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“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

“He carried himself in his own hands.” Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum meaning commandment and refers to Christ’s repeated statement in John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” And as we have seen in the Office readings from St. John that commandment turns upon our keeping his words and abiding in his love. That love is the love of the Trinity.

But “a new commandment”? In what sense is it a new commandment? Do we not find the commandment to love God with the whole of our being in the Torah of the Jewish Scriptures as well as to love our neighbour? Yes, to be sure. Yet in the intensity of Holy Week and, especially on this holy night, those two commandments are uniquely concentrated for us in the figure of Jesus Christ. They are not just what we ought to do (but which of course we fail to do). They are radically fulfilled in Christ’s words and actions on this night understood precisely in anticipation of his Passion. What makes the new commandment new is the Cross in which God in Christ gives his life to us, for us, and in us. His sacrifice is his love lifted up before us already even before his being lifted up on the Cross. Hence the wonder of Augustine’s remark that “he carried himself in his own hands” in reference to the one of the central features of this day of many moving parts, the scene of Christ with the disciples in the Upper Room at the supper of the Passover. Take, eat; drink. This is my body; this is my blood.

The symbolism becomes increasingly clear. It is captured in Paul’s great statement that we proclaim in joy at Easter: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” Christ is the Passover, the Paschal Lamb who gives his life for us. The new commandment is his sacrificial love at work and moving in us. Such is service and sacrifice which Maundy Thursday illustrates in its various moments: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the agony in Gethsemane, as well as the other events such as the liturgical stripping of the altar, the King’s touch, and the Royal Maundy or giving of alms. They all belong to the Passion and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. They are all about sacrifice and service.

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“And I, If I be lifted up, will draw all unto me.”

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

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“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all unto me”

The office readings for Tuesday in Holy Week offer interesting insights into The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark and thus to the spiritual meaning of Christ being lifted up and our being drawn to him. At Matins, we have the first of the four suffering servant songs of Isaiah which signals the purpose of Israel’s mission as “a covenant to the people,” “a light to the nations,” “to open the eyes of the blind, and to bring out from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” These images all belong to the idea of human redemption and divine revelation recapitulated and made visible in the figure of Jesus Christ. The suffering mission of Israel for the world is fulfilled in Christ, too. This suggests complementary universalities rather than simply competing ones. The servant songs in Isaiah have contributed greatly to the Christian understanding of the person of Christ. The reading points to the sense of mission and purpose.

The first lesson at Vespers from Wisdom reflects profoundly on the nature of human sin in the forms of envy and resentment that are so prevalent in our world. The righteous man is inconvenient to us in our unsound reasoning. “He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us.” Therefore “let us condemn him to a shameful death.” The passage highlights our sinfulness which is visited upon him, ultimately upon Jesus who is made sin for us. In Wisdom our sins are about our reasoning as having gone astray and thus blind to the secret purpose of God, for we have forgotten or denied that “God created man for incorruption” and that we have been made in “the image of God’s own eternity.” Once again we confront the sad parody of the truth of our humanity; such is the twisted nature of our sinfulness.

The readings at Matins and Vespers from John’s Gospel, chapter 15, highlight the deeper communion between God and man that God seeks and makes for us. Such is redemption in our abiding in Christ as the branches in the vine. How? Through his word abiding in us, making us his friends and reminding us that we are not of the world but of Christ in his service and sacrifice.

These readings along with the lesson at Mass, the third suffering servant song of Isaiah, contribute to the deeper meaning of the Passion according to Mark. Christ is lifted up before our eyes on the Cross. We hear his agonizing word of desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” only to realize that he voices the desolating, despairing and contradictory nature of sin itself. It is made visible and audible in him. All of the forms of human injustice and the betrayal of all that is good and holy are concentrated in the figure of the Crucified and in his death. Nothing much good can be said of us in the events of Mark’s account of the Passion. But a great good comes out of this spectacle precisely in terms of what is lifted up before us. It is found in the words of the Centurion who beholding these things grasps its deeper meaning and purpose. “Truly this man was the Son of God,” he says. We behold Christ crucified bearing the wounds and marks of human sin, having been made sin for us, embodying all of the sufferings of our wounded and broken humanity, and yet we behold God. Sin and love are lifted up before us in the spectacle of the Passion.

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Monday in Holy Week sets before us the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark. It begins with the story of an unnamed woman who breaks open “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and anoints the head of Jesus. It is a touching act of compassion and devotion; an act of worship and an acknowledgement of Jesus. But this reading ends with the threefold denial of Christ by Peter and his tears of contrition when he recalls what Christ had said to him that “before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept.” An outpouring of ointment, an outpouring of tears. And all because of how Christ draws us to himself.

The compassionate act of the woman anointing the head of Jesus excites the indignation of some within themselves who “murmured against her.” But Jesus highlights the meaning of her action: “she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” She anticipates the meaning of Christ’s Passion in his death for us. Her act is an act of love and is recognised as such by Jesus. The breaking of the box anticipates the breaking open of the body of Christ and the outpouring of his blood for us. Peter, in confronting his own weakness and his betrayal of Jesus, is moved to tears.

“Take with you words, and return to the Lord,” Hosea says. He is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Hosea are read as the first lessons at Matins and Vespers respectively on this day. Hosea’s words convict us of having forgotten the Lord our God who “knew us in the wilderness” who cared for us and from whom we have turned away towards idols of our own making. But God turns us back to himself. “Take with you words and return to the Lord … Say no more, ‘Our God’ to the work of our hands” for “I will heal their faithlessness,” God says, “I will love them freely for my anger has turned from them.” Hosea concludes, “Whoever is wise let him understand these things.” It is a kind of commentary in advance on what Jesus says in the second lesson at Vespers from John 14 about loving Jesus by keeping his commandments and finding ourselves in him, embraced in the love of the Trinity. “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him.”

The woman is drawn to him in love; Peter who follows Christ albeit a far off denies him three times only to convict himself through recalling what Jesus had said. His tears are the tears of contrition; the tears of sorrow at having betrayed what he most loves. What flows out both from the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and from the tears of Peter belong to our being drawn more fully to Christ. There is no hiding the failings and weakness of our humanity in its disarray and confusion.

Christ is lifted up before us in the reading of these Scriptures so that he may draw us to himself. Our hearts are convicted and convinced of his love for us, a love that moves us in spite of ourselves and draws us to him.

“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, 2024

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