Christ Church

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word to God frames our reflections upon Christ’s Passion  this Holy Week. The accounts of the Passion are read in their fullness from all four Gospels during this week. On Monday in Holy Week we begin The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark and conclude his account of the Passion on Tuesday.

The beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark is framed by the story of a woman having a box of ointment of spikenard which is broken open and used to anoint Jesus’ head and by the story of Peter’s weeping upon the realization that he has betrayed Jesus. In a way, the tears of Peter and the outpouring of the spikenard signal the only good things that we can say about our humanity on this day. For in between lies all of the deceit and folly, compromise and violence, miscarriage of justice and forms of convenience, not to mention betrayal, that belong to the untruth and darkness of our human hearts. Not a pretty picture, we must say. The thoughts of many hearts are indeed revealed to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word in response to God’s word to her through the angel Gabriel provides the interpretative principle for our Holy Week pilgrimage. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the lesson from Isaiah (Is. 52.13-53 end) presents us with the picture of the suffering servant. At once, Israel, in the discovery of her vocation “to be a light to lighten the gentiles”, a vocation to be God’s chosen people for all people precisely through the experience of suffering, the image of the suffering servant is understandably transferred to Christ in his passion. Jesus, we might say, is the suffering servant. And in Luke’s memorable phrase, “all the people hung upon his words” (Lk. 19.48). There is something captivating and compelling about the spectacle of Christ’s passion. It has precisely to do with the way in which the images of the Jewish Passover are transformed into something new and strange.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, with the accounts of Matthew and Luke about Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the growing sense of foreboding and unease about what this will mean. The Passover is the great Jewish celebration of the liberation of the children of the Hebrews from Pharaoh’s oppressive yoke in Egypt. At Morning Prayer on Palm Sunday, we are reminded of the Passover of the first-born, that striking illustration of the divine power that discerns the first-born of man and beast, passing over only the first-born of the Hebrews, “that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel” (Exodus 11. 7). This week will challenge us about ourselves, about our inmost selves, about the commitments and principles that define us and defeat us. “A sword shall pierce through your own soul, also”, Simeon had said to Mary upon the occasion of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk. 2.35). The intention of Holy Week is to reveal the thoughts of our hearts to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Palm Sunday is a day of striking contrasts conveyed through conflicting words. Our words are in contradiction with our hearts. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the most intense and disturbing spectacle, dare I say, that we shall ever see, all the world’s holocausts, genocides, slaughters, and wickednesses notwithstanding. You see, Palm Sunday is for us, in all of the confusions and contradictions of the western democratic societies which we inhabit, the most alarming counter-cultural spectacle that we shall ever face. It is not new, of course. Sadly, it has been cheapened by our familiar customs, perhaps, as if it were a mere cultural phenomenon. As if we are simply going through the motions of ‘we have always done this’ without thinking for half-a-second just what this week we call Holy Week really means.

On the other hand, the willful retreat by so many from the life and witness of the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks volumes about a message that you have not received though it has been completely before you. It has nothing to do with the sad and pathetic banalities of our criticisms and complaints about one another, the various and mean defenses and accusations that we hurl at one another to avoid ourselves and the picture of ourselves which Palm Sunday presents and which is revealed more fully in Holy Week which Palm Sunday inaugurates.

No. Holy Week provides the picture, year in and year out, of a very profound truth about ourselves and one which we do everything in our power to avoid. We don’t want to see this picture of ourselves but, truth be spoken, you and I are in utter contradiction with ourselves, you and I in ourselves are hell. And only this week, at least in the meaning of this week, can offer us something more than the hell of ourselves. But, paradoxically, it may seem, only by going through the hell of ourselves in the pageant of Christ’s passion for us. Only through our seeing the forms of hell in ourselves can we begin to understand the joy of human redemption. Holy Week bids us contemplate the contradictions and confusions of our hearts and minds.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The cross is veiled. It is there but it cannot be clearly seen. We know and we do not know. We see but “through a glass darkly.” Such are the paradoxes of Passion Sunday, the paradoxes of the pilgrimage of our souls. Do we simply rest in these ambiguities? Or do we seek to see and know and to be seen and known by God? To love and be loved, too, we might ask?

Passion Sunday confronts all our ambiguities and names our uncertainties. Jesus so gently says to the mother of Zebedee’s children who “desir[ed] a certain thing of him” that “ye know not what ye ask.” How does one respond to that? And yet it signals the profoundest truth about our wounded and broken humanity. It will be signaled even more eloquently and more poignantly in the first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We don’t know what we want and we don’t know what we are doing. And yet we ask and we act.

What is needed then? Simply a change of the mind; in short, repentance. We are apt to think of that in terms which are far too limited, as if repentance was merely our saying sorry. But I think that this day opens us out to a deeper understanding of repentance. And it is signaled for us in the greater paradox of this day.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The cross is veiled. It is there but it cannot be clearly seen. We see but “through a glass darkly,” as Paul explains in the Epistle read on Quinquagesima Sunday. We know and we do not know, Jesus suggests on this day. Such are the greater paradoxes of Passion Sunday. We know and yet we do not know. Do we simply rest in these ambiguities, preferring the forms of indeterminacy and indefiniteness that belong to the culture of illusion? Or do we really seek to see and know and to be seen and known by God? To love and be loved, too, we might ask?

Passion Sunday confronts all our ambiguities and uncertainties. Jesus so gently, it seems to me, says to the mother of Zebedee’s children who “desir[ed] a certain thing of him” that “you do not know what you are asking.” How does one respond to that? Yet it signals the profoundest truth about our wounded and broken humanity. On Good Friday, it will be signaled even more eloquently and more poignantly in the first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We don’t know what we want and we don’t know what we are doing. And yet we ask and act as if we do.

What is needed then? Simply a change, a metanoia of the mind; in short, repentance. We are apt to think of that in terms which are far too limited, as if repentance was merely our saying sorry. This day opens us out to a deeper understanding of repentance that is rooted in the humility of the humanity of God in Jesus Christ. That is signaled for us in the greater paradox that belongs to this day this year.

Today is also Lady Day, the commemoration of the Annunciation of Mary. Christ’s Passion takes central place and so the celebration of the Annunciation is transferred to Tuesday. Yet, the conjunction of the Annunciation with the Passion arrests the mind, as it did the mind of the poet John Donne in 1608, contemplating the even greater conjunction of the Annunciation and Good Friday on the same day. Somehow the themes of the Birth and Life are inseparable from the themes of Death and Resurrection, Christmas and Easter. This is a critical feature of the Christian understanding. It concentrates the mind upon what he called the “abridgment of Christ’s story,” his coming to us and going from us into death, the Angel’s Ave and Christ’s Consummatum est, the one heralding the beginning, Hail Mary, and the other the sense of ending, “it is finished.” Such rich paradoxes illumine the glory.

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“Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?”

The sixth chapter of The Gospel according to St. John is sometimes known as “the bread of life discourse”. It is a fascinating and complex chapter and one which challenges Jesus’ disciples and the people of Israel in general, and, for that matter, all of us. As today’s Gospel reading makes clear the overarching theme is about the provisions God makes for us in the wilderness journey of our lives. Taken with the epistle reading from Galatians, the food of our wayfaring is food from home, “the bread of heaven,” as Jesus later names it. Jerusalem, as Paul makes clear, is our spiritual home, our alma mater, our nursing mother, as it were. The Gospel passage is about how we are sustained, nourished and refreshed in the journey with spiritual food. The teaching is the feeding on this day which is variously known as Mothering Sunday, Laetare Sunday and Refreshment Sunday, terms which are all derived from the readings in one way or another.

The word, wilderness, is used twice in the chapter and in both cases refers to the Exodus journey of the Hebrews. The text from Psalm 78 reflects on the trials of that ancient wilderness journey. A critical feature of the psalmist’s reflection is the complaint of the people in the wilderness. The question, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?” is a rhetorical question that challenges God; in short, puts God to the test. We are recalled instantly to the First Sunday of Lent, to the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations, too, belong to the wilderness, quite literally to the desert.

This Gospel story is the answer to the question but in such a way as to highlight our disbelief and distrust of the essential goodness of God. Here the Word by which we live and which nourishes and refreshes us is bread, food for our wayfaring souls. The bread in the wilderness is about the divine generosity from which we live; “twelve baskets” are taken up from “the fragments” of “the five barley-loaves that remain” a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, we might say, a basket for each of the twelve apostles of the new Israel, the Church, too, we might add.

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“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”

It is a terrifying and frightening picture, perhaps, the most terrifying and frightening picture of the human soul in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, this is where the ancient gospel with all of its perplexity and confusion about devils and demons meets the darkness and despair of contemporary culture. No set of readings, it seems to me, speaks more directly to our confusions and uncertainties.

There is far more to this picture than the postures of moralizing righteousness that, at first glance, we might think is the message of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians with his proscriptions against “fornication”, “all uncleanness”, “covetousness” which is idolatry, “filthiness”, “foolish-talking”, “jesting”, all of “which are not befitting”, and “whoremonger[ing]”, as he puts it, all of which are summed up as being “the unfruitful works of darkness.”

It seems like quite a list of the usual suspects of human sinfulness with more than a modicum of focus on sex which troubles our age so greatly. And yet, this list of “the unfruitful works of darkness” is based upon something deeper and more profound, and perhaps, most troublingly so. It will belong to the tradition of moral theology to rank and place the vices and virtues of the human soul in a kind of hierarchy, a kind of system, if you will, such as the seven deadly sins, for instance. And there is something right about that culturally, politically and socially. There is, we might say, the recognition that our peccadilloes, our little sins, as it were, are not to be compared with the ranker forms of evil potentially and actually in our souls and our communities and that are before us in the endless parade of injustices and violences in our world and day. But, be that as it may, there is also the deep spiritual insight that all our sins, from the least to the greatest, belong to the darkness. Paul claims that all of it must come to light.

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“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” we heard last week. It was Jesus’ response to the first temptation of the tempter, the devil. It captures, really, an entire attitude and approach to the Scriptures, especially in our Anglican understanding. It belongs to an entire theology of revelation. It speaks ever so profoundly to the deeper meaning of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures who are not and cannot be defined simply by the things of this world. This whole outlook and way of understanding is, of course, profoundly sacramental. Jesus will make the connection between bread and word ever so clear. “I am the bread of life”, he says, the bread of the Passover which he says is his body, “this sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life” as the Prayer Book Eucharistic prayer so beautifully puts it.

This sacramental connection between bread and word is present in this Sunday’s Gospel, too. It tells the wonderful, though somewhat disturbing, story of the Caananite woman coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”. Some of the same themes present themselves here as last Sunday. The ensuing dialogue is about the strength of this woman who is an outsider, we might say, but who has an insight into who Jesus is for the whole of our humanity. The dialogue, which is initially so troubling, serves to bring out a tension within Israel about God only to conclude that through Israel God in Jesus Christ is for everyone. But it is not cheap grace. The importunity or perseverance of this remarkable woman is like the insistence of the blind man on Quinquagesima Sunday. It belongs to a remarkable insight into the power of God’s unconditional goodness in Jesus Christ. But it testifies as well to the necessity of our seeking what God wants for us. As the poet John Donne puts it in a marvelous and super-intense sonnet, “salvation to all that will is nigh”. You have to want it, to will it. But you can only will what God gives.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells his disciples and us. And he tells them and us exactly what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem.

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all thigs that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and the third day he shall rise again.

He speaks of terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts and words and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short; Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order.

Christ speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” It complements Paul’s phrase about how we “see in a glass darkly”. We understand so little. These things were hid from them and, in a way, they are hid from us. We can’t understand except through the journey of Lent.

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde;
To me, who took eyes that I might you finde:
Was ever grief like mine?
(George Herbert, The Sacrifice, 1633)

So the poet, George Herbert, drawing upon the words of Isaiah and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, confronts us with the mystery of Lent, the mystery of human redemption. Christ “took eyes”, became man that he might find you and me, even in our blindness, so that we might see and be changed by what we see.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.

To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.

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