Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week
admin | 1 April 2015“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
The Passion According to St. Luke is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week even as we begin to enter into the intensity of the Passion with Tenebrae and the liturgy of Maundy Thursday. His account of the Passion is intensified and in turn intensifies our understanding of the Scriptures read in the Offices. Today, the readings from Numbers 21.4-9 and from Leviticus 16.2-14 together with the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel reflect powerfully upon our holy week text from Zechariah, “they shall look on him whom they pierced.”
The Leviticus lesson at Evening Prayer details the theme of atonement and the idea of the scapegoat, the one upon whom the burden of sins is placed and who is sent into the wilderness, and the goat, too which is sacrificed as “a sin offering for the people” and whose blood is brought into the mercy seat of the holy place. Powerful, primitive and certainly disturbing images but in The Epistle from Hebrews the theme of atonement is further developed. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” but rather than repeated sacrifices, Christ is said not to have “entered into holy places made with hands … but into heaven itself” and signifies the fulfillment of the logic of atonement in himself. “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” Once again the theme of our looking upon Christ is presented to us.
It is a point of emphasis in Hebrews. “Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our Faith,” referencing at once his passion, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” but also suggesting our looking upon him in his second coming at the end of time. In the Passion we look upon him in relation to our sins as well as his love; only so can there be the looking for him “the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” The moments of looking are connected; in some sense they are a notional difference, a difference in the nature of our looking. In terms of Zechariah’s text we “look upon him whom [we] have pierced” to be convicted of sin and convinced about love. This kind of double looking is also signaled in the reading from Numbers in a powerful image which John will apply to Christ.
The story in Numbers is about the continuing saga of Israel’s disobedience in the wilderness, particularly their complaining about the provisions which God has given for them. In response God sends fiery serpents among the complainers which leads to their confession of sin. To heal them, Moses makes a bronze serpent so that if any are bitten by the fiery serpent, “he would look at the bronze serpent and live.” The bronze serpent is made out of fire, too, joining copper and tin to form bronze but, more importantly, the idea here is that their sin is made objective to them. They have to see that in order to live. Salvation means nothing without our knowledge of sin.
John in the third chapter of his Gospel grasps the spiritual significance of this passage. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3.13). Our looking means the awareness of sin and the knowledge of salvation. The sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel concentrates these themes in terms of Jesus’ teaching about his going from them at once into the desolation of the Passion but also into the love of the Father. Suffering and joy are interposed, each present in the other. Once again, we are returned to the words of Christ. “I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes, you may remember that I told you of them.”
That the accounts of the Passion are written after the experience of the Resurrection means that these words are recalled and remembered after the fact, as it were, and are understood only after the fact. In other words, they are only understood in and through the Passion as seen in the light of the Resurrection. That only heightens the intensity of the significance of the Passion and our looking and thinking upon Christ crucified.
Tenebrae is the service on Wednesday night which anticipates the Triduum Sacrum largely through the Psalms of the Passion. Our participation in the Passion of Christ can never be reduced to a linear account; always our participation is in and through an interpretative matrix about its meaning. Tenebrae shadows forth something of the meaning of the Passion in order to intensify our understanding of its meaning. It marks the beginning of our intense gaze, hence the readings from Leviticus and Hebrews together with Numbers and John 16.
These readings are intensified in turn by Luke’s beginning of the Passion of Christ. Luke is the master story-teller and his Gospel presents us with the most powerful images of the sufferings of Christ as seen in his depiction of the agony of Christ in Gethsemane and in his account of Peter’s betrayal. The images are profoundly visual. In Gethsemane Christ is pictured by Luke as “being in an agony” as “pray[ing] more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground,” all ways of capturing the intensity of his anticipation of his Passion where on the Cross his blood will indeed fall down to the ground. In other words, Luke provides us with something of the psychological drama of Christ’s Passion, helping us to see, such as we can, from within the heart of Christ, showing us something of his heart in powerful and visual ways; “his sweat as it were great drops of blood.” The phrase ‘as it were’ reveals everything. He is helping us to see and feel something of what Christ knows and experiences; in a way shadowing forth the deeper meaning of what he will feel and know both in soul and body on the Cross.
Luke’s account of Peter’s betrayal has a similar psychological aspect to it for in his account it all turns on Christ’s “turn[ing] and look[ing] upon Peter” just at the moment when the cock crew. It is a powerful moment. Christ looks at Peter and in that look Peter is convicted. “Peter remembered the word of the Lord ..,. and he went out, and wept bitterly.”
“They shall look upon me whom they have pierced” the King James Version puts it. Here we have this intense moment when Christ, the one who will be crucified, looks upon us and we in turn are pierced and moved to tears. What is that look of Christ? It is not judgment but sorrowing compassion, a look of love that convicts our hearts of our own betrayals of love more surely than any look of angry judgment.
Such is the purpose of the Triduum Sacrum; we are meant to be moved more and more by love, not without the awareness of sin, of course, but already with the awareness of the greater power of love. Christ’s agony and look upon Peter show us something deeper about the meaning of atonement and sacrifice. They are really all about the love “which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” for “charity never faileth.” That is what is being awakened in us through our looking upon the crucified. We look and are healed. Out of the shadows of the Cross comes light and grace and salvation.
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, 2015