r/EasternCatholic • u/lex_orandi_62 • 7h ago
Theology & Liturgy Some thoughts on the service of the Twelve Passion Gospels - Fr Herman Majkrzak
This office is a high point of Holy Week in the Byzantine liturgical tradition. Many love it, but some do not. I love it deeply, and the (I think) eight times I've been choir director for it are among my most precious memories of service in the Church thus far. This service is a masterpiece of liturgical genius. Here are some thoughts about it.
The Triodion and Typicon direct that the service is to begin at 8 PM on Holy Thursday evening. (In practice, it may begin an hour or two earlier.) It should be sung in a darkened church, with little or no illumination besides candlelight and oil lamps. Despite it employing the framework of daily Matins, it’s not a morning service and should not be celebrated on Friday morning (that time slot is for Royal Hours). It’s rather a vigil in character, as Matins in the Byzantine Rite often is. The point of the service is not prayers upon waking, for the start of a new day, but rather, to keep watch with the Lord as he progresses through all the events that take him to Golgotha and death. Thus (after the usual Six Psalms and Great Litany) the service begins with the troparion of Maundy Thursday (“When the glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of the feet…”) and the first, very long Gospel (John 14–18), which takes place at the Last Supper. Much of the earlier part of the service is taken up with events that happened throughout that night: the agony in the garden, the betrayal, the trial before the Sanhedrin, Peter’s denial.
But like many of the services of Holy Week, this is a transitional service: in the span of three hours or so, it carries you from Thursday evening all the way through to Friday evening. Later, on the afternoon of Holy Friday, we will reread the Passion narrative (in composite form), much closer to the actual time of those later events. But this service begins instead at the time of these earlier events. (Many Greek Catholic communities over recent decades have been influenced, I reckon, by Pope Pius XII’s 1955 Roman Rite Holy Week reform in adjusting the traditional times for services so that Matins is always in the morning and Vespers in the evening. I believe that this adjustment makes good sense for the Roman Rite [e.g., with its Easter vigil beginning with the new fire and lucernarium] but less so for the Byzantine. I may write more about that some other time).
The twelve selections from the four Gospels’ Passion narratives overlap and repeat different episodes in the Savior’s advance towards death. Thus the way each Gospel reading interacts with the previous and succeeding readings and also with the hymnography sung in between them is very much two-steps-forward-one-step-back: a solemn, ceremonial dance. And this is key. Because this is how we work through grief. Our minds, hearts, and bodies must revisit, reinterpret, and reintegrate the traumatic and fatal events of those twenty-four hours, and we are part of those events, even if not the central figure. They affect us. Deeply.
Many are troubled and disturbed by the eruption of anger and finger-pointing that characterizes the hymnography in the first part of the service, throughout many of the fifteen antiphons and sessional hymns. Judas, Caiaphas and the Jews, even the sleeping disciples in Gethsemane: the atmosphere in this earlier part of the service is one of agitation. Everything is falling apart, all my hopes are crumbling, and THIS IS SOMEONE’S FAULT. One of the early stages of grief (in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous schema) is anger. And Peter himself gives voice to the first stage of grief—denial: “This shall never happen to thee, Lord.” It is necessary for us to experience and go through this anxious, confused, pot-stirring, boiling-over terror and rage. We don’t like it—we may find the rhetoric to be unfair, unjust—and yet, this is the reality of grief. And in the modality of poetry and lyric we can say things that we ought not say in prose.
Interspersed among all those verses of outrage, each of the fifteen antiphons concludes with a Theotokion, a brief hymn to the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Notice: they are Theotokia, not (as we might expect) Stavrotheotokia (except for the 15th). That is: they do not focus on the Passion, on our Lady’s suffering beside the Cross. Rather, with these short hymns, we periodically turn to our Lady, not to console her but for her to console us. We see her not in the midst of all this panic and turmoil but as already having passed beyond death and resurrection—both her Son’s and her own—and already reigning with Him in heaven. We run to her and bury our face in her lap as our emotions overwhelm us. And she consoles us. These Theotokia are small oases. They must never be omitted, and the choir or chanters should try to sing them in a calmer and more serene manner than the surrounding hymns. (The Stavrotheotokion at the end of the 15th antiphon is sometimes forgotten inadvertently. This too must not happen. It is the first Stavrotheotokion of the service. Several more will follow. Our Lady has come to join us in this moment.)
At the famous fifteenth antiphon, “Today, he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross,” our finger-pointing ceases. For in the next Gospel reading, we see the Lord finally lifted up on the Cross. It cannot be prevented now. It’s too late. And we are stunned. A certain kind of acceptance briefly comes over us—acceptance being the last stage of grief in Kubler-Ross’s schema. (The stages of grief are perhaps better thought of as elements of grief: they, like these Gospel narratives, overlap with each other.) We look at the majesty of the Cross now set up in the midst of the church, and we weep.
The fifteen antiphons concluded, our next bit of hymnography is a set of troparia interspersed with the Beatitudes. We see that the Crucified Lord of Glory is perfectly fulfilling the Beatitudes he preached at the beginning of his ministry. Intercalated with these verses are troparia in which we make our own the prayer of the wise thief: “Remember me, O Lord, when thou comest in thy kingdom.” We have stopped blaming others and look inward for a moment. It now occurs to me that I am to blame, and that this Crucifixion is in fact necessary to restore me to my place in the Father’s kingdom.
With the three-ode Canon by St. Cosmas (the final three-ode canon of the season), we return to an earlier stage of the events, focusing again on the washing of the feet, the garden, and Peter’s denial. We revisit these events with new eyes, eyes now filled not with fear and foreboding but with the tears of sorrow.
In the midst of the canon, we come to St. Romanus’s kontakion, the Stavrotheotokion par excellence, where we see our Lady watching her Son bear his Cross towards Calvary and asking him where he’s rushing off to. Is there another wedding in Cana? Is he going again to turn water into wine? No matter: he remains her Son and her God! The irmos and katavasia of the ninth ode complements this kontakion. It is the Theotokion par excellence: “More honorable than the cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim!” Here there is no hint of sorrow and incomprehension in the Mother of God, only her unsurpassable glory. This katavasia should be sung with stately, confident majesty. Our Lady, in her unconquerable faith, intercedes for us.
After the canon, we revisit the theme of the wise thief that was introduced in the Beatitudes before the canon. This famous Exapostilarion is, for many Slavs, the high-point of the service: “The wise thief didst thou make worthy of Paradise, in a single moment, O Lord. By the wood of the Cross, illumine me as well, and save me.” We now realize that our only hope is this Cross and the One hanging on it, this Cross the threat of which had earlier thrown us into frenzy and panic.
As we come to the stichera on the Praises and to the aposticha, especially when sung to Kastalsky’s very poignant Holy Week harmonizations of Kyivan Chant, our grief arrives at the stage of deep, deep sorrow. All creation, the sun, the moon, the earth, shudders as it beholds its Creator hanging naked on the tree. We gaze on every one of the members of Christ’s Body, each of which has suffered for us in its own way. Our Lady is now weeping and tearing out her hair with agony. Even the very angels shudder in bafflement: “O incomprehensible Lord, glory be to thee!”
Yet in the midst of this deep sorrow, anger flares out once more, as again it flashes before our eyes how the soldiers dared to mock their Savior and their King: “They stripped me of my garments / and clothed me in a scarlet robe; / they set a crown of thorns upon my head / and placed a reed in my right hand, / THAT I MIGHT DASH THEM IN PIECES LIKE A POTTER’S VESSEL.” (The choir director must lean into this for all its dramatic contrast from the surrounding text.) We put this hot wave of apparent vengefulness on the lips of Christ himself, quoting Psalm 2. (Again, poetry is not prose.) And yet, a moment later we think further of the matter and arrive at a deeper awareness of the truth, still in the voice of Christ: “I gave my back to scourging; / I did not turn away my face from spitting; / I stood before the judgement-seat of Pilate, / and en - dured the Cross—” why? “—for the salvation of the world.” These last words must be sung with great emphasis but pianissimo. They reinterpret the previous sticheron. If Christ must dash a vessel to pieces, it is in order that he can refashion it again according to his likeness.
And, so, after the twelfth (and shortest) of the Passion Gospels—which recounts Pilate setting a guard at the tomb so that no one could fake a resurrection—we sing one final, short hymn. And it is a hymn of gratitude. “By thy precious Blood, thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the Law. By being nailed to the Cross and pierced with the spear, thou hast poured immortality upon men. O our Savior, glory be to thee!” Like Psalm 21/22, the quintessential Passion Psalm, our long vigil concludes in triumph. We recognize that the suffering, crucified Servant is indeed the Lord of Glory. In some traditions, this hymn is preceded by a short, festal peal of all the bells. This peal marks the conclusion of the final Gospel reading, but also prepares our hearts for a brief and quiet “Thank you, Jesus” which we express through this concluding tone four troparion.
I have said little about the Gospels themselves. They speak for themselves more readily than do the hymns, it seems to me. I have also said little about what I called above the “framework” of this vigil: Daily Matins. All the ordinary bits, the psalms, the litanies, etc., which those in, say, monastic communities hear and pray every day. These parts are important as well, because they help provide contour—highs and lows—to this service. We cannot be revved up to 100% of emotion all the time. We need ordinary, humdrum things in our lives while grieving: getting a drink of water, preparing a meal, taking out the trash. We need down-time. This is why the service will go from something as heart-wrenching as the “Wise Thief” exapostilarion to something as quotidian as a Little Litany or a set of Trisagion Prayers.
Glory to thy long-suffering, O Lord!
- Fr Herman Majkrzak UGCC
