Sing to the Lord - Triduum addresses on the ancient songs of the Church

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.