ethical teaching and meaning of sacrificial service. Such is the true worth and dignity of our humanity. It is not found in the pursuit of power and privilege but in the dignity of service. This was the point of the Passion Sunday Gospel. “Whosoever would be great among you let him be your minister. Whosoever would be great among you let him be your servant,” literally your slave. This brings out the meaning of the famous Master-Slave dialectic of Hegel. It is not simply that the Master discovers his dependence upon the Slave and thus a kind of role reversal, but rather the more profound realization of mutual interdependence and mutuality that is the deeper truth of all forms of ordered life.

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“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.

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

We are never more the community of the broken-hearted than in our contemplation of Christ crucified in each of the four Gospels. There is something heart-rending in each of their accounts but especially in the one solitary word from the Cross which Matthew and Mark alone provide out of the seven last words of Christ. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the cry of dereliction, an agonizing and haunting cry from the heart of the son in his brokenness on the Cross. To hear it is to be broken in our own hearts. He voices the empty dereliction of own hearts and yet what he says is more than simply a quote from another psalm, Psalm 22. It is a prayer to God.

He cries out to God in the truest and deepest meaning of human sinfulness. It is the realization of our utter and complete separation from all that is good and true and holy. He voices the distress of our broken-hearts to God in the empty desolation of his aloneness. But it is addressed to God. Therein lies the great wonder of redemption. Everything is turned back to God, even and, perhaps, especially our sense of utter estrangement. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord,” Psalm 130, another one of the Penitential Psalms, prays. Here in the heart of Christ’s Passion and agony in the continuation of Mark’s Passion is the truest and fullest meaning of human sin, the most complete expression of separation and alienation. As G.K. Chesterton astutely remarks, “it seems as if for a moment that Christ was an atheist.”

Christ calls out here not to his Father but to God. It is as if the personal relation has been eclipsed and hidden from view, even stripped away. Yet it is a cry to God as all prayer and thought really is. That is, I think, the real power of this word. It convicts us of the radical nature of sin more powerfully than any other word. It expresses the real meaning of the depth of sin, the real meaning of sin’s folly in its attempt to eclipse God. It is in the form of a question. The ‘why’ of the sense of desolation and abandonment highlights the nature of sin’s folly. Sin is the denial of God and yet it is a parody of God by us. We forsake God. Such is the power and pretense of human sin. We presume to be God, as it were, in forsaking God only to discover our alienation and separation from God. This troubling word confronts us with the ultimate form of our brokenness as complaint. The Psalmist’s complaint takes on a whole new force of meaning as voiced by the Crucified. Nothing can highlight more forcefully the profound sense of sin as alienation and denial.

Yet, as a prayer to God, even with the absence of the term Father, it signals the radical truth upon which our humanity depends even in its contradiction. The extreme form of broken-heartedness here is the sense of being God-forsaken. In calling out to God, there is the recognition of our separation, of our having forsaken God. It is the ultimate cry of the broken-hearted, the ultimate expression of human sinfulness. It is voiced by Christ who expresses here what belongs to the depths of our brokenness and its meaning. Our brokenness is our God-forsakenness. We have forsaken God. This prayer to God captures precisely that truth in all of its agonizing awareness. In joining this prayer to the Penitential Psalm prayer of Psalm 51, we glimpse something of the wonder and mystery of redemption. “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” That, too, is simply a prayer to God.

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2021

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“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

This Lenten mantra from Psalm 51, the great Penitential Psalm par excellence, provides the interpretative matrix for our Holy Week meditations on the Passion of Christ. In our Anglican tradition, we immerse ourselves in all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. It is intentionally intense. But why? To feel and know in ourselves our brokenness without which redemption is entirely meaningless.

The readings of Holy Week not only immerse us in the Passion; they intensify its force and feeling in us. We confront the sad and sorry spectacle of our humanity in its disorder and distress. We behold ourselves as sinners and thus as broken-hearted, as aware of our brokenness. For to know ourselves as sinners means contrition and confession. Contrition and brokenness are correlative terms. To be contrite is to be broken in our hearts. But what does it mean to say that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit? It means that only in our brokenness can we turn to God. In the discovery of our brokenness is the realization of our wholeness as found in God. It is our awareness of God without whom we cannot know our brokenness.

We do not presume in any righteousness or moral rectitude in and of ourselves by which to offer unto God anything. That would be presumptuous; a bit like offering a gift which actually honours ourselves more than the one to whom it is given. It is in our brokenness that God beholds us without despite. The recognition of our brokenness is our recognition of God and our turning to him alone. We have to be broken before we can be made whole.

Holy Week is about our being broken by beholding the spectacle of ourselves in the Passion of Christ. In being broken-hearted, our hearts are opened to view both to ourselves and to God.

Palm Sunday has already presented us with the beginnings of the spectacle of our brokenness in the Palm Gospel and in the reading of the Passion according to St. Matthew. On Monday in Holy Week we begin with the reading of the Passion according to St. Mark. Each account of the Passion has its own special voice and emphasis as well as its own creative expression. This beginning of the Passion in Mark’s Gospel is especially significant. It begins with the breaking of the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and the anointing of the head of Jesus by an unnamed woman. Her generous act is seen by others in Jesus’ company in the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany as an extravagant waste. Far more important to sell the ointment and give the proceeds to the poor, some said with “indignation within themselves” while murmuring against her. We should feel the weight of this perspective as well as seeing the problem. It is the failure to understand the radical meaning of the gesture and in our contemporary world it is the reduction of everything to the priority of the economic.

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