The Harrowing of Hell: Reflection 5

Patrick Comerford

Reflection 5: Magnifcat by Arvo Pärt

As fewer and fewer people come to Evening Prayer in our parish churches on Sundays, we are in danger of forgetting that Magnificat or the Song of Mary is one of the great traditional canticles for Evensong throughout the Anglican Communion. And so I have chosen the Magnifcat as our final piece of music for this evening’s reflections.

This canticle echoes several Old Testament passages, especially the Song of Hannah in the First Book of Samuel (I Samuel 2: 1-10). In the Orthodox Church, Magnificat is usually sung at Sunday Matins.

The words of the canticle are from the Gospel according to Saint Luke (Luke 1: 46-55), in the account of Mary’s visit to her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. After Mary greets Elizabeth, the child who is to be born, John the Baptist, moves inside Elizabeth’s womb. When Elizabeth praises Mary for her faith, Mary sings the Magnificat in response.

The child leaping in the womb can be seen as a haunting prefiguring of those who leap with joy in the depths of death when they hear that Christ is coming to visit them from the tomb. Mary’s words in Magnificat are a harrowing of all the hells in our lives. Wickedness and the misuse and abuse of power are being thrown aside by her son. The greatness of the Lord is proclaimed. He descends to the lowly and with his arm lifts them up. This was the promise made to Abraham and the faithful of the past; it is true for us today; and it is true for the future and for all time.

As Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis are sung almost every day in many Anglican cathedrals and chuches, there is a real need for multiple settings of these canticles. Nearly every composer in the 19th and 20th century Anglican choral tradition composed one or more settings of the “Mag and Nunc.” At its extreme, this led such composers as Ireland’s Charles Villiers Stanford to write a Magnificat in every major key, or Herbert Howells to publish 20 settings of these canticles during his career.

Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat is probably his most immediately appealing work. But in this Magnificat, which was first performed in Berlin in 1989, he ignores the classical settings for Magnificat from previous centuries. Instead, he gives us a Magnificat with a strong spiritual aura that is intensely serene as we listen.

This is the fifth of five reflections on the Harrowing of Hell delivered on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

The Harrowing of Hell: Reflection 4

Mantegna: The Harrowing of Hell

Patrick Comerford

Musical reflection 4: Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is best known for his dramatic operas, including Rigoletto, La Traviata, Nabucco, Aida and Don Carlo. Barbara and I had a memorable evening last summer, sitting on the steps of the Arena in Verona for a breath-taking performance of Verdi’s Aida. It is impossible for us to imagine how central to Italian cultural identity this great composer is … at every interval, the applause was punctuated by enthusiastic cries of “Viva Verdi!” and these, in turn, drew their own applause.<

When Rossini died in 1868, Verdi proposed collaborating with a dozen other Italian composers in writing a Requiem for Rossini, and for this he wrote his Libera me. However, the premiere planned for Rossini’s first anniversary in 1869 was cancelled and the complete Requiem for Rossini only had its premiere in Stuttgart as recently as 1988.

But Verdi knew he had something worth working with in his Libera me. When the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni died in May 1873, Verdi decided to write a full Requiem for Manzoni and set to work on it in Paris that June. With a revised version of his Libera me, Verdi’s new Requiem was performed on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death on 22 May 1874 n the Church of San Marco in Milan.

Despite Verdi’s supposed agnosticism, his Requiem is unmistakably and movingly religious. Throughout the Requiem, he uses vigorous rhythms, sublime melodies, and dramatic contrasts – as he did in his operas – to express the powerful emotions in his text. The terrifying, and instantly recognisable, Dies Irae, which introduces the traditional sequence of the Latin funeral Mass, is repeated throughout the Requiem, allowing Verdi to explore feelings of loss and sorrow as well as the human desire for forgiveness and mercy throughout the Requiem.

The last two verses of the traditional version of the Dies Irae are:

Ah! that day of tears and mourning!
From the dust of earth returning
man for judgment must prepare him;
Spare, O God, in mercy spare him!

Lord, all pitying, Jesus blest,
grant them thine eternal rest. Amen.

Verdi ends his Requiem returning to his original working of Libera me, which he introduces to interrupt the Dies Irae as the soprano cries out: “Free me, Lord, from eternal death ... when you will come to judge the world by fire.”

This is the fourth of five reflections on the Harrowing of Hell delivered on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

The Harrowing of Hell: Reflection 3

Patrick Comerford

Reflection 3: Rossini’s Stabat Mater:

The Stabat Mater is a 13th century hymn written by a Franciscan friar, Jacopone da Todi or Jacobus de Benedictis (1230-1306). The title comes from the opening line, Stabat mater dolorosa, “The sorrowful mother was standing.” The hymn, one of the most powerful mediaeval poems we still have, recalls the sufferings of Mary as she stands by the Cross during her son’s crucifixion (The picture to the right is El Greco’s Pieta).

This hymn has been set to music by many composers, including Palestrina, Haydn, Dvořák, Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Gounod, the Scarlattis, Schubert, Arvo Pärt, Verdi, Kodály, Ireland’s own Charles Villiers Stanford, and most recently Karl Jenkins. But the best known setting is by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868).

Rossini’s Stabat Mater has an interesting history. In 1829 at the age of 37, suddenly, and without apparent reason, Rossini severed his connection with the stage. The rest of his life was spent without any musical activity save for the composition of his Stabat Mater and his Messe Solennelle.

During a visit to Spain in 1832, Rossini was persuaded by a wealthy banker to write a Stabat Mater for a Spanish prelate, the Abbé Valera (Don Francisco Fernandez Valera). Rossini accepted the commission on condition that the work was not to be made public.

Rossini worked on the Stabat Mater at his home in Bologna, finishing it with some help despite illness. The work was sent to Spain, and the composer was paid with a snuff-box valued at 5,000 francs. When the Abbé Valera died nine years later, Rossini was told the abbé’s heirs had sold his work for 2,000 francs. Rossini went to court to recover the copyright, saying he had dedicated the work to the abbé but had reserved the rights to publication.

The case caused a sensation in Paris, where the fame of Rossini’s William Tell was growing steadily and he was becoming increasingly popular despite his withdrawal from the stage. A private performance for about 50 people was arranged on 3 October 1841. By the next day, it is said, all Paris had come to know that Rossini had created a new masterpiece.

Rossini won his case, reworked parts of the Stabat Mater that were not his own, strengthened the orchestral parts, and then sold the performing rights for 28,000 francs. At its first public performance in Paris, Rossini’s new Stabat Mater was received with enthusiasm and rapture. Rossini’s name was shouted in the applause, and there were demands for repeat performances of many pieces.

However, the Stabat Mater was not to the liking of many critics, who asked whether the music was appropriate to the text. Do its brilliant loveliness and sensuousness detract from its reverent and religious themes? But the poet Heine pointed out that the same could be asked about painters and their religious subjects: “The true character of Christian art does not reside in thinness and paleness of the body, but is a certain effervescence of the soul, which neither the musician nor the painter can appropriate to himself either by baptism or by study.”

After hearing the Stabat Mater, Heine said the theatre seemed like “a vestibule of heaven.” He described audiences that were deeply moved by the sombre beauty of the long opening and taken by the beautiful melodies of the movements that follow.

The soprano duet Quis est homo was sung by at Rossini’s funeral in the Church of the Trinity in Paris on 21 November 1868.

In his reworked Stabat Mater, Rossini lost neither his creativity nor his individuality. One of the most wonderful parts is the unaccompanied quartet Quando corpus morietur, which comes at the end of the work, concluding with an elaborate double fugue, Amen. In sempiterna saecula. These words come from the final verses of the Stabat Mater, which ends with the prayer:

Quando corpus morietur,
fac, ut animae donetur
paradisi gloria. Amen.

When my body dies,
let my soul be granted
the glory of Paradise. Amen.

That prayer, the prayer we share with the dead visited by Christ on this day at the Harrowing of Hell, is the prayer we share today and the prayer we share with Christians of the past, present and future.

And so this evening we listen to Rossini’s conclusion of the Stabat Mater with his unaccompanied quartet Quando corpus morietur which leads into his elaborate Amen.


This is the third of five reflections on the Harrowing of Hell delivered on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

The Harrowing of Hell: Reflection 2

Duccio: the Harrowing of Hell

Patrick Comerford

Reflection 2: De Profundis by Arvo Pärt

Psalm 130, traditionally known as the De Profundis, was long associated with funerals and the prayers for the faithful departed. In deep sorrow, the psalmist cries to God (verses 1-2), asking for mercy (verses 3-4). The psalmist’s trust (verses 5-6) becomes a model for the people (7-8).

The depths from which he cries in verse 1 is Sheol, the place of the dead, or a metaphor for total misery; the depths of the sea are an image of the realm of death. In verse 3, the use of the phrase “our sins” is a shift from the singular/personal to the plural/communal, which occurs again in the final two verses. In verse 4, the experience of God’s mercy leads to a greater sense of God.

A long letter by Oscar Wilde while he was in prison bears the title De Profundis, as do poems by Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, C.S Lewis, Dorothy Parker and the Spanish poet Federice García Lorca. The De Profundis has been set to music by many composers, including Handel, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Purcell, Schoenberg, Bach (as part of the Cantata BWV 131), Gabrieli and John Rutter as part of his Requiem.

Our second piece of music this evening is Arvo Pärt’s De Profundis, a very rich and rewarding composition, with its inter-action between the flickering organ, the tenor and bass voices, the quiet bass drum strokes and the chimes of a singular tubular bell.

Arvo Pärt, who was born 1935, is an Estonian composer who has become very popular in his own lifetime. Pärt’s musical education began at the age of seven. By his early teens, he was writing his own compositions. His early influences included Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartók and Schoenberg. When his early works were banned under Soviet rule, Pärt started to study 14th-16th century choral music. Later, he immersed himself in early music, looking at the roots of western music and studying plainsong, Gregorian chant, and polyphony. During this period, his new compositions included Fratres, Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula Rasa.

In 1980, he was forced to leave Estonia with his wife and their two sons. They first lived in Vienna, where he finished his De Profundis and became an Austrian citizen. They then moved to Berlin, where he still lives. Pärt’s music came to attention in the West through the efforts of Manfred Eicher, who started to record several of Pärt’s compositions in 1984.

Pärt’s later works include settings for sacred texts, drawing inspiration from Saint John’s Passion, the Te Deum, and the Litany. His choral works from this period include his Magnificat and The Beatitudes.

This year, he was honoured as the featured composer of the RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin. The Louth Contemporary Music Society commissioned him to write a new choral setting for Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, called The Deer’s Cry, which had its debut in Drogheda and Dundalk in February.

He has reached a more popular audience through scores for over 50 movies, including Promised Land and part of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Pärt describes his music as tintinnabuli – like the ringing of bells. The music is characterised by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triad chords. He says his music is like light going through a prism: the music may have a slightly different meaning for each listener, and so it creates a spectrum of musical experience, similar to the rainbow of light.

It is said “his music fulfils a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion.” But there is a warning: with Pärt, you have to be patient. At first, his work sounds very austere, almost as if it has a respect for silence. Yet it is music that lingers in the memory for a long time. It has been summed up as “mystical minimalism,” or “spiritual minimalism.”

This evening, we listen to his De Profundis, which was first sketched in 1977, but only completed three years later in 1980 after Pärt moved to Vienna.

This is the second of five reflections on the Harrowing of Hell delivered on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

The Harrowing of Hell: Reflection 1

The Harrowing of Hell, from the Church of the Saviour, Chora, Istanbul

Patrick Comerford

Reflection 1: two Byzantine Hymns by George Koros, Ton nymphona sou vlepo (I see thy resting place) and I Zoi en Tapho (Life in the Holy Sepulchre), from Byzantinoi Imnoi (Byzantine Hymns):

George Koros is one of the finest Greek solo violinsts of our time. Born on the island of Evia in 1925, he started playing the violin at the age of eight, when his father – who was a church cantor and a teacher of Byzantine music – decided to replace the mandolin with a violin and a bow without strings. His professional career began a year later, when he began playing at weddings and feasts with his father.

His mother spurned the opportunity for him to have a classical musical education. But George Koros later revolutionised Greek folk music through the introduction of the fiddle as an accepted instrument. He became an acclaimed, self-made musician, who has composed about 2,000 songs. But despite his reputation in Greek folk music, for me he is stands out for his Byzantine hymns. In these hymns, he returns to his roots in Byzantine music and with his violin he recreates the tradition of the early hymns he learned from his father in church as a boy.

In our first two hymns this evening, George Koros uses his violin to plaintively recall the sorrow of the tomb: I see thy resting place and Life in the Holy Sepulchre.

In the Western tradition of the Church, at this time of the year, we have traditionally contemplated the cross, and then the empty tomb. As John Waters pointed out in The Irish Times yesterday, the deep joys of the Resurrection have often been overshadowed in the Western Church by the way of the Cross, as though the Cross leads only to death. We have neglected Christ’s resting place, his tomb, and given little thought to what was happening in the Holy Sepulchre on this day.

This day, Holy and Great Saturday, is observed solemnly in the Orthodox Church, with hymns and readings that truly explore the theme of the Harrowing of Hell in depth. For this is the day on which Christ’s body lay in the tomb, this is the day on which he visited those who were dead.

The icon of the Harrowing of Hell reminds us that God reaches into the deepest depths to pull forth souls into the kingdom of light. It reminds us how much we are unable to comprehend – let alone take to heart as our own – our creedal statement about Christ’s descent into Hell – “He descended into Hell.”

Christ’s descent into Hell is captured in Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2, which is part of one of the appointed readings for tomorrow week. In one of our readings this evening (I Peter 3:15b- 4:8), we are told that when Christ died he went and preached to the spirits in prison “who in former times did not obey … For this is the reason the Gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that … they might live in the spirit as God does.”

[In the NRSV, I Peter 4: 6 reads the gospel was “proclaimed even to the dead …” reflecting original Greek: “εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ καὶ νεκροῖς εὐηγγελίσθη …” The New International Version, however, says the Gospel “was preached even to those who are now dead …” But the word “now” is not in the Greek text. It was inserted to rule out the idea that Christ preached to those who were dead when they were preached to, and instead it says that he brought his good news to people who were dead at the time I Peter was written. If you remove the word “now,” the English becomes ambiguous on that point, just like the Greek is ambiguous there.]

The Early Church taught that after his death Christ descended into hell and rescued all the souls, starting with Adam and Eve, who had died under the Fall.

The Harrowing of Hell is intimately bound up with the Resurrection, the Raising from the Dead, for as Christ is raised from the dead he also plummets the depths to bring up, to raise up, those who are dead. The Harrowing of Hell carries us into the gap in time between Christ’s death and resurrection.

In Orthodox icons of the Harrowing of Hell, Christ stands on the shattered doors of hell. Sometimes, two angels are shown in the pit binding Satan. And we see Christ pulling out of hell Adam and Eve, imprisoned there since their deaths, imprisoned along with all humanity because of sin. Jesus breaks down the doors of hell and leads the souls of the lost into heaven.

It is the most radical reversal we can imagine. Death does not have the last word, we need not live our lives entombed in fear. If Adam and Eve are forgiven, and the Sin of Adam is annulled and destroyed, who is beyond forgiveness?

In discussing the “Descent into Hell,” Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that if Jesus’ mission did not result in the successful application of God’s love to every intended soul, how then can we think of it as a success. He emphasises Christ’s descent into the fullness of death, so as to be “Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 5).

However, in her recent book, Light in Darkness, Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, says that Christ did not descend into the lowest depths of hell, and only stayed in the top levels. She finds untenable his view that Christ’s descent into hell entails experiencing the fullness of alienation, sin and death, which he then absorbs, transfigures, and defeats through the Resurrection. Instead, she claims, Christ descends only to the “limbo of the Fathers” in which the righteous, justified dead of the Old Testament awaited the coming of the Messiah.

Her argument robs the Harrowing of Hell of its soteriological significance. For her, Christ does not descend into hell and experience the depths of alienation between God and humanity opened up by sin. She leaves Christ visiting an already-redeemed and justified collection of Old Testament saints to let them know that he has defeated death.

However, Archbishop Rowan Williams has written beautifully in The Indwelling of Light on the Harrowing of Hell. Christ is the new Adam who rescues humanity from its past, and who starts history anew. “The resurrection … is an introduction – to our buried selves, to our alienated neighbours, to our physical world.” He says: “Adam and Eve stand for wherever it is in the human story that fear and refusal began … (This) icon declares that wherever that lost moment was or is – Christ (is) there to implant the possibility … of another future.” [Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ, p. 38.]

I ask myself: what’s the difference between the top levels and bottom levels of hell? Is my hell in my heart of my own creation? In my mind, in my home, where I live and work, in my society, in this world? Is hell the nightmares from the past I cannot shake off, or the fears for the future when it looks gloomy and desolate for the planet? But is anything too hard for Lord?

On this day, the icon of the Harrowing of Hell tells us that there are no limits to God’s ability to search us out and to know us. Where are the depths of your heart and your soul – where darkness prevails, and where you feel even Christ can find no welcome? Those crevices even you are afraid to think about let alone contemplate, may be beyond your reach. You cannot produce or manufacture your own salvation from that deep, interior hell, hidden from others, and often hidden from yourself.

Christ breaks down the gates of Hell, and as the icon powerfully shows, he rips all of sinful humanity from the clutches of death. He descends into the depths of our sin and alienation from God; and by plumbing the depths of hell he suffuses all that is lost and sinful with the radiance of divine goodness, joy and light. If hell is where God is not, and Jesus is God, then his decent into hell pushes back hell’s boundaries. In his descent into hell, Christ reclaims this zone for life, pushing back the gates of death, where God is not, to the farthest limits possible.

Our readings and our music this evening remind us that Christ plummets even those deepest depths, and that his love and mercy can raise us again to new life. This evening, as we remember Christ lying in the grave, we can ask him to take away all that denies life in us, whether it is a hell of our own making, a hell that has been forced on us, or a hell that surrounds us. Christ reaches down, and lifts us up with him in his Risen Glory.

This is the first of five reflections on the Harrowing of Hell delivered on Easter Saturday, 22 March 2008, in Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham, Dublin. Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

The triumph of Good Friday

Patrick Comerford

Two newspapers – The Irish Times and the Church of Ireland Gazette – carry leaders today that reflect appropriate themes for Good Friday and the Easter weekend.

The leader in The Irish Times is headed “The Triumph of Easter” and says:

“Good Friday has been free to date of the tendency to commercialise and secularise every religious holiday. So far, there are no noticeable efforts by card makers to cash in on it, nor have the windows of the best department stores been decorated with Good Friday themes. For the theme of Good Friday is stark and challenging: it asks questions to which there are no easy, slick, commercial, profitable answers.

“The mainstream churches share a lengthy but common reading today from Saint John’s Gospel (John 18:1 – 19:42). It is a desolate story of isolation, betrayal, false accusation, miscarriage of justice, denial, abdication of responsibility, rejection of ambition, questioning of values, torture, vilification, crass power play, humiliation, dehumanisation, abandonment and – ultimately – cruel death. And yet it is a story in which gentle tenderness and compassionate love continually break through the walls of hatred and in which light persistently pierces through the dark. It is a story for today for it is the story of our world.

“On this day, Christ is taken to be executed outside the city walls. On this evening, he is buried hastily outside the city walls. In his dying and in his death, he is placed forcibly outside the city limits, outside the realm of civil society. Who are placed outside the limits of our society today? Pushed to the margins and outside the boundaries to places for which we no longer feel responsibility, where we are no longer called to have compassion or challenged to show love?

“The sad stories where love and compassion fail to break through are told throughout our cities this day. There are the experiences of Polish workers, for instance, who are isolated and marginalised, those whose only social life is with one another, who are the victims of racist taunts and – as recent events have demonstrated – appalling violence. Despite popular myths, figures show that immigrants are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators; a disproportionate number of immigrant children end up in hospitals; and too many immigrants are over-qualified for the jobs they do here.

“Those who are pushed beyond the walls of our cities to the margins of civic life must find it easy to identify with the Christ who is crucified on a hill outside the city, with the Christ who is buried on the margins and the edges, beyond polite society. But today’s reading from Saint John’s Gospel is not the end of the story. The end is not rejection, injustice and eternal marginalisation. Rather, the climax of the story is in the triumph of the Resurrection on Easter Day when night becomes morning, when darkness turns to light, when despair is redeemed by hope and when hatred is conquered by love.

“That Easter message is not easy to package and commercialise. But it challenges us all to look again at how we value the new lives and the new life among us, to ask how we can welcome in from the margins those who should to be accepted and embraced within our civic, political and polite society.”

An Early Easter

In its editorial today headed “An Early Easter” the Church of Ireland Gazette says:

“Easter has arrived early this year. As we noted last week (Gazette, 14th March, Editorial, p.2), Easter is so early that the Church calendar for Holy Week demanded a change to the day on which we celebrated St Patrick. No other festival, mo other commemoration, can be as important as Easter in the life of the Church. However, the fact that most people in Ireland – and at least one cathedral in the Church of Ireland – continued to allow St Patrick to displace the solemn commemorations of Holy Week shows how difficult it is for the Church to communicate its core beliefs and the Good News of Easter in an increasingly secular and secularised society.

“The very name Easter has questionable origins, traced by some authorities to the names of long-forgotten Germanic or Greek goddesses. But in all the Romance and Celtic languages, the name for Easter is derived from Pascha and Pesach, the Passover, the great celebration of liberation and deliverance, while in almost all Slavic languages the name for Easter translates as ‘Great Day’ or Great Night’.

“Easter is truly our Great Night and our Great Day, and, as Christians, we should be able to celebrate our greatest festival in unity. But our linguistic differences are less of a division than the great divide which still exists between east and West when it comes to calculating the date for Easter. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches, Easter comes much later this year, with Easter Day falling on Sunday 27th April, five full weeks after Easter in the West. We celebrated Easter on the same day last year, but this coincidence will not recur until 2010.

“In 1997, the World Council of Churches proposed reforming the way we calculate Easter, sidestepping the differences in the eastern and Western calendars by using direct astronomical observations of the moon. The reforms were to come into place in 2001, but were never adopted by any member-Church. Other proposals included observing Easter on the second Sunday in April, or always having seven Sundays between the Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, but all failed to attract significant support. Legislation in the United Kingdom 80 years ago proposed setting Easter on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. These proposals were never implemented either, although the legislation remains on the statute books and could be implemented if the Churches agree.

“If we are going to reassert that Easter is the greatest festival in the life of the Church, then we need to renew our efforts to ensure all Christians celebrate Easter on the same day.”

Faithful stewards of the Mysteries of God

Patrick Comerford

Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to the end of the Easter Eve on the Saturday, is the most solemn, precious and sacred week in the calendar of the Church. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, this week is known as Great and Holy Week. On this week, we mark the last week in the earthly life of Christ before his Crucifixion on Good Friday, his burial, and his Resurrection on Easter Day.

The Early Church gave greatest prominence during the “Great Week” to Good Friday and then to the Sabbatum Magnum or Great Sabbath on Holy Saturday or Easter Eve. The earliest references to marking this week are found in the Apostolical Constitutions, when Christians abstained from wine and meat, observing absolute fasts on the Friday and Saturday.

During Great and Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Orthros or Matins services for each day are held on the preceding evening. Thus, the Matins service of Great Monday is sung on Palm Sunday evening, and so on, allowing many more people to take part. Fasting during Great and Holy Week is very strict, with dairy products, meat and meat products strictly forbidden, no-one drinks wine, and no oil is used in the cooking. Friday and Saturday are strict fast days, and nothing should be eaten on those days.

The services on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings are often called the “Bridegroom Prayers,” with their theme of Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church, a theme movingly expressed in the troparion solemnly chanted each evening. As Tuesday evening draws to a close, the lengthy but sorrowful and deeply-moving Hymn of Kassiani is sung, recounting the story of the woman who washed Christ’s feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7: 36-50).

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is celebrated, without the anaphora or concecration, so that commuicants receive the Eucharist from the reserved Holy Mysteries. Many churches in Greece also have a service of Anointing on the Wednesday evening.

The Divine Liturgy of the Last Supper is celebraterd on the morning of Great and Holy Thursday. The Matins of Great and Holy Friday, with 12 Gospel readings, takes place on the evening of Great and Holy Thursday.

The Vespers of Holy Friday are sung on the Friday morning or afternoon, when the figure of Christ is taken from the Cross, and the eipitaphios, a richly-embroidered icon of cloth, is laid on the bier in the church and strewn with flowers. On Friday evening, rose petals and rose water are scattered and sprinkled over the epitaphios and the bier, which are then carried in a candlelit procession through the parish as the hymns of Lamentation are sung.

On Saturday night, the service begins in complete darkness with the chanting of the Midnight Office. While the church is still in darkness until the stroke of midnight. Then, the priest lights a single candle from the eternal flame behind the iconostasis or icon screen, and as he comes out from through the royal doors, the light spreads rapidly from one to another until everyone in the church holds a lighting candle and the whole church is filled with light. The priest and choir then lead the congregation in a procession out of the church, brnging the light of Christ out into the darkness of the world. The procession moves around the church, recalling the women who came with myrrh to the tomb on the first Easter morning. As the procession returns to the church, the closed doors are opened once again, symbolising the stobe being rolled away from the tomb of Christ on the first Easter.

The Chrism Eucharist

Traditionally, the Western Church has celebrated the Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday, although it is often brought forward to one of the earlier days in the week so as many as possible of the priests and deacons in a diocese can join their bishop in renewing their ordination vows and for the blessing of oils for the anointing of the sick.

In the Western Church, we have often observed the Saturday of this as a day of silence and prayer which remembers the Christ lying dead in the tomb. No Eucharist is celebrated, and the sanctuary or chancel is left bare and unlit.

But in the West we have often neglected the significance of this day. When we use this as a day of preparing and decorating the church with flowers and Easter bunnies and chocalate eggs so that everything is in place for the children’s services on Sunday morning, we miss the great catechetical opportunity to teach about the significance of that day in the tomb, and the meaning of what the Orthodox know as the Harrowing of Hell.

Holy Week this year

Holy Week, or Great and Holy Week, began on Sunday, or Palm Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, I was in the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Sandymount, where I read the Gospel and the Eulogy at a Memorial Eucharist for my friend and colleague, the Revd Dr Robin Wakeley, who died a year ago. Robin and I had been at the same selection conference nine years ago, and his tragic death last year robbed the Church of Ireland of a deeply spiritual priest.

On Monday evening, I led Compline in Whitechurch Parish Church in Rathfarnham, where Philip McKinley, the “Hard Gospel” Project Officer in the Republic of Ireland, spoke on the theme of “Sacrifice.”

On Tuesday at noon, I was in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, where Archbishop John Neill presided and preached at the Chrism Eucharist. During the Eucharist, 12 lay ministry candidates were commissioned as parish readers, and a further three were re-commissioned.

Most of the priests of the diocese, the two deacons, and many readers and ordinands were also present. The priests among us were reminded by the Archbishop that at our ordination we had taken “authority to watch and care for God’s people, to absolve and bless them in his name, to proclaim the Gospel of Salvation, and to minister the sacraments of his new Covenant.” And he asked us: “Will you continue as faithful stewards of the mysteries of God, preaching the Gospel of Christ, and ministering his holy sacraments?”

“By the help of God, I will.”

On Tuesday evening, we were with the parishioners of Whitechurch in the Chapel of the Augustinian House in Orlagh, at the top of the Ballycullen Road. This retreat house overlooks a large number of new houses in the sprawling suburbs of south Dublin, and out across the lit-up city and Dublin Bay.

The Service of the Word was led by the Revd Obinna Ulogwara, and Philip McKinley spoke once again, this time on “Confidence.”

Tomorrow evening, I hope to celebrate the Maundy Thursday Eucharist at 8 p.m. in Whitechurch Parish Church, when Philip will talk about “Receiving.” And I hope to lead the Good Friday evening service there at 8 p.m., when Philip will speak on the topic of “Arrest.”

For many years, I have argued that Holy or Great Saturday should not be marked in Whitechurch by taking our btime up with preparing and decorating the church for Sunday morning. I want us to remind ourselves about the significance of that day in the tomb, and the meaning of the Harrowing of Hell. Over the past few years, I have led an hour of meditation, readings and music on the theme of “Waiting at the Tomb.”

Once again, we will recall and rejoice in the Harrowing of Hell on Saturday at 5 p.m., with appropriate readings, meditations, drawing on music from the Orthodox tradition, and listening to other apporpriate music, including selections from Arvo Part and Verdi.

And then on Sunday we can celebrate Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection, with new hope and new joy.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

“Holy Irrelevant? Lent and Sin in an Age of Prosperity”

The Revd Darren McCallig (left), Church of Ireland Chaplain and Dean of Residence, Trinity College Dublin, and the Revd Canon Patrick Comerford (right), Director of Spiritual Formation, Church of Ireland Theological College, at the Chapel in Trinity College Dublin on Sunday 10 February 2008, the 1st Sunday in Lent

Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5: 12-19; Matthew 4: 1-11

May I speak to you in the name of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Easter is coming early this year. Many people will only notice this because two bank holiday weekends are coming one after the other in a row. Unless they had pancakes in the canteen at work last Tuesday, or resolved (yet again) to give up smoking on Wednesday, I am sure many people will not have noticed that Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.

Lent has come early this year. But has Lent become wholly irrelevant in the prosperous and increasingly secular Ireland we live in?

Giving up smoking on Ash Wednesday is one of the few Lenten resolutions that survive in Irish society. But even as I was growing up, Lenten resolutions were broken and forgotten as quickly as New Year’s resolutions. How many of us promise on New Year’s Eve to give up smoking, to drink less, to cut out sugar or to lose weight? How many of us can remember our New Year’s resolutions for this year, never mind those for 2007?

Someone I know well tells me how, as she was growing up, she gave up sweets for Lent. But she didn’t really. She saved sweets for Lent. She stored them in a tin box under her bed, got great pleasure in looking at them as they mounted up in great numbers – she even managed occasionally to lick some of them without actually eating them. In this way, she kept to the letter if not the spirit of her self-imposed Lenten mortification, and managed to tease and mortify the other children in her family.

With this memory of Lent, is it any wonder that many people find Lent wholly irrelevant today? It was all about not doing something, rather than doing something. It was all about what I might gain today, rather than preparing for something more important in the days ahead.

The tradition of Lenten discipline and abstinence grew up as people began to associate Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness – our Gospel reading this morning – with the 40 days of Lent. But Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness were not a preparation for the events of Holy Week and the days before Easter. Nor were they a withdrawal from the pressures and demands of the real world. Rather, they were a preparation for the full mission and ministry of Jesus in the world – just as the 40 days Moses spent on Mount Sinai or the 40 days Elijah spent walking to Mount Horeb were times of preparation for real engagement with the real problems of the world.

Lent originally began as six weeks of preparation and instruction for the newly-converted Christians before their baptism, before joining the Church, on Easter Eve. Lent should still be a time of preparation for our ministry and mission as people who walk in the light of the Resurrection, for our mission of calling the world into the Kingdom of God. And the temptations or distractions that take us away from that mission and ministry are similar to those faced by Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning.

As that Gospel passage was being read, did you notice the sequence of events as they are recalled by Saint Matthew? How, as the drama unfolds before us, we are moved in each sequence to a greater height each time?

We start with Jesus standing on the ground, amid the stones and boulders of the wilderness. From there, he is taken to the pinnacles of the Temple, and is able to look across the city. And then he is brought to the mountain-top where he looks across the kingdoms of the world.

The movement is from the particular to the general. As readers we are challenged to move from the temptations that affect our own lives to temptations that have consequences for the lives of those around us, and then to temptations that concern the world we live in. It is a dramatic movement from my own life to the spiritual lives of others, and then to the social, economic and political life of the world. It is a stern reminder that there is no such thing as personal sin unless there is also social sin.

How often has our Lenten observance been like some spiritual self-improvement course instead of considering the wilderness that is the world around us?

In each case in our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is asked to be complicit in social sin for tempting, self-centred reasons. Whenever I am tempted to look after my own interests first, there are always consequences – potentially dire consequences – for those around me.

In the first temptation, Jesus is invited to take control of the essentials of life for his own personal comfort and gain. He is asked to prove himself by turning the stones into bread. He is asked to take control of nature and the environment and to use them to meet his own personal need for food. The consequences of looking after my own needs when it comes to the supply of food has left us with an abundance of food in northern Europe, both naturally grown and produced food and genetically-modified food.

Controlling the supply of food without fully considering the social consequences for others and the needs of others is one of the first great social sins. When the Church feeds the hungry, we are seen as encouraging charity. When we challenge the reason they are hungry we are easily accused of interfering in politics and economics. As the late Dom Helder Camara said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.”

Try to imagine how famished Jesus was after 40 days in the wilderness. I get a migraine if I don’t eat regularly; I cannot imagine how unbearable life is for those who are hungry on a regular and continuous basis, day-by-day, every day.

Desperate people are so willing to do desperate things when they are hungry they are even willing to go against their own better interests. The Children of Israel murmured after 40 years in the wilderness without proper food and shelter. They were so unsettled they were even willing to go back into slavery in Egypt. The fear of hunger allows people to accept structural injustice and unjust societies. Yet, as Archbishop Helder Camara pointed out in his book Spiral of Violence (1971), structural violence is the beginning of all violence.

In the second temptation, Jesus is invited to take control of sacred and civic space for personal gain. He is taken to the heart of the city and the pinnacle of the Temple and challenged to show that he can command and hold power.

How many of our religious and political leaders in our society, in our world, use their political and religious leadership to give themselves power and command, to control, and to guarantee their personal gain? The use of political power for personal gain is so common among politicians in our society today that it makes people cynical and alienates them from the political process. But how often have those with religious power also used their power to protect their own personal interests?

From the heart of the city and the pinnacle of the Temple, Jesus is then taken to the mountain top, where he is shown all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. Why do these temptations start on the ground, move to the pinnacle of the Temple, and reach their climax on the mountain top? Moses receives the commandments on the mountain top; Peter, James and John witness the Transfiguration on the mountain top; Christ is crucified on a hilltop.

The invitation to throw himself from the pinnacle holds no attraction for Jesus who later refuses to come down from the cross. He is not afraid of death. He knows where the true Temple is. Who or what is worshipped in the temple of your heart?

When he was threatened with death and murder during the apartheid era in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared: “I cannot help it. When I see injustice, I cannot keep quiet … But what is it that they can ultimately do? The most awful thing that they can do is to kill me, and death is not the worst thing that could happen to a Christian.”

In the final temptation, we see the real connection between social sin and idolatry. There is a world of difference between being political in the party sense and being prophetic in the unexpected sense.

When I visit the sick in hospital, I am showing pastoral care.

When we question why they are on trolleys, or why we have a two-tier health service in one of the richest countries in the world, we are bringing together pastoral theology and the prophetic call of the church – but we are accused of being political or, even worse, of being party political.

When we greet others with the sign of Christ’s peace at the Eucharist, we are being liturgically relevant.

When I ask why the world is not at peace, why hundreds are killed in clashes and wars in Iraq, Sudan, Kenya, Afghanistan and Chad, I am bringing the liturgy to life in the world, but I am accused of being political.

In each of these temptations we see the subtle attraction of doing the right thing but using the wrong means.

Would it have been so wrong for Jesus to attend to his hunger, to take control of the Temple and the city for the right theological and political intentions, or to usher in the Kingdom of God hastily by taking control of the kingdoms of this world?

There must always be a link between the means and the end. If we fail to keep the end in mind, we will always be tempted to use means that appear to serve our own interests, but ultimately destroy us.

Faith can never be enough for a Christian. Indeed, even the Devil himself sees that Jesus is the Son of God. When we neglect and deny the needs of the world, we neglect and deny God and who Jesus really is for us. But if we serve God and serve others, then God will see that our own real needs are served too.

After saying no to each of these temptations, Jesus is waited upon by angels. The words in our Gospel passage can also be read as telling us messengers of good news ministered to him, those who proclaim the Gospel served him. At the heart of the ministry and mission of the church, at the heart of our proclamation of the Gospel and our diaconal service, at the heart of our true worship of God, there is always a call to the Church to minister to and to serve the needs of others in a world that often deprives them of food and shelter, of political and religious rights, and of a true place in this world.

This is the ministry and mission Jesus was preparing for during his 40 days in the wilderness. This is the ministry we in the Church need to remind ourselves about during the 40 days of Lent. And if we do this, then we can truly live in – and truly invite others to live in – the light and joy of the Resurrection as Easter breaks into our lives.

And now may all our thoughts, words and deeds be in + the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation at the Church of Ireland Theological College. This sermon was preached on 10 February 2008, the 1st Sunday in Lent, at the Sung Eucharist in the Chapel of Trinity College Dublin, as part of the Sermon Series, "Holy Irrelevant?" An MP3 file of this sermon is available to listen to and/or download on:

Sunday 10 February 2008 - The Revd Canon Patrick Comerford - "Holy Irrelevant? Lent and Sin in an Age of Prosperity"

‘Holy Irrelevant?’: part of a Hilary Term lecture series in the chapel Trinity College Dublin

This photograph is posted on the website of the United Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough

Revd Darren McCallig and Revd Canon Patrick Comerford

The Revd Darren McCallig, Chaplain to Trinity College Dublin, with the Revd Canon Patrick Comerford. Canon Comerford was speaking as part of this term’s ‘Holy Irrelevant’ lecture series held during Sunday Holy Communion services.

10 February 2008: ‘Holy Irrelevant? Lent and Sin in an Age of Prosperity’.