An Important Hymn from The Great and Holy Tuesday
Come, O faithful, let us work zealously for
the Master; for he distributes wealth to his servants.
Let each of us, according to his or her
ability increase the talent of grace:
let one be adorned in wisdom through good
works; let another celebrate a service in splendor.
Ihe one distributes his wealth to the poor;
the other communicates the word to those untaught.
Thus we shall increase what has been
entrusted to us, and, as faithful stewards of grace, we shall be accounted
worthy of the Master’s joy.
Make us worthy of this, Christ our God, in
your love for mankind.
As more
and more people attend and thoughtfully follow the services of Holy Week, many
are struck by the incomparably rich hymnography, often sung in unique and
evocative melodies. Many of us have favorite hymns, which we greet as friends
when they come along each year. There are the landmark hymns of the Bridegroom
services, repeated for several nights running. There are, of course, the
unforgettable moments of Holy Thursday: “Of Thy Mystical Supper!” The Twelve
Gospels! Then Friday: the Burial Shroud! The Lamentations!… Then Saturday and
the victorious Prokeimenon! These are like lanterns, lighting our way forward
in an otherwise dark terrain.
One of my
own favorites is a humbler little hymn (blink and you’ve missed it for the
year) sung with the Aposticha at Matins and Vespers on Holy Tuesday. [The hymn’s text is at the beginning of this post.] Why do we sing such a hymn
during Holy Week? Let’s spend a minute examining its liturgical context before
looking at it more closely.
By the
time we sing this hymn, we have entered squarely into the journey to Christ’s
life-giving Passion. We have traveled six weeks of Great Lent. We have
celebrated the victorious entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem (a bitter victory:
Jesus knowingly enters the city where he is to be betrayed and slain). We have
heard him preaching with increased intensity against civil and religious
hypocrisy and injustice. But as we follow Jesus’s journey, we also direct
attention at ourselves. As we Orthodox always do in our penitential hymnography
(for example, in the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete), we apply all that
hypocrisy, all the examples of pride, lust, murderous intent, to our own lives
as we live them. It is not a pretty picture. So we ask God’s forgiveness and
beg him to help us to become better human beings.
During
Holy Week, this sort of penitence is brought to a high level of intensity, a
dosage that we cannot sustain for long. But here we are pushed to our limits,
because Our Lord himself, the King of Glory, who made the heavens and the
earth, is on his way to being betrayed, abandoned, and slaughtered. Matters do
not get any more serious than that. We have to make sure we are paying full
attention.
That is
why, at the Bridegroom services, usually celebrated on Sunday, Monday, and
Tuesday evenings of Holy Week, we pray for several things surrounding the theme
of bring ourselves into realization of who we are and what is happening:
– We ask God to “illumine the vesture of our
souls,” to purify us, to give us appropriate clothing in order to celebrate
properly the Feast of Feasts.
– We remind our own selves to be wakeful and
watchful, rouse ourselves out of our slumber, to penetrate the usual half-awake
state of our minds and hearts.
– We contemplate scriptural images as lessons
or as inspiration. The common theme to all these services is that of the
Bridegroom (Christ) who comes in the middle of the night and finds some who are
prepared, others for whom it is now too late. But on different evenings we sing
about the withered fig tree, the betrayal of Judas, and – as a positive image –
the repentant harlot who wipes Jesus’s feet with her tears and hair.
It is
within this broader context, then, that we come to that Holy Tuesday hymn, in
which we urge each other to do the particular work that God has given us to do.
Let’s look through it to see what it is saying, and why people may be attracted
to it.
– We goad each other to work zealously. Don’t
almost do something, or just thing about doing it, or do it in a half-baked
way. Do it, and do it well for the sake of God.
– Notice that God gives the wedding garment.
God gives the talent. Without this initial gift, we have nothing, we are
nothing. But once we realize that God has filled our otherwise empty vessels,
it is very much up to us to take up that gift and to act on it.
– When God distributes his gifts, he is not
using a cookie cutter to form identical little shapes. He is not drawing a
uniform pattern for us to imitate like robots. We are different from each
other; we do not strive to conform to a single model, even if sometimes the
image of a virtuous person in the Church’s Tradition seems frustratingly
uniform. In iconography and spiritual literature (depending on where we’re
looking) we might find a preponderance of monks, bishops, and virgins. But if
we look closer, we find a message applicable to school teachers, social
workers, bankers, moms, dads, writers, sanitation workers – people from all
walks of life and different talents.
– When it begins enumerating tasks, our hymn
encourages us to “do good work” – whatever our station of life, whatever our
vocation. Then it identifies specific vocations – but let us take note how
these are both particular and universal in character.
– One “celebrates a service in splendor.” (When
I was sacristan during my student days at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, I watched as
Fr. Paul Lazor, the consummate liturgical celebrant, made a large and
meaningful sign of the cross over himself during that line.) Although this
verse does carry a particular, clerical meaning, doesn’t it also pertain to our
corporate celebration of the liturgy? All of us celebrate the liturgy in
splendor when we participate meaningfully in it. Going still further, can this
not also pertain to any way in which we – whether lay or ordained – as
“priests” offer the world to God, making our whole life a creative service of
splendor?
– In the Divine Liturgy we pray for “those who
remember the poor.” Is helping the poor, then, something that someoneelse
always does? No. Although we recognize realistically that not everyone is
called to make his or her whole life a service to the poor, none of us is off
the hook in the basic, universal, Christ-imitating vocation of ministry to the
poor, solidarity with the outcast, speaking out against injustice.
– While teaching the Word applies in a
particular way to teachers and catechists, don’t we all impart knowledge and
wisdom – both explicitly and implicitly Christian Truth – in our various vocations
(not least those of us who are parents or godparents)?
Wherever
we are, whatever we do, whatever our station in life our task is to build upon
what we have been given. First, of course, we have to identify the gift, and
that is not always simple. But by understanding the gift and recalling that it
indeed comes from God himself, we can build on it. The gospels tell us that
wasting our talents is one of the things that seriously displeases God. But we
pray that, if we recognize and work with our gifts, we will be “deemed worthy
of the Master’s joy,” a joy that is beyond anything that we can imagine.
Source: https://svotssynaxis.com/2012/04/10/holy-tuesday-a-hymn-of-invitation/
