The Green Wood and the Dry

When the Veil Tears and the Feast Begins — A Reflection for Meatfare Week (Cheesefare Week) on Jude 1:11–25 and Luke 23:2–34, 44–56

The Church, in her severe and luminous wisdom, places the Crucifixion before us now—not in Holy Week’s fullness but here, at the threshold of the fast, where meat is relinquished and the long preparation begins. Why? Because before you can fast truthfully, you must see what your hunger is for. And before you can see what your hunger is for, you must stand at the foot of this Cross and reckon with what hangs there.

Matthew’s seasonal Gospel for Meatfare Sunday has already sounded its trumpet: I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). The Last Judgment turns on a single axis—not doctrine, not ritual precision, not the architecture of your theology, but whether the suffering flesh before you was met with tenderness or turned away. Now Luke’s Passion narrative and Jude’s fierce epistle refract that judgment through the week’s remaining days, and the light they cast is unsparing.

Consider the parade of evasions in Luke’s account. Pilate finds no fault and punts to Herod. Herod, that old fox, wants a miracle—a spectacle, a confirmation of his own sophistication—and when Christ offers him nothing but silence, he dresses the Lord in a gorgeous robe and sends Him back. Two rulers, each washing his hands of the living God standing before him in wounded flesh. And here is the bone-deep question the Church presses into your chest as the fast approaches: Where do you do the same? Where do you encounter Christ in the suffering of another—or in your own suffering—and pass the responsibility elsewhere? Where do you dress the wound in gorgeous robes of theological explanation rather than touch it? Herod’s curiosity is the soul that wants spiritual experience without spiritual cost. Pilate’s hand-washing is the soul that knows the truth and lacks the courage to bear its weight.

Jude names these same evasions with a poet’s ferocity: clouds without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness (Jude 1:12–13). This is not mere invective. It is diagnostic. Each image describes a specific failure of substance—clouds that promise rain and deliver nothing, trees that mime the shape of life while bearing no fruit, waves whose fury produces only foam. The sickness Jude diagnoses is the substitution of performance for presence, of display for depth. These are they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit (Jude 1:19). The Greek word is apodiorizontes—those who draw boundary lines, who build walls between themselves and others, between the acceptable and the unacceptable, between the parts of themselves they will acknowledge and the parts they will not.

And this is precisely what the stoicheia of the old Temple system enforced: separation as holiness, boundary as blessing. But Luke records that when Christ breathed His last, the veil of the temple was rent in the midst (Luke 23:45). The wall falls. The separation dissolves. Not through conquest but through the self-emptying of the One who hung there. Maximos the Confessor understood that Christ “united in Himself all the divisions of nature” (Ambigua 41), and the torn veil is the visible sign of that cosmic mending—every wall between sacred and profane, between the respectable soul and its hidden wounds, between God and the furthest reaches of human darkness, torn clean through by love that refuses to stop at any boundary.

Now feel what Luke places at the center of this tearing: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). This is not piety. This is not performance. This is a man who has sweated blood, been stripped, been mocked, been nailed to wood—who has felt every shred of it—and from inside that feeling, not above it, chooses love. Gregory of Nyssa wrote that “the one who has been purified to the utmost will be the one most keenly aware of what still remains to be healed” (Life of Moses 2.238). Christ’s forgiveness from the Cross is not the suppression of pain but its transfiguration. He does not forgive instead of feeling. He feels everything and forgives from within the wound.

This is what the fast asks of you. Not the renunciation of meat as spiritual performance—Jude’s clouds without water—but the descent into your own hunger, your own need, your own unhealed places where you still build walls. The thief who turns to Christ does not offer theology. He offers only raw honesty: Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom (Luke 23:42). And Christ’s answer is immediate, unboundaried, total: Today shalt thou be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43). No waiting period. No penance extracted. The veil is already torn.

Irenaeus saw that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive” (Against Heresies 4.20.7). The women who followed from Galilee, who prepared spices and ointments (Luke 23:56), who would not abandon the body even in death—they understood this. They knew that flesh matters, that the body laid in stone-hewn tomb was not a discarded husk but the seed of everything. Your body, entering this fast, is the same. Matter learning to pray. Jude’s closing doxology rings out over every honest hunger: unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy (Jude 1:24). Faultless not because you performed flawlessly, but because you stood before the torn veil and let yourself be known.

Meatfare, Cheesefare, Lenten preparation, Last Judgment, kenosis, torn veil, forgiveness, embodied fasting, theosis, Sophia