Christ Church

“I knew you in the wilderness; in the land of drought”

Holy Week is the week of our betrayals of God and of one another. To contemplate such betrayals is the good of this week. Why? Because it is only possible through the love of Christ. We immerse ourselves in all four of the accounts of the Passion starting with Matthew’s Passion on Palm Sunday followed by the Passion according to Mark today and tomorrow, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and ending with John’s Passion on Good Friday. This is one of the remarkable features of our Anglican Prayer Book tradition.

But the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer also contribute profoundly to our meditation and understanding of the Passion of Christ in all of its scriptural fullness. The Gospel of John is read at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout Holy Week until Holy Saturday. It functions like a basso continuo, an underlying bass line which grounds and holds together all of the chaos of Holy Week, the chaos of human sin and evil. What we contemplate is the dynamic between sin and love. Such is the agony of Holy Week, wonderfully encapsulated in George Herbert’s poem, The Agonie. Who would know Sinne, the poem asks, and answers “let him repair Unto Mount Olivet” to the garden of Christ’s agonie, to see “a man … wrung with pains” and all “bloudie be,” a reference to Christ’s tears coming down like great drops of blood on the one hand and an anticipation of the actual blood outpoured on the Cross, on the other hand. Herbert gives us a very powerful image of sin. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” Such is the ugly intensity of the Passion.

But we are to know Love in and through Christ’s Passion and to know that love intimately and sacramentally, that is to say in terms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, he in us and we in him. His sufferings freely bearing our sufferings and showing us his love. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, /Which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine.” Such is the beauty of the Passion.

Hosea is the great Love prophet of the Old Testament whose words in the 13th and 14th chapter contribute to our reflection upon the Passion. “I knew you in the wilderness,” God says (Hosea 13.5). Holy Week is about our going into the wilderness of sin and suffering. It is from Hosea that Paul takes the famous words that have become part of the funeral liturgy, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Hosea bids us “take with you words and return to the Lord thy God,” words which are echoed by Luke in last evening’s second lesson about hanging on the words of Christ.

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The collect for today, Monday in Holy Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 63:7-9
The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark
The Gospel: St. Mark 14:1-72

Artwork: Mihály Munkácsy, Passion Trilogy: Ecce Homo, 1890-96. Oil on canvas, Deri Museum, Debrecen, Hungary.

“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”

Our cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to “let him be crucified.” And so it begins, and ends, on Palm Sunday. It begins with the exultant note of rejoicing but ends with the grim spectacle of Christ’s death on the Cross. Yet that ending also marks a beginning. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. For only then can we say that “truly, this was the Son of God” (Mt.27.54). Already something comes to birth, to light, out of the darkness of Christ’s suffering and death.

The global pandemic has made the world a rather fearful place. That is, perhaps, the greatest danger of the Covid-19 crisis; the fearfulness that brings out the worst kinds of despair and anxiety as we contemplate the growing numbers of fatalities globally. Churches are closed and media headlines suggest that preachers wonder, ‘where is God in all of this?’

Where is God? Right where He always is, right in the midst of the struggles and sufferings of our wounded and bent humanity. Never more so than in Holy Week and in the drama of the Passion of Palm Sunday. The question is not, ‘where is God in all of this?’ The question is where are we in our thinking and our caring about the ethical and about one another? The whole point of Holy Week is to confront us with the contradictions that belong to human sin and wickedness without which we cannot be awakened to the truth of our humanity in God. Such are the deep lessons of the Passion. We are to be where he is. As Rowan Williams puts it in his lovely book Being Christian, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering” That is where we are.

“There were they in fear where no fear was,” the Psalmist says (Ps. 53.6). In a way, such words speak to our current state of isolation. For as cooped up in our homes we are, it seems, largely insulated from contagion but not from the fears of our minds and hearts about others in our families and communities, fears about those in the front lines of health care, fears about deaths in Nursing Homes, fears about ourselves and a growing fear, suspicion, even hatred of others, precisely because of our isolation. No doubt, too, there are fears about the necessities of life, fears about other kinds of illnesses that belong to the human condition quite apart from the coronavirus. Our fear is very much a fear of the other, a fear of bodies, a fear of nature. At the heart of our fears is uncertainty. Yet the Passion of Christ is all about God’s willingness to subject himself to the bodily realities of human suffering. God wills to suffer. That is the striking paradox and meaning of Holy Week.

Such is the radical truth of the Incarnation, recalled for us in the Annunciation of Mary which fell in Passiontide this year. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God being with us and so with human suffering. Her Annunciation marks his conception in her womb. Only so can God suffer for us and with us. In the body. And why? To bring us to the truth of ourselves in his will for us. To do so through suffering.

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The collect for today, the Sunday Next before Easter, commonly called Palm Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 2:5-11
The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Matthew
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:1-54

Artwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, 1897. Musée Georges-Garrett, Vesoul, France.

Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten Programme addresses (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer”.

The collect for today, the Feast Day of St. Ambrose (339-397), Doctor of the Church, Poet, Bishop of Milan (source):

Lord God of hosts,
who didst call Ambrose from the governor’s throne
to be a bishop in thy Church
and a courageous champion of thy faithful people:
mercifully grant that, as he fearlessly rebuked rulers,
so we may with like courage
contend for the faith which we have received;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 2:7-11, 16-18
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:35-37, 42-44

Artwork: Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo, St, Ambrose and Emperor Theodosius, c. 1620s. Oil on canvas, Sant’Ambrogio a Voltri, Genoa, Italy.

The collect for today, the commemoration of Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Bishop of Calcutta, Missionary, Hymn writer (source):

Almighty God,
you granted to Reginald Heber
a manifold life of service,
to shepherd a rural parish in England
and to preach in the cities of India.
Give to your people such faithfulness,
that in every place and circumstance
they may sing of your power
and minister your gifts
for the glory of your Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Richard (1197-1253), Bishop of Chichester (source):

Most merciful redeemer,
who gavest to thy bishop Richard
a love of learning, a zeal for souls
and a devotion to the poor:
grant that, encouraged by his example,
we may know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly,
day by day;
who livest and reignest with the Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
ever one God, world without end.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:10-13
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25: 31-40

This is the fourth and final address in this series. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

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It happened late one afternoon

It seems strange to be in the Chapel without all of you physically present but the deeper point of Chapel is how we are connected spiritually through the ways in which we think and pray for one another. What we wrestle with in Chapel, we wrestle with in our global world. Something has happened, “late one afternoon” in this story; late in December, in one part of the world, and now everywhere. In both cases, we are in the story. In both cases, there is an ethical challenge, first, about sin itself, and second, about how we deal with human suffering; in short, how we care for one another in a suffering world.

You have all heard of the ‘slippery slope argument’ and the ‘domino effect,’ about how one thing leads to another, about things going from bad to worse. You may even have realized that at times in your own lives. We return from the March break and, indeed, something has happened. You are not here in the same way and yet we are together in the intellectual and spiritual life of the School. We return to the story of David, but it is not David as hero but as sinner. Something happened. The lessons are there for us all. As the poet/ preacher John Donne wonderfully puts it, “David shows us the slippery ways into sin … and the penitential ways out of sin.”

The Thursday reading is about the first; the Friday reading relates to the second. A marvellous story told with great craft and care, the story of David holds up a mirror to each of us, just as it is also a window opening us out to the wonder of God in the face of human sin. What happened “late one afternoon”? David walking in his roof-top garden in Jerusalem sees a beautiful woman bathing. She is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier fighting for David against the Ammonites. He sees her. He desires her. He acquires her. He has sex with her. He impregnates her. Note the progression from what we see to what we desire to what we possess.

Think about it for a moment and you realize that this story shows the dynamic of the ethics of the universal moral code of our humanity, the Ten Commandments. First, David covets – desires – another man’s wife. Secondly, David commits adultery. But that is not all. She is pregnant. What next? David seeks to cover it up, recalling Uriah from the battle, sending him home to his wife in the hopes that her pregnancy can be attributed to her husband. It is an act of deception through a misuse of reason and speech. But Uriah holds to the warrior code and sleeps at the door of the King’s house, the King whom he serves. He is acting out of solidarity with his fellow soldiers. David then tries to get him drunk in the hopes that he will go to Bathsheba; his plan is foiled yet again. In desperation, David conspires to have Joab place Uriah at the forefront of the battle where he will most surely be killed. Joab reports to David that “your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.” David covets Bathsheba; he commits adultery with her; he conspires to have Uriah killed. Such is the slippery slope of sin graphically and compellingly told. In a marvel of understatement, we are told that “the thing which David had done displeased the Lord.” Do you think?!

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