The Lamentations of Holy Thursday
The Desolate City
V Kalendas Aprilis (28 March) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIV
In Cena Domini
The Triduum days in the ancient Roman Office are strewn with golden nuggets and scattered diamonds from one end to another and it would take several posts or really better a month long seminar to really penetrate its depths and wonders.
So here is just an observation that popped up while praying Matins this morning: the first Office of the Triduum. Even though this is Holy Thursday unlike in our modern conception of things the overriding focus in the ancient Roman Office is not on the Institution of the Eucharist. It is there1 of course but it really isn’t the focus of attention.
What is the focus of attention is the final unleashing of the grand conspiracy that has been building up since Passion Sunday to assassinate Jesus Christ and to remove Him from the world He created. Masterfully weaving the prophetic texts of the Old Testament together with the Gospel accounts on this Thursday we see the traitor unmasked and the plot set in motion.
The lectios of the first Nocturn comes from the Book of Lamentations2 and begin with the following words:
Aleph: Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium; princeps provinciarum sub tributo.
Aleph: How she now sits alone the city full of people! The lady who ruled the nations has become a widow; the prince of the conquered lands is now under tribute
A chill went down my spine reading all of this for a few reasons. Firstly on the surface level it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ so what is it doing here on Holy Thursday?
Lamentations is the song of Jeremiah after all of the prophecies and warnings which God had instructed him to deliver to the people of the land (which he had of course done and they had of course ignored and/or spat upon) had been fulfilled down to the last terrifying letter and the earthy Jerusalem with its Temple that had been the glory of the nations was now nothing more than a smoldering pile of rubble.
I do not know when these readings from Lamentations arrived in the Office. In Saint Giuseppe Maria Tomasi’s seventeenth century study of the history of the Divine Office he found the responds3 associated with them already present in a tenth century manuscript of the Monastic Office that described itself as being an accurate representation of the Office as reformed by Gregory the Great 350 years or so before. But how far back they actually go is really anyone’s guess. Possibly to the Roman Empire.
One suspects that these readings may have found there way in there on this day at least in some part as a reflection of the fact that only a few decades after the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ Jerusalem was again destroyed and this time would not be rebuilt. The Old Covenant was over and the failure of so many of its people to accept their new Moses4 and a Prophet infinitely greater than Jeremiah had led to them being cast off and scattered to the four winds and their once holy city to lie in ruins and trampled down by the nations they had once heaped scorn upon seemingly forever.
But there is something else going on here that should not be underestimated. This is about much more than just the commemoration of past events. The liturgy here is speaking in its always present (yet seldom listened to) prophetic voice and that is what sent the chill down my spine. For there is a respond sung much later in the year during the cold and gray month of November, when the Church in the West is reflecting upon the end of the world and what will be her state at that time, that reads eerily familiar to the above mentioned lines:
Aspice Domine quia facta est desolata civitas plena divitiis sedet in tristitia domina gentium
See O Lord that the city full of riches has been made desolate; the lady who ruled the nations sits in misery.
We do not know where this respond comes from. Its words do not match any known Latin translation of Lamentations 1:1 but they are without a doubt a reference to it. Perhaps they come from some long forgotten translation or are an adaptation based on the aforementioned lines read here at the onset of Our Lord’s Passion which commemorated the destruction of the rites of the Old Covenant that the Church of the West composed long ago when she was first coming into her prosperity as a warning concerning the termination of the outward rites of the New Covenant.
For as one prays through these three lectios from Lamentations one sees an eerily familiar set of circumstances to those that the Church in the West faces at the present moment. She has now long been cast off by the nations that she herself brought into being. Her walls are all broken down and her most precious possessions being left unsecured and undefended have now passed into the power of her enemies who parade them about in mockery of her former greatness.
She who once against overwhelming odds conquered the Roman Empire by the blood and the implacable fidelity of her martyrs and imposed her law upon the nations now in a vain and delusional attempt to gain some sort of illusory safety for herself pays tribute at every opportunity to the barbarous laws of a world that holds her in contempt and seeks her annihilation.
You see the conspiracy against Jesus Christ was not just an isolated cabal of a few Jewish priests and a money grubbing Apostle against a wandering rabbi of the first century, but is a thing that stretches throughout time and will not cease until He Himself comes back to kill it with the breath of his mouth.
The account of the Institution from 1 Corinthians 11 is of course read during the third nocturn but these lectios also both include and emphasize the terrible consequences of a faithless reception of the Eucharist as Judas did on that night. These are accompanied by some memorable responds emphasizing that the joint betrayal of the priests and elders of ancient Israel and Judas: the religious leadership of the Old and of the New Covenant.
This includes the famous rebuke addressed to the Apostles, i.e. the orthodox and faithful, but weak, bishops:
Una hora non potuistis vigilare mecum qui exhortamini mori pro me. Vel Iudam non videtis quomodo non dormit sed festinat tradere me Iudaeis?
You could not watch with me a single hour, you who cried out that you would die for me? Or do you not see Judas, how he does not sleep but hurries on to hand me over to the Jews?
Lamentations 1: 1-14 is read throughout the first three lectios on Holy Thursday.
In monte Oliveti… Tristis est… Ecce vidimus eum…
Deuteronomy 18: 15-19