Year: 2023

“All the people hung upon his words”

Luke gives us three of the seven last words from the Cross. In some sense they shape the drama of salvation with a certain kind of intensity and poignancy. They are words which reveal us to ourselves as sinners at the same time as they reveal the deep love of God. That dialectic of sin and love is the drama of Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum.

We are meant to hang upon the words of Christ in the intimacy of the Last Supper as we heard last night at Tenebrae. One of the important features of Maundy Thursday is that it connects powerfully and essentially the Passion and the Eucharist, the celebration of the Christian Passover, if you will. In both we confront the spectacle of our betrayals of ourselves and God. As Christopher Lasch puts it, “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” Nothing could be more self-critical than Holy Week. “The nature of religion,” he notes, is “to console, but, first of all, to challenge and confront.” We have forgotten this in what has become for our culture and our churches ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ and now ‘the tyranny of the therapeutic’, as if our self-esteem were the highest good.

Holy Week and Maundy Thursday challenges that sense of the self in a way that is profoundly counter-culture. It is not about ourselves as the victims but as the victimizers because of sin and evil. We confront our betrayals of Christ and thus of ourselves in the scene at the Last Supper which Maundy Thursday reminds us about by way of the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians (as well as the Evensong second lesson from John 13). It is the betrayal of the fellowship of friends. We cannot celebrate the Eucharist without recalling our betrayals of that fellowship. “In the same night that he was betrayed,” the eucharistic prayer says; that same night is this night. Every Eucharist places us in the upper room where Christ carries himself in his hands and gives himself to us who are his betrayers.

This kind of self-criticism belongs to the good of the Passion. It is through confronting the limitations of our humanity in all the forms of our fallenness and sin that we learn the greater love of God for our humanity. It is all about confronting ourselves and being challenged by the words of Christ. That and that alone is our comfort. Our good intentions are not enough whether it is in the garden of Gethsemane or in the high priest’s house of the temple precincts. We may want to watch with him in companionship but are too weak. We may want to bear witness to him but betray him like Peter. We confront ourselves in these scenes in the hopes that the look of Christ upon us as upon Peter may move us to contrition and sorrow.

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“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.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? The Nicene Creed says that “he suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures, the Creed does not mean the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament but the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament. Luke’s text however is about the words of Christ. Holy Week sets before us the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and complexity. Yet the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures help us greatly in grasping the radical nature of his Passion, Death and Resurrection. They provide the ground for the credal witness to Christ crucified.

Thus on Tuesday in Holy Week at Matins we read the first servant song of Isaiah, a passage which is understood in reference to Christ in the Christian understanding and to Israel in the Jewish understanding. Christ unites both, we might say. He accomplishes or fulfills what belongs to the vocation of Israel as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” even as Simeon identifies the child Christ in exactly the same language based upon exactly the same passage. And the redemptive nature of Christ’s work is also signaled here: opening the eyes of the blind, bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon and from the prison those who sit in darkness. These are the pilgrimage themes of illumination and purgation, of liberation from the prison of ourselves.

The reading from Wisdom tonight complements the first servant song from Isaiah and highlights the theme of Christ as the victim, the righteous one whose very being excites the wrath and envy of those who seek his destruction. For wherever the good is sought there too is the devil hard at work but always as a negative force, always as negating the goodness of being but as such reasoning blindly and foolishly. These texts throw light on the continuation of Jesus’s farewell discourse in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel.

Even more they complement and deepen our understanding of the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark which is a pretty full picture of human evil and the miscarriage of justice, of human cruelty and abuse and mockery which culminates in the crucifixion and the word, the one word of the crucified in both Matthew and Mark. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” We are meant to hang on that word of the one who hangs on the Cross and feels to the fullest possible extent the reality of sin and evil, feeling it more that we can imagine because of his greater goodness. We are meant to feel his sense of utter abandonment and alienation which is nothing less than what we have visited upon him in our abandonment and alienation from God.

What, then, is the good for us in the face of this awful spectacle of suffering and evil, of sin par excellence in several different registers? Simply this. The one word that comes out of the Centurion in seeing the crucified Christ. We are to hang upon the words of Christ that we might be able to say with the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to profess what we proclaim in the Creed about the crucified Christ who “suffered and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead.” But only if we hang upon his word of desolation and know ourselves as its cause and truth.

“All the people hung on his words”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2023

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“All the people hung upon his words”

The readings at Morning and Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week complement in wonderful ways the Eucharistic readings. We hang upon the words of Hosea, the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. He bids us tonight to “take with you words and return to the Lord,” having reminded us this morning of God’s words to us in our disobedience and folly.

I am the Lord your God
From the land of Egypt;
You know no God but me,
And beside me there is no saviour.
It was I who knew you in the
Wilderness,
In the land of drought.

But in our prosperity, he says, we forget God. It is from Hosea that we have the lines from 1 Corinthians 15 used in the Burial Office about “Death being swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But God does not forget us. In the awareness of our sins we learn the love of God. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them.” These passages contribute to the beginning of Christ’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel (ch. 14) which is really about preparing the disciples for his passion & death, his resurrection and ascension; in short, the radical meaning of Christ’s going to the Father and about our learning the love of each for the other. The Passion teaches us the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” through our being gathered into his love for the Father. That is the underlying principle of the Passion.

These office readings inform our understanding of “the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark” framed by the broken alabaster box of ointment of spikenard poured out upon Christ’s head – a sign of love in repentance – and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. The focus is on Christ in our midst bearing the faults and follies of our betrayals whether explicitly like Judas and Peter or through our weakness in not being able to watch even one hour with him in Gethsemane. The alabaster box that is broken open prepares us for the breaking of his heart and body on the Cross. This beginning of the Passion convicts us of the limitations and the outright betrayals of our love of God and one another but only to move us to contrition and tears of sorrow. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.”

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 3rd, 2023

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