“All the people hung upon his words”
What words? Whose words? Those questions take on a certain poignancy of meaning in the service of Tenebrae. The Latin for darkness or shadows the ancient services of Tenebrae were anticipatory of the three great holy days, the Triduum Sacrum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The service of Mattins was sung solemnly the evening before each of those days. This reminds us that Holy Week is not simply a linear sequence of events but a cluster or crowd of events that belong to the credal understanding of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, events that are all interrelated doctrinally and which inform each other. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be understood independently and in separation from each other.
Tenebrae in the modern practice anticipates the Mattins of Maundy Thursday but includes a number of psalms and canticles that point us to the Resurrection. It is essentially a psalm office. The Psalter is the Hymn and Prayer Book of the Jews and of Christians. Thus many of the words we are meant to hang upon in an attentive and serious way are the words of the psalms. That is intriguing and poignant because the psalms present us with a number of different voices: the voices of our humanity in its distresses and fears, its disorder and violence; the voice of God in judgment and compassion; and the voice of Christ both as suffering victim in his humanity and as seeking our good. The psalter, as Calvin observes, presents us with an anatomy of the soul. We are meant to learn things about ourselves in relation to the truth of God. We are, yet again, learning the great lessons of sin and love in their interrelation.
Thus Tenebrae draws us dramatically into the Passion through the power of the psalms and the canticles, scripture songs which comment on the things of the Passion and human redemption. We are meant to find ourselves, our own souls, in these psalm prayers and hymns at the same time as we are meant to find ourselves in the deep embrace of God’s love for us and for our good.
The psalms of Tenebrae complement the first Mattins lesson for Maundy Thursday from The Lamentations of Jeremiah understood as the voice of Christ addressing us from the Cross revealing to us our rejections of God’s Word and truth made visible in the crucified. Thus it is Christ speaking directly to us about our evil and our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Powerful words and images that reveal Christ as bearing our sins in his own body, words that convict us.
The second Mattins lesson is the high priestly prayer of Jesus, as it is sometimes called, from John 17. It signals beautifully and powerfully the idea of the atonement, our being at one with God and with one another in the unity and distinction of the Son and the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine which belongs to our life in Christ, to our incorporation into Christ, to our co-inherence in God and with God. It highlights the theme of the interrelation of glory and suffering. It speaks of the idea of the fulfillment of the Scriptures, meaning the Hebrew Scriptures, and as well the exact words of Christ who is the Word and Son of the Father. “I have given them,” he says, “thy word,” the word of the Father which he is. He gathers us into his love for the Father.
O righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee; and these know that thou hast sent me. I made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
This is what we are meant to learn from Holy Week; to be convicted of sin and to be convinced of love. Our Tenebrae service ends with The Beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke which offers a very intense and interior understanding of Christ both in terms of what is said at the Last Supper and in the garden of Gethsemane. Luke’s painterly and poetic touch encourages us to feel Christ’s agony in the garden as the prelude to his agony on the Cross. “And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It is a powerful image that prepares us for the intensity of the Passion where literally water and blood will pour forth from the wounded side of Christ.
We are meant, however, to be convicted like Peter not just by what we see but by how Christ looks at us. The beginning of the Passion in Luke’s account includes the story of Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Luke introduces a unique and powerful image. “The Lord turned,” he says, “and looked upon Peter.” In hanging upon Luke’s word here we feel something of what Peter felt in remembering the word of the Lord, that “before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.” If we hang upon his words in holy remembrance we too shall weep bitterly now in sorrow and then in joy. But only if our hearts are moved by the look of Christ. His look is not condemnation but love and mercy. It anticipates Christ’s first word from the Cross which Luke gives us in the continuation of the Passion. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Ultimately, Tenebrae anticipates the Triduum Sacrum to bring us to Christ hanging on the Cross. Surely it is our task to hang upon the words which reveal us to ourselves and show God’s greater love in Christ’s sacrifice for us. By hanging on his words, may his words and love dwell more deeply in us.
“All the people hung upon his words”
Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, 2023