Alleluiah! Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, alleluiah!
How long we have been waiting to say those words. We have literally been in quarantine for the last six weeks. That after all is what forty days and forty night are - quarantine!. For this period of time Alleluiah has been struck from our vocabulary. In the Middle Ages the Sarum Use liturgy instructed that a chorister should be whipped out of the cathedral on Ash Wednesday to symbolise the Alleluiah being whipped out of the liturgy. There were times when I was Precentor of Salisbury when I thought seriously about reintroducing that ancient tradition.
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This is where life begins;
this is where the church begins; this is where you and I and the world around us begins again. Here in the darkness (you must close your eyes and imagine the darkness!) - in the darkness, the emptiness and the silence - before any candle was lit we gathered together. We had nothing, - all our success, our status, our prestige, our respect and position in the community, have been stripped away. Like the Lord we saw crucified yesterday we stand naked. Ecce Homo : Behold the Man said Pontius Pilate, as he presented the Christ to the multitude. Homo in Latin but Adam in Hebrew - Behold Man. Here we behold ourselves - humankind - stripped of our pretension - revealed as we truly are. 14/4/2017 Tomorrow shall be my dancing day (Homily for The Good Friday Liturgy) - Fr Jeremy DaviesRead NowYou probably know the medieval English carol Tomorrow shall be my
dancing day. Tomorrow shall be my dancing day Sing, O my love, O my love, my love, my love; This have I done for my true love. It’s a carol usually sung at Christmas - but the original ballad contains these rather unChristmassy verses: 13/4/2017 Love Bade Me Welcome, Homily for Maundy Thursday, Mass of the Last Supper (Fr Jeremy Davies)Read NowThe night is closing in: the enemies of goodness, some of them thinking they do the
Lord’s work, are closing in as well. Even at the supper table there are those who are singing from a different hymn sheet; whose mind is set on betrayal. There are those indeed who will say one thing and do another; those who do not know what they will do until confronted by overwhelming force - when they will crumble, disappear into the crowd. In the poignant words of St John’s gospel “They all forsook him and fled”. 12/4/2017 Homily to precede the Office of Tenebrae, Wednesday in Holy Week (Fr Jeremy Davies)Read NowThe cathedral congregation waits in rapt attention, the electric
lights are dimmed and then extinguished, the organist comes to the end of J S Bach’s Nun Kom der Heiden Heiland. The ancient gothic spaces are now still, though packed with more than 1,500 people, attentive, silent and expectant. In the silence and the darkness a single, flickering candle is lit. Everyone in the cathedral can see it, tall and towering on its magnificent stand. 11/4/2017 Sermon preached at Compline on the Tuesday of Holy Week, Preparing for Darkness 2 (Fr Jeremy Davies)Read NowSimon and Garfunkel may have regarded darkness as an old friend, and we too may
recognise the sympathetic, life embracing aspects that we associate with the dark night. Just to pick out some of those in the paragraph on your sheet of ‘dark texts’ by Ian Matthew (see below 1) - stillness, rest, peace, silence, sleep, dreams, moonlight, stars, refreshment, romance - and so on. But these positive aspects of darkness stand alongside negative perceptions as well - solitude, fear, the unknown. And in St John’s Gospel where the contrasts between darkness and light are a recurring theme throughout the gospel, darkness is always represented negatively. 10/4/2017 Sermon preached at Compline on the Monday of Holy Week, Preparing for Darkness 1 (Fr Jeremy Davies)Read NowOn 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). 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. |
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