“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.
March 25th also celebrates the Annunciation of Mary. The conjunction of the Annunciation with the Passion arrests the mind. Somehow the themes of the Birth and Life are inseparable from the themes of Death and Resurrection, Christmas and Easter. It concentrates the mind upon what a poet called the “abridgment of Christ’s story”, his coming to us and going from us into death, the one heralding the beginning, Hail Mary, and the other the sense of ending, “it is finished.” Such rich paradoxes illumine the glory.
Christ begins his earthly life in the womb of Mary, breaks forth into the world as the incarnate son at Christmas and goes to the tomb of Good Friday only to break forth again into resurrection glory at Easter. The tomb becomes the womb of new life, the new life of the Resurrection. We know this, don’t we? We know the story. Indeed. We do know and yet we don’t. We don’t fully grasp the meaning of the Jesus’ going up to Jerusalem. It means the way of the Cross.
The cross is veiled from our eyes. How will we come to see more clearly? That is the further significance, it seems to me, of Passiontide. It confronts us with all the forms of our unknowing. The answer to the Gospel question, “what do you want?” is given by Mary’s response to the mystery of the Angelic salutation. She heard the Ave of the Angel; she asked what it meant, “how can this be?” She responds to the explanation with the words, “be it unto me according to thy word.”
What this means for us, I think, is our openness to the things of Christ’s passion, the things that are opened out to us through the Scriptures read in this holy season. It may be that, like Mary, “a sword shall pierce through [our] own souls also” at what we hear and see, for what is on parade in the passion of Christ are all of the things belonging to the disorder and the disarray of our humanity as made visible in him. Her response is not, however, some sort of shrug of the shoulder, some sort of concession to fatalism, the “whatever” of contemporary culture which means ‘who cares? I don’t’. Her reply signals the very nature of the Church and never more so than in deep Lent. We are, quite literally, to be hanging upon the very words of Christ, hanging upon the very words of him who goes to hang upon the cross for us and for our salvation. He comes and he goes for us and for our salvation. Let Mary’s “be it unto me” be unto us. It is for us but only if we attend to it.
We know this but its meaning remains veiled and hidden from our eyes. For all our pretense of independence and self-sufficiency, we do not live alone and simply for ourselves. That is the way of death and it belongs to Passiontide to help us to see more clearly the ignorant and deadly folly of our ways, that, indeed, we “know not what [we] do.”
Only in contemplating our unknowing can we begin to come to know; knowing that we do not know is the beginning of our knowing. Passiontide reveals the depths of human folly and wickedness to us. But that must seem to be a rather negative truth and one that contrasts with the gentleness of Christ’s rebuke, if rebuke it is, to the ambitions of the mother of Zebedee’s sons. The point is that a glory awaits us but in far different terms that what we might imagine. Hence the profounder truth of Mary’s response to the divine initiative without which the Lord is not with her and through her with us. She, indeed, “mothers each new grace” if we are open to the word which defines her and the truth of all our humanity with her.
“We are wound/ With mercy round and round/ As if with air.” That is the mercy of Christ in his Passion for us, the mercy conveyed through the mother of mercy, Mary, who “holds high motherhood/towards all our ghostly good/ And plays in grace her part/About man’s beating heart.” To learn that mercy is the joy of Passiontide, but only if we like Mary learn to say “be it unto me according to thy word,” the word of him who seeks all our good, our good in knowing his goodwill and love towards us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2012
AMD Service of the Deaf