Day: March 25, 2012

“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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