Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week, Tenebrae
Holy Wednesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
The Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week recalls and completes the Epistle reading for Passion Sunday from Hebrews 9. It centers our attention on Christ’s Passion as the “forgiveness of sins” through “the shedding of his blood” in the sacrifice of himself.. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,” and “now, once for all, at the end of time, he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” It offers a way of understanding theologically just what it means to say that “Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant, [and] that by means of death” so that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” This theological understanding is complemented by the Passion according to St. Luke, read today and tomorrow.
Luke, in Dante’s famous phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This, wonderfully illustrated in The Beginning of the Passion According to St. Luke. Luke, helps us to feel something of the meaning of Christ’s Passion psychologically, emotionally, and personally, and what it means for us. In other words, Luke gives us a sense of the inner struggles, turmoil and dynamic of the Passion in Christ himself in the movement towards the Cross.
Luke shows what is at work in the forces of evil that seek to kill Jesus especially with respect to the intentions of the chief priests and scribes and the role of Judas in Christ’s betrayal. Satan, Luke tells us, “entered into Judas” who conspires with the chief priests and captains to betray Jesus unto them. Satan is the tempter, the devil, who as a created being is good but exists in denial of his own being. He is, as Augustine nicely puts it, “an evil good”. He shows us the radical nature of evil as the contradiction and negation of the good upon which it utterly depends, the evil to which we concede so easily.
