The traditional liturgy for Wednesday in Holy Week is Tenebrae, a name that comes from the Latin meaning shadow or darkness. While it can be done in a number of ways, it is a sustained meditation on the suffering of Jesus, employing imagery from a number of biblical sources that did not originally have anything to do with Jesus but were applied to him by the Christian tradition. The church becomes increasingly dark as the service moves on — a symbol of the sense of hopelessness that must have come over Jesus’ friends as his life came to an end, and that often comes over us when we find ourselves in a particularly dark phase of our lives.
A feature of the Tenebrae service is the reading of a number of verses from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to the Prophet Jeremiah. The book itself is a sustained lament over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE. As the prophet mourns Jerusalem’s destruction, he also seeks to find meaning in it, to somehow understand why it happened.
Typical of Jewish prophetic literature, Lamentations sees this tragedy as a working out of divine judgment that comes upon Jerusalem and the people of Israel as a result of sin or unfaithfulness. This is a common interpretive move in the Hebrew Bible, as the prophets grapple with tragic events in the context of a theological perspective in which everything is under God’s control and in which Israel enjoys a special relationship with God. It is instructive, however, that after the close of the Hebrew Bible, Israel ultimately abandons this perspective. There is too much tragedy in Jewish history to sustain the notion that all of it comes down to God’s judgment. The Jewish people had to move on from this perspective in order to preserve a relationship with the divine. And so they did.
Listening to these verses from Lamentations last night, I found myself hearing Jeremiah’s sadness over the unfaithfulness he perceives on the part of the people as a lament over the ways that we, as human beings, so often get out of alignment with the divine, with ourselves, with the intersection of God and our own humanity in which our purpose and our meaning are to be found. We lose our way in life so easily, and when we do, tragedy and destruction can be the result. Not because there is a God out there punishing us, but because we are trying to live a life that does not lead us into our own flourishing.
This is perhaps true of the Jerusalem of today, as the modern state of Israel’s response to the horrendous attacks of Hamas have seemed more and more to be disproportionately devastating to the people of Palestine. To hear Jeremiah’s laments over Jerusalem in last night’s liturgy seemed particularly poignant in the current context where political leaders seem to have gotten lost in a labyrinth of anger, vengeance, and violence.
Yet, Jerusalem is more than an ancient modern city with a long history. It is also a biblical metaphor in which what is said of Jerusalem is true well beyond its borders. Last night’s laments of a once great city that had lost its way and been overrun seemed to have much to say about the current social and political realities in the United States and much of the world. As a people and as a society, we seem to have lost our way, to have lost our alignment. We no longer seem to have any shared understanding of who we are and what we are about, and so we drift into ever more polarized camps that are leading to the destruction of decades of progress around a more evolved and enlightened view of human beings and what is necessary for their flourishing.
As individuals, as peoples, as a planetary community we get lost in darkness, we lose our alignment, we forget who we are. That is much to be lamented. Tenebrae — and this moment in Holy Week — invites us to actually look at that sense of being lost that knocks with increasing urgency upon our consciences. It invites us to stop saying that things are okay when they quite clearly are not. It asks us to look at our brokenness and that of our world, and to allow ourselves to feel the sadness and the grief. It is not an invitation to stay there permanently. It is an invitation to pause and lament all the undoing in ourselves and in our world that at some level, I am convinced, deeply disturbs us all.
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