These are three adddresses given during the Triduum at Carlisle Cathedral in 2023 focusing on three of the great hymns and antiphons of the Church: Ubi Caritas, the Improperia, and the Te Deum.
Maundy Thursday: Ubi Caritas
In the second century after Christ, Tertullian, the great
father of Latin Christianity, suggested that the identity of Christianity –
still at the time a marginal and persecuted sect – might best found not in words
alone but in their deeds. Unlike the pagans he opposed, Tertullian argued that
people should look at Christians and remark, above all things, on how they love
one another.
This phrase has become through the history of the Church one
which is used less in hope and more in bitter irony. If there is one constant
in the life of the Church it is that Christians are all too often unable to
show the world that they “love one another”.
A brief look at social media posts by members of the Church
of England since the meeting of General Synod in February shows that there
appears to be very little love on display between those at the opposite ends of
the debate on how we respond, in love, to those in same-sex relationships. But
this is not an Anglican problem. You don’t have to look very far to find in
Roman Catholic discussions deep divisions and animosity over doctrinal
questions, or liturgical language, and the pattern of possible church reform. And
keen students of American politics will be all too aware of the way in which
Christian identity has been weaponised on both sides of the current culture
wars gripping that nation.
Christians…see how they love one
another.
But love one another is what we are called to do, today and
this night above all nights. This is Maundy Thursday named after that command,
that mandatum, that Jesus gives to his disciples at the end of our Gospel
reading and as we begin our journey through these great days of our faith.
As we begin this journey together, I want to, in the series
of addresses I will give today, tomorrow, and Sunday afternoon, to focus on the
ancient words of the church which we will hear sung through these days. On Sunday we will bring our journey to a close
through the singing of a solemn Te Deum, tomorrow we will be accompanied
to the foot of the cross by the words of the Improperia or Reproaches,
and this evening we will relive that ultimate moment of our Lord’s love and
service as we witness the washing of feet and hear that great antiphon, Ubi
Caritas.
The words for this antiphon remind us of the dual call that
God in Jesus makes to us today. At the end of our Gospel reading, we heard
Jesus’ great command:
I give you a new commandment, that
you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one
another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love
for one another.
A command which is echoed in our antiphon:
Ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est
Where love and charity are to be
found, God is there
As we reflect on this command – and on the journey that lies
ahead of us – there is much for us to draw from these words. These words help
us recognise the differing, but complimentary elements of Jesus’ command to us.
The first is to recognise that where there is love, there is
God. St John, in his first letter, reminds us that "God is Love". This direct
characterisation is taken on poetically by others. George Herbert famously
names the chief protagonist in his greatest poem, Love III, not as God,
but as “Love”. So, in Herbert’s words, it is “Love” who bades us welcome, and
“Love” who invites us, unworthy as we are, to sit down and eat. In this spirit
we know what it is to know God as we know love.
The challenge for us this evening is though whether we can live
out the next part of this great command. Too often, in our fractured and
faltering care for one another the language of love can be misused and
misinterpreted. “I’m saying this out of love” one person might say, before a
particularly cutting or barbed statement.
So how do we save ourselves from this? Here the wisdom of our
antiphon helps us. Rather than use the same word for this call to find God in
the divine and in serving one another we are encouraged to find God in our charity
to one another. Keen students of the King James Version of the Bible will know
that there “charity” is often used where other translations use “love”. It is
not for me comment on the quality or otherwise of these translations. But it
does remind me that as those older translations have fallen out of use, we have
perhaps also fallen out of knowing what it means to live with one another in
and through this divinely sanctioned charity.
It is in caring selflessly for one another, in opening
ourselves to the other, as Jesus does for us this night, do we encounter the
true divinity in this calling. In charity there is no hiding behind our
cleverly constructed words or guarded consent. In charity to one another we
live out that love which Jesus lives out in his words and actions this night. If
we recognise that in love and charity we find God we not only have a
fuller way of living out the command our Lord gives us this night, we also have
a path to follow as the sure foundations of this faith a challenged and shaken
over these coming days.
On this night when those who Jesus loved and served will
abandon and betray him one by one. In the day to come the love who invited us to
sit down and eat will be arrested and torn from our view. In this journey to
the foot of cross we will see the love we know in Jesus expire before our eyes.
As we begin this journey, we need then to recognise the power
of this twin calling to love God and live in charity with one another. Because
as one seems to fall away, we need to know, more than ever, that even if it
appears that God is absent from our view, if we live in deep and abiding
charity with one another, God is there even if hidden from our eyes.
Ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est.
Where love and charity are, there is
God.
Good Friday: The Improperia
On this Good Friday we might all ask ourselves where are we as we hear this story? Are we distant observers of a dimly remembered event from an unfashionable corner of the Roman Empire two millennia ago? Or are we a little closer to the action, sharing the gaze we are given in Isaac Watt’s great hymn as onlookers, one step removed from the action and drama, as we “survey the wondrous cross”? Or are we, as the words of the second of the ancient church texts I want to reflect on over these days, drawn firmly into the heart of this story facing the reproachful look of the one who hangs on the cross?
The Improperia, or The Reproaches are an amalgam of words and
prayers which took their current form in the ninth-century. At their heart are
a series of accusations or reproaches. In one sense the tone of these reproaches
fit the tone of other words we hear today. In the Lamentations of Jeremiah,
for instance, which we often hear on Good Friday, the onlookers mock the
personification of fallen and ruined Jerusalem:
All who pass along the way
clap their hands at you;
they hiss and wag their heads
at daughter Jerusalem;
‘Is this the city that was called
the perfection of beauty,
the joy of all the earth?’
In a similar vein, in some of the gospel accounts of the
crucifixion Jesus is mocked and challenged by the crowd. As we hear in
Matthew’s gospel:
Those who passed by derided him,
shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it
in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the
cross.’
However what marks out the Improperia is that the
reproachful voice is not that of the onlooking crowd, but of Jesus himself on
the cross. Alongside these, woven together with the Trisagion, the ancient
prayer of the Eastern Church, we hear again and again these questioning words
put into the mouth of Jesus from the cross:
O, my people, what have I done to
you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!
At this point it is worth making a health warning. There is
no suggestion in the gospel accounts that Jesus turned on his accusers as a
condemned might from the gallows. The only words of reproach come as Jesus
quotes from Psalm 22:
‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?... ‘My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
But to his accusers and attackers Jesus remains silent.
The prayer of the Improperia is not intended as a way
of imputing an intention or motive to Jesus in the words to use. Rather they
use poetically the drama of the occasion to turn the spotlight firmly and
squarely on us.
This pattern introspection through the words of divine
reproach is a form of prayer drawn from the great depths of our faith beginning
life in the Jewish pattern of remonstrance prayer. The words we reflect on
today are drawn initially from the prophesy of Micah. There in chapter six the
prophet challenges the people of God to explain how they have fallen so far
short of God’s plan for them:
O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of
Egypt,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
In Micah this is not simply an empty rhetorical tool, but an
open challenge to those who had fallen short of God’s promise for them. As
another translation forms this opening indictment:
My people what have I done to
you…Testify against me.
The challenge is not simply to call out the failures of God’s
people, but for them to answer for these failures and make amends.
As we move forward into the Improperia this pattern of
indictment is made even stronger and sharper. We hear a series of juxtapositions
between the promises made to God’s people through his love and covenant and the
reality that they see before them on the cross. So, borrowing from Micah we
hear:
I led you out of Egypt, from slavery
to freedom,
but you led your Saviour to the
cross.
And then later drawing from Isaiah’s great image of God’s
promise as a fruitful vineyard:
I planted you as my fairest vine, but
you yielded only bitterness:
When I was thirsty you gave me
vinegar to drink,
In other verses of the Improperia, this pattern
continues:
I rained down manna for you in the
desert:
but you rained down blows and lashes
on me.
I raised you up in great power:
but you raised me up on a cross.
As we explore the rich imagery and lineage of these words
there is a temptation for us to remain one step removed. After all these could
be accusations put imaginatively into Jesus’ mouth as we looked on at that
original crowd. Those who, in his own time, had refused to see Jesus as he
fulfilment of these promises made through Moses and the prophets. In this
reading we remain, like Isaac Watts, one step removed. But now rather than the enlightened
surveyors of a landscape we are observers in the gallery of a court room where
claim and counter claim are exchanged. However why should these reproaches stop
with those original witnesses to the crucifixion?
Last night we reflected on the words of the antiphon Ubi
Caritas – where there is love and charity there is God – and as we come to
the cold light of this day we find that Jesus’ command woven into this ancient
text have already been forgotten. So, we might imagine, in the pattern of these
reproaches, new ones being formed. Looking to Peter we might hear:
I told you to love the Lord your God,
and yet you denied me three times.
Or to the disciples who accompanied Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane:
I told you to love one another as I
have loved you, and yet you left my side and fled into the night.
But more than this, as these questions and challenges can be
brought forward from the memories and stories of God’s chosen people to the experience
of Jesus’ disciples, so this pattern of challenge can be directed at each of us.
Through them we recognise our failure to follow Jesus’ teaching and find that
we become as worthy a focus of these reproaches as those first witnesses of
disciples.
I told you to treat to greet the
stranger as you would treat me
Jesus might be heard to say:
But you live in a world of plenty
where people still live on the streets.
We hear that voice again saying:
I told you to care for my creation,
but yet you pollute and mar my world for personal gain and convenience.
Or:
I told you to worship only me, but
yet you seek the idols of power and praise from the world around you.
Through the searching ancient wisdom of the words of the Improperia
we find, whether we like it or not, that today we are not distant observers of
the landscape, nor are we dispassionate onlookers. Through the ancient wisdom
of these words, we are drawn into the heart of the drama of this day, to the
foot of the cross, facing the cruel and stark reality of this day.
On this day of days each one of us is confronted by the stark
reality that we are part of a fallen and sinful world. And that we are as fitting
recipients of these reproaches as were those first witnesses of the
crucifixion. That on this day we stand with all humanity in all time and space
and hear the haunting and searching words of a broken and dying man who has
only ever shown us love:
O, my people, what have I done to
you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!
Easter Day: Te Deum
On Easter Day in 387AD a baptism took in Milan. The priest was the venerable and saintly Archbishop of Milan St Ambrose. The candidate was the brilliant, aristocratic Augustine then aged thirty-three years old.
A little under a year earlier Augustine’s life had been
transformed by a spiritual encounter in a garden in that same city. After
living a life of social and political ambition and of wide intellectual and
philosophical exploration, Augustine had come to a point of deep mental crisis.
All this worldly ambition and pagan ideas had led him to a dead end, a place of
utter emptiness and despair, his own Golgotha, his own place of the skull.
Reflecting on this moment Augustine later wrote:
From a hidden depth a profound
self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it ‘in the
sight of my heart’ that precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of
tears.
Out of this place of utter darkness came a shining moment of
grace and rebirth. As he goes on to say:
As I was…weeping in the bitter agony
of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from a nearby house chanting…over and
over again “Pick up and read, pick up and read”…I opened [the book of the
apostle] and read… “put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the
flesh”.
And so, the Easter following the moment of grace and
transformation, Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was complete with his baptism by St
Ambrose as he was reborn, as we all are this day, in Christ.
At that moment, so the story goes, Augustine looked to heaven
and exclaimed:
Te Deum
laudámus: te Dominum confitémur.
To which Ambrose responded;
Te aetérnum Patrem omnis terra
venerátur.
And so, as the legend tells us, this two great Fathers of the
Church extemporised the words of the Te Deum this supreme expression of
Christian rejoicing which will bring our prayers and praises to a close this
afternoon.
Sadly, it is probable that this tale of the authorship of the
Te Deum is apocryphal. Although known originally as the Canticle of
Ambrose and Augustine, and being part of the Ambrosian Hymnal which
influenced the worship of the early church, it is more likely to have come into
the form that we have it now through the combinations of texts and authors in
the fourth and fifth centuries. However, this more prosaic account of the
origins of the Te Deum should not minimise both its importance to the
church or the power and meaning it has for us as we come to this Easter Day.
Over these days we have been exploring the
great hymns of the Church that accompany us through these days. Beginning with
the antiphon Ubi Caritas on Maundy Thursday evening, and then on Good
Friday with the searing words of the Improperia, we come to the
completion of this great journey with the Te Deum. In one sense each of
these hymns leads one to the other. The call of Ubi Caritas to seek God
in love and charity to one another is brought into sharp and painful relief by
the reproaches of the Improperia. Words which remind us again and again
of our own sinfulness and fallenness which Christ gathered to himself in love
on the cross. Moving forward the penitence of the Improperia stand as a
mirror to the praise of the Te Deum. In the Improperia we were
called to account for our failure to live as God has invited us to. Through
those words we were drawn into the centre of the drama of Good Friday and hear
the words of reproach directed at us:
O, my people, what have I done to
you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!
In that place, living with the reality of our own fragility
and fallenness, we found that there were no words we could muster, no form of
self-justification or redress that we could find. All we could do was come to
the foot of the cross in sorrow and lament and silence. But today, through the
silence and tears, through the garden and the empty tomb, through the voices of
angels and strangers on the road we find the words which we could not find
three short days ago.
Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum
confitémur.
We praise thee, O God : we
acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the
Father everlasting.
In the wonder of this day we find that God, through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, has transformed our world. And in
the face of that truth all we can do is come to God with these great words of
praise and adoration.
Through the whole history of the Church the Te Deum has
acted as the culmination and crowning of our praise. Through the medieval
church it was used as moment of climax in services of prayer on Sundays and
great festivals. It transcended the convulsions of the Reformation which both
Luther and Cranmer making vernacular translations of the text central to their
new liturgies. Through history it has been used to mark moments of celebration
and rebirth such as in 1713 when Handel wrote his Utrecht Te Deum to
mark the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht which ended years of bloody conflict
across Europe. And in our national life the words have been central to
coronation services as moment of rejoicing and rebirth which we will hear sung again
at the Coronation of His Majesty the King.
What this reminds us is not only the historical importance of
these words, but their universal and collective use. These are not the words of
a private prayer, but a shared song of we declaim with people of all time and
all places. A song of praise for the universal Church, militant and triumphant.
And so we are drawn into this song of praise. At the end of these great days,
knowing something of God’s transforming love and grace for all of us, fallen
broken people that we are, saved and brought to new life by the love and grace
of God.
If we are downtrodden and overlooked by our world we stand
shoulder to shoulder with the Angels and powers of heaven and the cherubim and
seraphim and sing God’s praise. If we are the youngest or oldest amongst us we take
the lead with the Apostles and the Prophets and praise his name. If we are
weary or grieving, poor or forgotten, straight or gay, married or single,
powerful or powerless we join our voices with the Martyrs, and the Church
throughout all the world to sing this day our great song of praise.
Through these days, where we have been forced to see our own
limitations, our own failings, our own places of the skull, we discover afresh
that great resurrection truth. That God in Jesus shows love to the loveless,
breathes life to the lifeless, brings light into the dark places of the skull
that mark and scar our livess and our world. In the reality of that bright
shining truth, born not from our worth but from God’s grace in Jesus Christ, we find
ourselves standing with the Church in all time and space with one song coming again
to our lips:
We praise thee, O God : we
acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the
Father everlasting.
Amen.
