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Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant

Passiontide. We enter into deep Lent. Already the focus is increasingly on the Cross, upon the Passion of Christ. His Passion is about his willing sacrifice for us, his willingness to be acted upon by our evil. But what does that really mean? “We see through a glass darkly”, Paul reminded us on the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, even as the Gospel story about “go[ing] up to Jerusalem” was about Jesus telling us what was going to happen, telling us about the things of his passion, death, and resurrection. The point, at once disturbing and true to human experience, is that “they” – we – “understood none of these things”. The hope of the Quinquagesima Gospel was that like the blind man crying out from the wayside we might want to know, to see and to understand. But this meant that we obviously don’t see fully or clearly. Thus the Cross is veiled, especially in Passiontide, there before us but in the increasing awareness of its mystery, in the awareness of “the dullness of our blinded sight.”

Lent is about that journey of the soul with God into what God wants for us. But God’s goodness cannot be comprehended and grasped even partially without an awareness of our faults and failings, our sinfulness and wickedness which contribute to our brokenness.“The sacrifices of God”, the psalmist tells us, “are a broken spirit, / a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51.17).  This is powerful wisdom, a deep theological truth, and one which shapes our journey into the Passion of Christ.

On Passion Sunday, the Epistle and Gospel bid us reflect on the meaning of human redemption in Christ’s sacrifice. The theme is atonement. What will it take to restore us to oneness with God? It has everything to do with Christ as the Mediator between God and man because he is both God and man. His mediation is about his death, his “giv[ing] his life a ransom for many”. What does this mean? That is our struggle. The struggle to understand what redemption means belongs to our real good in God’s love and mercy. It begins by learning our lack, our incompleteness, our brokenness.

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons. We think we know what is best for us and for one another but as Jesus says we “know not what [we] ask”. This is Jesus’ verdict on our desires. We do not really know what is good for us. Our reason is clouded over and our will disordered. Such are the effects and the reality of sin. We can however engage with the struggle to learn what God wills to provide for us through the sacrifice of Christ and our participation in that sacrifice; in short, “to strive to strive” towards such things. Such is Passiontide and especially Holy Week. Everything is concentrated on the way of the cross; at once the way of our betrayals of divine love and the triumph of that love for us and in us.

Christ is “the Mediator of the new covenant”, Hebrews wonderfully tells us. It is a profound book with a profound insight into the theory of atonement, into the ways in which a new covenant is established between God and our humanity in Christ. The key term here is Mediator. The key image in the Gospel that opens us out to its deeper meaning is humility, the humility of Christ which is his service, his sacrifice for us. Blinded by our worldly ambitions and our fears and desires, we fail to see clearly what is truly wanted to be known and received. The journey of Lent requires the purification of our desires in the awareness of our brokenness. That is equally our illumination and points to our union with God in Christ. The pilgrimage paths of purification, illumination and unification begin to converge yet more and more with Passiontide and Holy Week.

“The Mediator of the new covenant”. It is a loaded and potent phrase and one which illumines something of what belongs to the Christian understanding. Here the mediator does not simply stand between and apart from two opposing concerns. Here the Mediator is emphatically both God and man, the God of all reality, on the one hand, and fully human, on the other hand. Both sides in their radical truth are present in Christ. Here is the core insight that will culminate in the Chalcedonian definition that belongs to the forms of Christian orthodoxy. Christ is truly God, perfectly man, indivisibly one person in the conjunction of both his divinity and humanity, and distinctly both God and Man in that personal unity. These are “the four things”, as Richard Hooker puts it “which concur to make complete the whole state of our Lord Jesus Christ”. They belong to the nature of “the Mediator of the new covenant”.

Such is the Christian mystery and the only way in which our brokenness can be overcome. His death is about his “becoming sin for us”, taking upon himself the forms of our separation and alienation from God and making them the way back to him. He is the Mediator who has in himself from us what properly belongs to us to give unto God for us. He is the one who alone reconciles our humanity to God not only through our humanity but by making visible in his humanity what belongs to the disorders and disarray of our sin and wickedness, the forms of our inhumanity.

By his stripes we are healed. By his wounds we are made whole. Christ’s Passion is the divine condescension in the humanity of Jesus. His service is his sacrifice. It means love. Deep Lent is about the deep love of God for our humanity, a love that goes into the depths of death and darkness of human sin to bring us light and life. We have in Christ what we need and want but cannot achieve and acquire on our own. It is not about power and prestige, “the one sit[ting] on the thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom” as in today’s Gospel. Such are the shallow tropes of our world, of what some have called the secularized religion of sociology, for instance, which seeks “the emancipation, equality and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing, individual agents” (Christopher Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology). Yet such “totalizing individualism” is at the expense of the “supportive webs of mutual dependence”, and especially at the expense of the sacred which the older generation of sociologists, such as Durkheim and Weber and even Marx, knew was critical to human life. Paradoxically, in the claim to autonomy we can only discover that we are endlessly victims, constantly being told what we can and cannot say, what we can and cannot think.

Passiontide counters such reductive and domineering shallowness by drawing us more fully into the Passion of Christ, into the patterns of service and sacrifice in which we discover the real dignity and freedom of our humanity. “Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with”, Jesus tells the sons of Zebedee. It is not about the exercise of dominion and authority over others, the presumption of the elites of our world and day. It is about service and sacrifice, about the service and sacrifice of Christ for us living in us. “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”, Jesus tells us, and grounds this in himself, “even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many”.

“By his own blood”, the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” The sacrifice is actually about love, the mutual and indwelling love of the Father for the Son in the bond of their common love, the Holy Spirit, which gathers into itself all that belongs to the redemption of our humanity. In Christ, our humanity is restored to its true vocation and being. We are made for God however much we have unmade ourselves. In Christ, “the Mediator of the new covenant”, the things of our fallenness and brokenness become the vehicles of grace and salvation. We enter into the way of redeeming love by which our humanity is restored to its truest and greatest relationship – to God and to God in us. Such is Christ “the Mediator of the new covenant” whereby God’s will realized in Christ is accomplished for us and in us.

Our focus on the Passion in such things as the Litany and the Lent Prose as well as the readings and hymns of the season serve to awaken us to the wonder of Christ’s redemption of our humanity. In Christ we are allowed to see ourselves in a whole new light, to see not just our separation from God but our union with God. The contemplation of the sinfulness of our humanity is the good of Passiontide. It is about seeing ourselves in Christ, in his service and sacrifice, and letting that rule and move in our lives.

For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant

Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2019