“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”
Passion Sunday. It is, perhaps, a curious and a rather perplexing term. What does it mean? What are we to make of Passiontide?
Suffering. That is what it means. Passion Sunday marks the beginning of our intense participation in the Passion of Christ; in other words, the sufferings of Christ. The suffering is for us and in us. The suffering is redemptive, even celebratory, and all the more so if we attend to the sufferings of Christ, which is what the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is suggesting. The Gospel reading, too, points to the redemptive nature of this suffering and to the themes of discipleship and service and the idea of learning through sacrifice.
But suffering? Surely there is more than enough suffering and on a far greater scale than any of us can really imagine in our own world and day. It has been scarcely weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and already it is fallen off the front page and, indeed, was often eclipsed by the fears and worries about nuclear fallout. The loss of life and destruction of property along the coast of Japan was overwhelmingly huge, the magnitude of the earthquake and flood unprecedented. But humans can bear only so much truth, even the truth of suffering, it seems. And yet, suffering is the main concern of Passiontide.
Whose sufferings? Ours? Yes, in a way. Suffering here is seen as part and parcel of the human condition in its brokenness and fallenness; part and parcel, too, of a fallen world where things are not always as certain and stable and as safe as we would like them to be. Suffering in the Christian viewpoint is a result of sin, original and actual, personal and collective, but in Passiontide, all of it, I repeat, all of it, is concentrated on the figure of the Crucified.
There is no path to God except through the burning love of the Crucified. This captures the whole matter of Passiontide. We are meant to look at Jesus and “him crucified” to learn about suffering and redemption. This is not easy in our culture. At once a culture of death and a culture in denial of death, to contemplate the crucified Christ seems, if not an obscenity, then at least an unhealthy obsession. For Christians, however, it is meant to be understood as a most necessary and salutary discipline; in short, something absolutely good for us and, indeed, good for the world. For here is the world’s redemption, the gathering to God of all that is good and true, and the overcoming of all that is evil and false.
Crosses. We all know the power of images. The image of the Cross is a strong image. In Christian art and architecture the cross is a central image. Church buildings are often cruciform, meaning cross-shaped. Images of the cross appear repeatedly in Christian art and in the structure and decoration of Christian buildings. In our liturgy and in the holy spaces dedicated to worship, we are meant to contemplate “the picture of Christ Crucified.” We are meant to learn something through ‘looking at the crucified.’
There are three major forms of the depiction of the cross of Christ in art and architecture. The oldest form of the depiction of the Crucified is the Christus Rex, Christ the King. Christ is presented with his arms extended – the human form as cruciform – but with a Crown on his head and robed in royal and priestly garments. It represents the idea of the triumph of Christ over sin and death. It signals victory. “In this sign, conquer.” Christ is the Triumphant King.
But at other times in the long story of the burning love of the crucified, there has been another emphasis. It is the image of the suffering Christ. Here crosses show Christ in the agony of the Passion; capturing, in one degree of intensity or another, the idea of the physical and psychological suffering of the crucified. Some of those images are deliberately hideous and grotesque, disturbing and yet compelling, especially those that were created during the times of extreme suffering in human culture, for instance, during the times of plague. The images convey graphically the idea of the reality of the sufferings of Christ for us. Christ is the Suffering Victim. “By his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place,” as Hebrews puts it. The sufferings of our wounded and broken humanity are carried by Christ in his body into the life of the Trinity.
And then, there is the image of the bare and empty cross that points obliquely to the idea of the Resurrection that follows upon the story of the Crucifixion. Christ is risen.
And yet, the cross is veiled. All three ways of thinking the Crucifixion are hidden from view, we might say. Like the mother of James and John in the Gospel, we do not really know what we are asking. She had asked for places of prominence and importance for her sons. It is for them but it reveals a mother’s pride and zealous ambition for her children. Jesus’ response is intriguing and direct. It counters all our pride and vainglory, all our ambitions and pretensions. We do not know what we are asking. We think we do but Jesus is saying, no, we don’t. After all, to ask for something for ourselves or for our children is, inescapably, at the expense of something for others.
His word here ultimately takes us to the cross, it seems to me. We do not know the real meaning of what it is that we seek. Because of that limitation and blindness, there will be suffering upon suffering. The suffering Christ addresses our blindness and arrogance in the first word of the Crucified. It is the word of gentle and compassionate forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We know and yet we do not know. We see but in “a glass darkly.” We are not fully known to ourselves. Suffering is part of the reality of our ignorance and our arrogance. To look at the suffering Christ is to be aware of the complexity of all of the forms of suffering and to be aware of our own sinfulness. This “strange and uncouth thing,” as George Herbert describes the cross, makes us think about suffering as redemption.
By looking at the crucified we confront ourselves and one another in the hurts and injuries that belong to our lives, individually and collectively. “I have suffered with those that I saw suffer,” Miranda says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She has seen the storm that has afflicted the ship and she, utterly unknowing about who any of the passengers are, assumes that there are good and noble creatures on board. She only senses that her father’s magical arts have had something to do with the storm. She has yet to discover that the ship carries all of her enemies and her father’s, namely, the very company of those who have betrayed them. In Passiontide we confront the sad reality of our betrayals.
What is the purpose of the storm? Revenge or forgiveness? Passiontide is about the pageant of forgiveness through the spectacle of suffering. It means being able to face ourselves in our incompleteness and brokenness. It means being willing to contemplate the sufferings of others as being our sufferings, too. But above all else, it means looking at the suffering Christ who bears all suffering and all death. It is beyond our imagining and yet, Passiontide speaks to our spiritual imaginations and compels us to contemplate “the picture of Christ crucified,” the one in whom all sufferings find their clarity and are overcome by his charity. And such is all for our good.
“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Passion Sunday, ‘11