Advent is a season especially attuned to the Darkness, and it’s rhythms—not primarily the light. For the Darkness has a strange luminosity all its own, but our eyes must readjust.
I walked out of our church in ritual silence with the procession at twilight and was met—stunned—by the radiant face of the nearly full moon. I started to weep. Especially tired this particular Maundy Thursday, I was hit by the welling up of unprocessed emotion from a particularly hard year.
In Matthew’s story of the Passion of Jesus, based as it is on Mark’s original written passion narrative, we can discover by a close analysis the outline of a …