Sermon preached at Compline on the Monday of Holy Week, Preparing for Darkness 1 (Fr Jeremy Davies)

On Wednesday evening we will celebrate the ancient liturgical office of Holy Week
called Tenebrae. Tenebrae is the Latin for darkness or shadows and although it is
essentially the Office of Morning Prayer it is celebrated at night time (following the
monastic practice of anticipating the dawn of a new day by saying morning prayer in the
middle of the night).
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It is night time - the darkness - that is the potent visual image for this office. For in the
course of this dramatic liturgy all the candles will be snuffed out and as much electric
light as possible excluded from the church, to recall the darkest moment of our
humanity. Not simply the daily elimination of light which heralds tranquility, quiet and
restfulness - which we know will be followed by a new dawn and a new day. Not simply
the cycle of night following day, but the extinguishing of the Light of the World; the
snuffing out of God himself; as the world - not just night and day - is plunged into that
moral and spiritual darkness from which we may never recover. The lights which
illuminate the church at the beginning of the office which should be welcoming the day
are one by one extinguished, until only one candle is left alight. and that candle is hidden
away, entombed if you like. It is not quite extinguished - but buried, seemingly snuffed
out, defeated, killed. Even God dies, and we are left in the darkness.​

At Advent full of hope we will light the candles in our churches (in Salisbury Cathedral
some 3,000 candles for the three Advent Processions are lit) from a single flickering
source. The light was coming into the world: and that light, says St john, was the life of
men and women. The light shines in the darkness, the gospel proclaims and and the
darkness has not overcome it.

But now advent and Christmas seem a long way off ; and the other prophecies of St
John’s prologue resonate more powerfully with us. He - the Word of God, God himself,
‘Jesus - he was in the world and the world was made by him, but the world knew him
not. He came unto his own and his own people received him not’. The office of
Tenebrae enacts in a powerful drama of candle-snuffing the tuth that John’s Gospel
proclaims: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has indeed overcome it. we
are in Holy week and the story-telling of this week cannot escape the reality of the
darkness. Of course we remember the hope expressed by the psalmist as he reflects on
the miracle of daily renewal. ‘ Heaviness may endure for a night but joy comes in the
morning’. But this week invites us (if we dare) to enter into the darkness; to make more
of Tenebrae than a liturgical charade. Our world is dark (and you in Westminster have
good reason to know how dark this world can be). Parts of our own lives are dark - with
the shadows of pain and shame, grief and resentment, obsession and addiction. We may
light a candle in the darkness, but we don’t have to travel far either in imagination or
beyond our own front door, before we confront the reality of darkness.

But why am I suggesting that we should deliberately inhabit or explore these dark
places? Surely Christianity is about hope and light, comfort and joy. deliberately to
plunge into the darkness is perversely stupid! You may be right. But I am encouraged by
two little sayings - one by that great spiritual guide whom I was proud to regard as a
friend, Archbishop Michael Ramsey who said ‘ Christian faith is not light away from
darkness, but the willingness to go on with darkness all around’. And the other by the
17th century Puritan divine who said ‘Christ leads me through no darker rooms than he
went through before’. If those spiritual giants are right then I can dare to enter the dark
room - either of my own inadequacy or waywardness, or of the world’s disorder - and
find there a glimmer of hope, a ledge of honesty and truth on which, however
precariously, I may place my feet, and feel in the darkness, as I clutch at straws, a hand
stretched out to support me.

No one doubts that the darkness is both real and frightening. That is why we try to
escape from it at all costs - even if it means creating a make-believe world to help avoid
the chaos and disorder around us and within us. But there may be some real value, if not
virtue, in entering the dark room. The first value or virtue that may come to us as grace
is that of honesty.

I don’t know about you but I ma quite adept at self-deception. I don’t think this is a
condition confined to gay people, but gay people (like myself) became skilled, in an age
when gayness was unacceptable, stigmatised and, until I was an undergraduate in the 60s,
actually criminalised - I or we became skilled at a self-denial that was in fact a selfdeception.
Because gay people, like everyone else, want to be liked, loved and accepted,
we conformed, or attempted to conform, to the norms of the ‘normal‘ heterosexual
world, and covered up truths that were too painful to admit to. Things have changed
since then of course, although there is still some way to go, especially for those who are
bullied because of their sexuality or whatever else it is that makes their minority status a
cause of ostracism or rejection. Darkness then becomes a useful cloak of self-deception.
But it is also a dark place because despite attempts at conformity, and despite the effort
to become acceptable and thus accepted, many people are indeed alone, with low selfesteem,
demeaned and diminished. How do you escape from such darkness - which all
of us, I assume, recognise or empathise with, whatever category of ethnicity, sexuality,
nationality or gender we fall into. Well! we can, as I suggest, escape by pretence, by selfdeception
that tries to deceive others as well. And often our religion colludes with such
strategies of self-deception. It may be true as Richard Baxter declared that ‘Christ leads
me through no darker room than he went through before’ but the church too often
prefers not to follow the Master’s lead into the dangerous darkness.

Sometimes we learn about the grace of divine acceptance and see it put into practice by
those who do not share our beliefs, or are frustrated by the church’s inability to put into
practice what it proclaims. But also, of course and thank God, we see God’s grace in
action through the care and compassion and love and self-emptying of our fellow
Christians who are also sometimes an example and an inspiration to us.
Sometimes we use the darkness as a cloak: to quote scripture, indeed Jesus himself:
People loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil
Or to put a more contemporary gloss on that text - we prefer darkness because our
deeds, whether evil or not, do not live up to the expectations of others or conform to
convention. Darkness, to quote Simon and Garfunkel, can be regarded as an old friend.

Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again:
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains, within the sound of silence

(I’m not sure what those lyrics mean though I love the song, but maybe the darkness and
silence are old friends because they allow the seed of what I truly am to grow and
flourish in the obscure and hidden spaces away from the neon-light scrutiny of
conventional wisdom)

Yes, we may use darkness as a cloak to deceive and dissemble to ourselves as much as
others. But there is another tradition in Christian spiritual understanding that recognises
the reality of our dark world and sees that darkness cannot be eliminated other than by
being encountered, struggled with, rather than run away from. The darkness that
confronts Jesus in this week, that he has seen closing in on him from the earliest days of
his ministry, is a darkness he longs to escape from. In his pleading prayer to the Father in
the garden of Gethsemane we recognise the authentic voice of our humanity.

Please let this cup pass from me

The prayer in the darkness is an authentic prayer - from the heart - from the depth of
Jesus’ soul. And yet Jesus, always obedient to the Father’s will and knowing that he is
held in a love which will not forsake him says:

Not my will, but thine be done

And the Father’s will is that the light should shine on in the darkness and the darkness
will not overcome it. The light shines on in the darkness through words of forgiveness
to those who pierce his mortal flesh; the darkness is contradicted by words of
acceptance and forgiveness and promise for those who hang beside him; the darkness is
confounded by his loving concern for his mother and his best friend and their wellbeing.
They should have found another way to rid themselves of goodness than by
stretching him upon the wooden planks of a cross, with his arms open for ever to
embrace a dark world with a love that utterly contradicts the world’s disorder by entering
into it. It was Gregory of Nazianzus, a Cappadocian father, who said :

That which God has not entered into has not been redeemed
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God in Christ has entered into the darkness of our world and by that very act of selfemptying
he has set us free from the darkness around us.

Even at Tenebrae, as the lights of the world are snuffed out, the Light of the world
remains. That light is a judgement, of course but it is also a healing source of goodness
and acceptance. When Peter hid in the crowd, and tried to lie himself out of danger,
warming himself at the fire in the High Priests’ courtyard, he heard the cock crow and
he turned to face the gaze of his master, friend and companion. He knew he had been
seen, seen through, scrutinised and seen for what he was: a fair weather friend, a coward,
and a colluder with darkness. No warming at the fire could warm his soul; no contrition
could clear his conscience. And yet at that moment when the Light of the World shone
upon him in judgement, that same light shone upon him in love. The light revealed Peter
a she was, but instead of flinging him into outer darkness, the light of the world warmed
the so-called rock back into life. The words ‘Feed my sheep’ were to be spoken some
time later, and there is much darkness to go before we get there, and Peter has a sea to
swim before his conscience is clear and he can once again break bread with his Lord, but
at this dark moment in the courtyard the Peter who is judged and found wanting is at the
very same moment the Peter who is loved and given everything. He, like us, has his
darkness pierced by light - and he like us, is ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.