The incomparable soprano Jessye Norman, who from time to time attended St Paul’s Cathedral, made a recording of spirituals released in 1986. Unaccompanied, she sings, amongst others, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’.  And after the last verse, when she has drawn us into her world echoing with the sun’s refusal, the nails, the grave, she simply stops singing the lyrics, published in 1899 as one of the slave trade’s ‘Plantation hymns’, and starts only to hum the tune. I say ‘only’, but it is absolutely not a reduction.  

The meaning of this lament, this call to the sky, is brought into sharp focus by the ending to the song that is wordless;  a song not only of an individual Christian soul but of a whole people enslaved. And whenever I hear her move between the haunting tune and the repeated refrain of ‘tremble, tremble, tremble’, I am struck by the wordlessness of this week we call holy.

Christ remains silent before Pilate.

The woman who anoints him today simply weeps and touches him in preparation for the death that has come close, suddenly.  

And there are sometimes days, situations, events, and reactions, that cause us to tremble, perhaps like this year’s circumstances. Tremble, lament, fall silent and pray.    

Were you there?  

We are here.  And we tremble for our world, for ourselves, and like Jessye Norman’s spiritual, find both horror and beauty in the song. 

I’ve always loved the name for this day: Spy Wednesday. It introduces a contemporary note into what can inevitably feel like a Holy Week story that is culturally far from 21st century UK.   Spy Wednesday doesn’t, unlike other names of days this week, get its name from a Latin root. It describes what it says. That Judas, from today when he decided to take the thirty pieces of silver, became a spy in the closest circle of Jesus and tomorrow will betray him with a kiss. 

After centuries of condemnation, in recent years, Judas has been receiving something of a rehabilitation theologically and in Christian spiritual reflection. I’m glad of this. Because today is a sort of ‘cusp’ moment that any of us might recognise in our own lives. It’s the kind of moment when you and I set in train a set of events that we know to be damaging, most certainly to others and probably to ourselves too. But, either because we’re angry and disappointed like Judas, or because we become enthralled to a pattern of behaviour or the influence of another person, we, like St Paul, don’t seem to be able to ‘help ourselves’.  

This can be as simple has having that second glass of wine, or making that unneeded purchase online, or as complex as sabotaging a relationship or a job or living with an unexamined addiction. Fuelled by fury and disillusion, Judas just went with it. As we sometimes just go with it. And while we condemn Judas, we condemn ourselves. But Christ, harrowing hell on Saturday night, is asked why he is there.   I have come to find my friend Judas, he says. And when he sees him, he embraces him with a kiss. 

And so we’re here. The day of execution. Jesus has been afraid to die, and afraid to die alone. Today he will scream at God that God has abandoned him. And by speaking at all from the Cross, that most barbaric and showy forms of execution, he teaches us to speak from situations of suffering and dereliction. Even if it is to accuse God who seems so far away. 

Today we draw close to Jesus who is, after such energetic and urgent ministry, rendered still, pinned, dis-abled by the irreducible human need to destroy what challenges our own power and control. Jesus’s life pointing to an upside-down kingdom where the poor, the ones who are secretly (or not so secretly) despised, become teachers and guides, proved in the end too threatening. And so he dies, alone. 

The novelist Colm Toibin imagined, provocatively, that contrary to all the deposition paintings we have been familiar with over the years, Mary didn’t, couldn’t, stay to the end. In some ways a shocking suggestion. But maybe also too a faithful one?

Because some years, maybe this year, it’s hard to stay confronted with the pain. And so perhaps with her, we can allow ourselves quietly to slip away when it’s too hard. And if we do, the distance will remind us that God remains free from our need to be thought of as holy. 

One last thing: the artist Mark Cazalet was commissioned by a convent in London to paint the Stations of the Cross. Together with the Mother Superior, he imagined what Mary would have done on the evening of Good Friday. She visited Judas’s mother. And so the final station is a picture of these two women, together at the end of a terrible day, finding solace in the company of one who understood.