Jesus stands trial, accused of blasphemy. He, in turn, is insulted and mocked by his Roman guards. Judas knows he is cursed, and hangs himself. The church has always had a slightly ambivalent attitude towards cursing. The thinking behind these services, and the more informal practice, was simple enough.
Modern commentators agree that cursing is an activity that has close associations with blessing.
Indeed, the forms of words are frequently parallel. To bless someone, or something, is to raise them, or it, to its proper status before God, enabling fuller praise to be returned through the very thing that is blessed. Cursing is the opposite of this, a spiral of denigration, denial and, finally, the absence of hope. Like a blessing, a curse is what linguistic scholars term a speech-act, since it is simultaneously a verbal utterance and a deed performed. In the very act of speaking, there is action.