Back to St. Joe’s, to the early mass, 8:30 a.m. It’s lightly attended and there’s no music, which oddly enough makes it so very solemn and lovely.

The Gospel reading is from St. John, where Mary of Magdala discovers the empty tomb and runs to tell everyone. Peter and another, un-named disciple come running. Poor St. Peter, always the schlub, loses the race, of course.

But somehow, to me, thinking of poor St. Peter the schlub, thinking about he so often gets it wrong but keeps going, it just makes Acts or his epistles so much more real to me. To think that likely St. Paul never met Jesus, pace that encounter on the road to Damascus. But St. Peter really was there so much of the time. And so he can say,

We are witnesses of all that he did
both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,
not to all the people, but to us,
the witnesses chosen by God in advance,
who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commissioned us to preach to the people
and testify that he is the one appointed by God
as judge of the living and the dead.

and he’s being so entirely literal, you know? “We are witnesses to all that he did.”

Happy Easter, folks.

Despite how much I’m digging St. Peter’s this week, we go to St. Joseph’s on Capitol Hill for the Good Friday service.

The procession is in silence. Then when the priests reach the sanctuary, they prostrate themselves, lie there with their faces on the floor for a short time. It’s incredibly moving. The altar itself is absent its usual cloth. The Tabernacle, here at the back of the Sanctuary behind the altar, stands open and empty. And here at St. Joseph’s on either side of the Tabernacle are statues of angels which also serve as candle holders. Today they hold none; indeed, they’ve turned their backs on us as well. Everything is all so very lonesome feeling.

And there’s no Mass today, just a service.

Of the readings, the first is a long, heart wrenching piece from Isaiah. This gets me every year.

He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins

The Gospel is from St. John, two whole chapters. Nineteen hundred and fourteen words. The whole persecution and passion.

After this, aware that everything was now finished,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled,
Jesus said, “I thirst.”
There was a vessel filled with common wine.
So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop
and put it up to his mouth.
When Jesus had taken the wine, he said,
“It is finished.”
And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.

I always liked this scene in The Last Temptation of Christ. The movie, I mean. I never read the book. Willem Dafoe plays Jesus, and in this last line he says, “It is completed” rather than, “It is finished.” I don’t know what exact word St. John used in the original Greek, but I like that.

Completed.

We generally stay away from our dear St. Matt’s on the big holy days. It’s so very crowded. And Dawn is, as mentioned earlier today, a little thing, and she doesn’t like big crowds. So we go to St. Peter’s on Capitol Hill.

It’s at 2nd & C Streets Southeast, just across the street from the Library of Congress Madison Building, so it’s only like sixteen blocks from our house. Normally that’d be an easy bike ride, but we’ve already ridden like fifty miles today. So we drive. I’m worried about parking, but we happily find a spot along Folger Park just three blocks away.

We’ve been to St. Peter’s before, once or twice. I think maybe Good Friday three years ago? I remember being very disappointingly uninspired. Not so today. We have the pastor Father Byrne tonight. I don’t remember him from before, but I like him very much. For his homily he talks about what it’s like to be a priest and how much he loves being a priest. It’s not remarkably Holy Thursday-ish, but it is wonderfully honest and heartfelt.

And the church itself is beautiful. As is often the case, it’s the result of a few iterations. The exterior and stained glass are from around 1890, and the interior is from 1941. The only trouble I have is finding the font of holy water as we’re walking in. One of the ushers sees me looking around bewildered and knows exactly what my problem is. She points me to the tiny cups on the backs of the last row of pews.

The most amazing thing of the night is the cantor. They’ve got a choir here, and they’re okay, no St. Matt’s Schola Cantorum or anything. But the cantor is this amazing tenor. I assume he’s the music director Kevin O’Brien, but who knows for sure. He’s lovely to listen to all the same.

And the homily about being a priest, about serving, does actually serve well for the feet washing on Holy Thursday. Of course I always think back to Holy Thursday in 2003, when I was one of the nervous folks up there getting my foot washed. I think maybe I’d feel a little more at ease with friendly Father Byrne, after the homily about how much he loves serving as a priest. Back in ’03 it was His Eminence Cardinal McCarrick. Yikes.

But it’s good stuff, the washing of the feet.

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.
He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.
The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over.
So, during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power
and that he had come from God and was returning to God,
he rose from supper and took off his outer garments.
He took a towel and tied it around his waist.
Then he poured water into a basin
and began to wash the disciples’ feet
and dry them with the towel around his waist.

Poor St. Peter, as usual, misses the point.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him,
“Master, are you going to wash my feet?”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“What I am doing, you do not understand now,
but you will understand later.”
Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.”
Jesus answered him,
“Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”
Simon Peter said to him,
“Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.”
Jesus said to him,
“Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed,
for he is clean all over;
so you are clean, but not all.”

At the end of the mass comes the greatly moving part, where the Blessed Sacrament is removed from the Tabernacle, which remains open and empty. It always makes me think of Cordelia’s sad monologue from Brideshead Revisited.

They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; Mummy’s requiem was the last Mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in — I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me — and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like.

We attend the 8:30 a.m. at St. Matt’s, avoiding our usual 10:00 a.m. It’s not going to be the usual Latin anyway; rather, it’s the Archbishop, in English. So 8:30’s fine.

The processional antiphon is Richard Proulx, as we’ve had all through Lent. Ah, but not Psalm 130. Today it’s Hosanna to the Son of David, chant, mode VII, choral setting, no less. The procession makes it’s way to the back of the nave, rather than forward to the sanctuary. This is per usual on Palm Sunday. We’ve got palms to bless and then a gospel reading first. From St. Matthew:

Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them,
“Go into the village opposite you,
and immediately you will find an ass tethered,
and a colt with her.”

and

This happened so that what had been spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:
Say to daughter Zion,
“Behold, your king comes to you,
meek and riding on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.”

This confuses me every year. What’s the deal with riding on both animals at once?

In these things in the New Testament, when they say that such-and-such happened so that some particular thing might be fulfilled, the particular thing necessarily comes from the Old Testament. And here St. Matthew even tells us that it’s from one of the prophets. I assume immediately that it’s our man Isaiah. It’s always Isaiah, isn’t it?

Turns out I’m only half right. It’s a mixing of two passages, one from Isaiah, t’other from Zechariah. Isaiah’s just the “Say to daughter Zion” part. Zechariah’s the one with the livestock. Zechariah 9:9b says:

See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, Meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.

Goodness. It’s an ass, a colt, and a foal. Now there’s three animals!

Turns out I’m not the only one confused. Notice how Zechariah doesn’t ever use the word and. Apparently St. Matthew was himself somewhat confused. The annotation to the USCCB’s NAB says that the ass and the colt are the same animal, mentioned twice in a rather standard method of Hebrew parallelism. They go on to say that St. Matthew’s confusion leads scholars to believe that he was a Gentile rather than an originally Jewish Christian, mistaking the parallelism for two different animals.

The St. Matthew gospel reading ends with Jesus riding so provocatively into Jerusalem:

The crowds preceding him and those following
kept crying out and saying:
“Hosanna to the Son of David;
blessed is the he who comes in the name of the Lord;
hosanna in the highest.”

Hence the Proulx antiphon this morning. I love things like that. And we get to wave palms as well. Palm Sunday always starts out as a hooting good time.

But, of course, things turn deadly serious later. The gospel reading for the mass proper is again from St. Matthew, all but the first fourteen verses of chapter 26, followed by chapter 27 in full. It’s a solid twenty-five minutes. Two-thousand, six-hundred and seventy-nine words. The heart of the matter:

From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land
until three in the afternoon.
And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Some of the bystanders who heard it said,
“This one is calling for Elijah.”
Immediately one of them ran to get a sponge;
he soaked it in wine, and putting it on a reed,
gave it to him to drink.
But the rest said,
“Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to save him.”
But Jesus cried out again in a loud voice,
and gave up his spirit.

Welcome to Holy Week, people.

All about rising up, from the depths, from the grave, today.

Much of the singing comes from Psalm 130. As is usual every Sunday in Lent, we don’t have an entrance hymn; rather, we have a chant. Specifically it’s the Processional Psalm for Lent by Richard Proulx. It’s definitely Psalm 130, but Proulx doesn’t use the New American Bible, or at least not any version I’m familiar with. Neither is it King James, although it’s much closer:

Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice.
O let thine ears consider well
the voice of my complaint.

These first few lines in fact match up with the Book of Common Prayer, of all things. But after this the lyrics diverge. The Book of Common Prayer has, “If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it?”Proulx uses iniquities (instead of what is done amiss) and who shall stand (rather than who may abide it).

The responsorial Psalm today is also 130. But, again, not strictly from the NAB. It’s the Lectionary version: “Let your ears be attentive to my voice in supplication.” Just for the record, our Bible’s got it as, “May your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.”

And just for kicks, during communion we sing a phrase from James Biery, Whoever is alive, and the choir sings verses, from good old 130.

The first reading is from Ezekiel.

Thus says the Lord GOD:
O my people, I will open your graves
and have you rise from them,
and bring you back to the land of Israel.

Up from the depths indeed.

So of course the Gospel of St. John tells us today of Lazarus. And just like two weeks ago, when Jesus told the woman at the well, and just like last week, when he told the man blind from birth, this week Jesus tells Martha that he is indeed the Christ.

Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
She said to him, “Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
the one who is coming into the world.”

But what’s most amazing about this whole story is when Jesus becomes “perturbed and deeply troubled.” Why is that, I wonder. Does he or doesn’t he know what he’s doing?

But then, this chapter in St. John relates how close these events are to Passover. It’s almost time for the Passion. So maybe that’s why. So maybe therefore, the most moving passage in all the New Testament:

When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping,
he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said,
“Where have you laid him?”
They said to him, “Sir, come and see.”
And Jesus wept.