by CCW | 27 March 2024 22:00
Our Parish custom has been to pray the Service of Tenebrae on the Eve of Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae is the liturgy of anticipation. It is about praying the monastic services of Mattins and Lauds of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. It suggests the way in which the Passion is shadowed forth before us and enlightens us even in the shadows. The word comes from the responsories of Good Friday, Tenebrae factae sunt cum crucifixissent Jesum as derived from the accounts of the Crucifixion. “There was darkness when they crucified Jesus.”
The office or service of Tenebrae is a way of going in and through the Passion in part through the Psalms with their Antiphons. The Antiphons are scriptural passages that frame each Psalm and provide an interpretative matrix for its meaning and understanding in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalms are seen in the light of the Passion through the Antiphon even as the Passion is further illuminated by the Psalms. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Hebrew Scriptures and those of the New Testament.
Of particular significance are the readings tonight from Lamentations with its haunting and convicting question “Was there ever grief like mine?” understood as said by Jesus himself. Read along with his high priestly prayer in John 17, they provide the theological principle for the whole Passion and Life of Christ. It is all part of the theology of the atonement, about our being made at one with God through Christ’s sacrifice understood as love.
George Herbert’s poem “Sacrifice” recounts the whole story of Christ as revealed in the Gospels by way of using the phrase from Lamentations as a recurring refrain. We will hear it again on Good Friday in the Reproaches. Tenebrae in every way anticipates and intensifies the Passion and its meaning for us.
Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of joint. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax,” as Psalm 22 so powerfully puts it. But this is us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, twisted and turned in upon ourselves and away from God, homo incurvatus in se.
But it is in this sense of darkness and disarray that we sense the transformation of images, the transformation of the nature of our relationship with God. It means going through the Passion in this intensely focussed and rigorous way, constantly exploring a great range of images that turn in one way or another upon the reality of our life with God. The challenge of the Holy Week liturgies is about accepting the rich confusion and complexity of things and finding that what holds everything together is God and God alone. Anticipating the Passion only serves to heighten its intensity and its meaning in us.
Tenebrae is one way in which we pray the Passion through the Psalms in particular and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness and shadows of human experience something of the light of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/03/27/sermon-for-tenebrae-5/
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