Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: He was also crucified for us. That brief statement in the Nicene Creed refers to one of the two most important events of all time. The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his Resurrection three days later form the fulcrum of human history.
We commemorate the Crucifixion Friday of this week, Good Friday. Our penitential and liturgical preparation for that event began five weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday. It will build in intensity over the next few days to reach its culmination at the end of the week. Fasting, the Stations of the Cross, and the Veneration of the Cross will mark the Death of Jesus. Next, the silent, watchful waiting of Holy Saturday. Finally, we come to an explosion of joy in the Easter Vigil and the services of Easter Sunday.
Musical Treatments
Numerous composers over the centuries have looked for ways to invest the bare statement of the Nicene Creed with that intensity. Howard Ionescu of Winchester College gives us two examples. He contrasts Johann Bach in his Mass in B Minor, and Antonio Lotti in his Crucifixus. Bach, he says, “depicts Christ’s suffering in continuous descending chromatic lines, with the voices plummeting to the depths of their vocal range and then hushed to a silence.” Antonio Lotti (whose Miserere we heard last week) goes in a different direction. Ionescu says of his Crucifixus:
Written for 8 voices, each part enters bar by bar starting with the lowest basses, piling up the musical texture with suspensions (musical crunches in the harmony) and creating a piercing intensity by the time the highest voice enters.
Bach’s setting creates a powerful impression of the living spirit departing the body as it dies. Lotti’s composition instead feels like the Divine Soul of Jesus building up to the point where it bursts the confines of its human body.
Lotti’s Crucifixus
Both treatments are extraordinarily beautiful and moving musical representations of the Passion and Death of Christ. Bach’s O Sacred Head Surrounded was our final musical selection of Lent last year, however, so we’ll give Lotti the honor this time around. His Crucifixus will be the last music we share on this site until we celebrate the Resurrection next Sunday.
The NMH choir sings Lotti’s Crucifixus in the clip below.
And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:40-41)
The Inner Struggle
One could make a good case that many of the purported reforms of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council were not a good idea. I admit, I did once compare the so-called Spirit of Vatican II to a rabid raccoon. On the other hand, I’m not a rad-trad, either. Some recent reforms are, in fact, improvements. The restoration of the Easter Vigil to Holy Saturday evening after dark, for instance (it had become customary to celebrate it Saturday morning). Granted, this reform dates from before Vatican II. Pope Pius XII instituted it a few years before the council, in 1955. It was a part, however, of the movement of liturgical reform that culminated in the Mass of Paul VI fifteen years later.
We can see another positive (or at least more positive than negative) change in today’s liturgy. Passion Sunday used to be the Sunday before Palm Sunday (as I discuss at further length here). Now the two liturgical observances share the Sunday before Easter.
The downside of the change is that we have lost the clear demarcation Passion Sunday used to give us between the earlier part of Lent and Passiontide. We gain something, however, from seeing the joyful palm-waving crowd welcoming Jesus and the angry crowd demanding his death in the same liturgy. We see a reflection in today’s mass of the struggle within each of us between the desire for salvation and the allure of sin.
Which Crowd?
Let’s start with those two crowds. I used to wonder as to what extent both crowds were composed of the same people. If they were the same, what had changed their minds in so short a time? After my last post on the subject, a reader convinced me that the two crowds did largely consist of different members. At the very least, the disciples of Jesus dominate the Palm Sunday crowd; the Sanhedrin and their supporters the mob demanding that Pilate crucify Him.
That’s the literal import of the two events. Scripture works on multiple levels, however. What is the liturgy showing us by putting the two crowds together?
One key to the bigger picture is St. Peter, humble fisherman become fisher of men. As chief Apostle he plays a prominent part in all the Gospel accounts of the events of Holy Week. In this year’s reading, from the Gospel of Luke, we see Jesus telling him:
“Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.”
The Turning Back
The Lord is entrusting Peter with a critical mission, but there’s a warning here, too. What does he mean by “once you have turned back”? Turned back from what? Peter doesn’t seem to notice, because be immediately blurts out: “Lord, I am prepared to go to prison and to die with you.” If only it were that simple. Peter must have been stunned by Jesus’ response:
“I tell you, Peter, before the cock crows this day, you will deny three times that you know me.”
And, of course, Peter does just as Jesus says. He does turn back to strengthen his brethren in the end, but he has his ups and downs along the way. He genuinely wants to stand boldly in defense of his Lord, but fails at critical moments. He disavows any knowledge of Christ in response to the questions of a mere servant of the high priest. He and his fellow Apostles can’t stay awake when Jesus most needs their company. And of course, he is nowhere to be found when Christ is dying on the Cross. Matthew and Mark preserve Jesus’ summation of the situation when he finds his biggest supporters asleep on the job: “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41)
Our Challenge
We can also see a reflection of ourselves in the two starkly different crowds in today’s separate Gospel readings. There’s a part of us that wants to welcome our Messiah with loud hosannas. There’s a part that, like the religious leaders of the time, fears that embracing Christ will get us into trouble with the human powers-that-be out in the world. There’s also a side of us that we see in both crowds. Both contain a large number of people who are not there from a sense of commitment to one side or the other. They are simply following the mob, they are Jesus’ proverbial man who builds his house on sand (see Matthew 7:26).
The liturgy shows us at the beginning of Holy Week what our challenge is going to be. We all start out with the cheering crowds waving palms. Will we stay with Jesus the whole time? Will we fail for a time, like St. Peter, but turn back to Christ? Will the crowd shouting “Crucify Him!” sway us to their side? Where will we stand in the end?
There’s something a little unsettling about Palm Sunday. It appears that the same people who welcome Jesus as a victorious king at the beginning of the week are screaming for his death by its end. The liturgy reminds us of this incongruity by putting Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday together (at least in the Ordinary Form; in the Extraordinary Form last Sunday was Passion Sunday). I’ve heard a number of possible explanations for this apparent change in the crowd. I read once (I’m sorry to say I can no longer remember where) that the supporters greeting Jesus with palm fronds and hosannas on Sunday may not have been the same angry mob demanding his crucifixion on Friday. Maybe they were all different people.
There may be some small element of truth to this theory, but I can’t help but think that there must have been a very significant overlap between the two groups. How likely is it that the entire mass of people who were so enthusiastic just a few days earlier would simply stay away from their new king’s trial? I find the more traditional explanation more likely, that a large portion, at least, of the first crowd had soured on the whole Jesus phenomenon over the intervening days.
Which brings us back to the original question: why did so many change their minds? The likeliest thing seems to be that when they found out that Jesus had no intention of being the sort of savior they were looking for, disappointment and disillusionment turned to disgust and hatred. They thought that Jesus was a conquering hero who would free them from the oppression of the foreign Romans; when they discovered that his real aim was to free them from sin, well, no thanks, Jesus.
This explanation rings true, because it fits with human nature: I’ve experienced it in myself, I’ve seen it in other people. The fact is that, very often, we don’t really want to be saved from our sin. We would be happy to have Jesus take on our external hardships for us, to battle “Caesar” out there on our behalf, but we’re all too comfortable with the inner tyrants who hold us bound in a way no emperor can do. How often have we welcomed Christ as our savior, only to turn away when the freedom he offers comes with the admonition “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11)? But Christ still rides into Jerusalem, receiving acclaim from a crowd that he knows will soon turn against him. He does it because he loves them . . . just as he loves every one of us.
Featured image (top of page):“Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem” Hippolyte Flandrin, (1842-1848)