by CCW | 3 April 2012 23:00
Mary’s word of response to God provides a chilling and yet intriguing commentary on the heart of The Passion According to St. Mark. At the heart of the Passion, we have the most notorious and most difficult word of Christ from the Cross, the only word from the Cross that Mark and Matthew, too, pass on to us. It is the word that troubles us most and grieves our hearts, as it should. “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.” “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is heart-breaking.
At once a question, it is one of the dozen or so Aramaic phrases in the New Testament and yet it is actually a transliterated quote from the Psalms, from Psalm 22. The only word of the Crucified Christ in two of the canonical gospels, it must give us pause to consider and weigh its import and message. How is this word according to thy word? And yet, how can it be understood in any other way? It captures precisely if indeed somewhat terrifyingly the meaning of Christ’s Passion. He has entered into the land of the darkness of human hearts, of our refusal and denial of God himself. The statement of the Psalmist is testimony to the sense of being bereft and abandoned; in a way, this is the true reality and result of sin. That we don’t see it is because of our own weakness and blindness; paradoxically, because of our own sinfulness. Christ sees it and names it from within the experience of the moment, the moment of utter estrangement and remove from the Father. But note, not from God.
This is, it seem to me, the interesting point. At the moment of extreme duress and pain and agony, the Crucified Christ cries out. He cries out to God. He voices, in the words of the Psalmist, his distress and the existential meaning of his situation. This is the most supreme and, perhaps, the greatest example of ‘the situated individual’. But note as well the point that Christ cries out to God and that his cry is, unambiguously, a prayer. Jesus teaches us how to feel by his words of the most intense feeling imaginable. It is not by accident that it is a word from the Psalms. The Psalms, we may say, supremely and intensely teach us how to feel.
The cry of dereliction complements in a way Mary’s ‘yes’ to God. That yes does not imply or require, let alone demand, an easy ride, a pleasant journey. No. It really relates more to what Jesus says here, namely, a calling out to God, an acknowledgment of God even in the form of an agonizing question, even one which may seem to be accusatory. His cry is the agony of the Saviour who seeks our good through our incapacity both to think and feel his goodness. He feels utterly abandoned. In a way, he is. There is, after all, nothing that we can do to overcome what has separated us from God. All that we can do is contemplate the heavenly grace of Christ’s passion. He names the condition of human sinfulness. It is about being cut off from God. Sin denies God. That is its truth and its folly.
The Crucified is, indeed, the God forsaken. He has, indeed, gone into the far away land of dissimilitude, the land of unlikeness, the land of the most intense form of estrangement from all that matters most. Like the prodigal son, who in coming to himself, recognizes that he is no longer worthy to be called a son, so here, the Son of God cries out, not to the Father, but at least to God. The intimacy of the former relationship is seemingly (and frighteningly) eclipsed by the experience of the meaning of sin. It means the utter estrangement and separation from God. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And yet, even in the agony of the Crucifixion, there is profoundly a cry, a prayer, to God. It is, we might say, testimony to the righteousness of the Son, to his truth and love for us. He cries out to God in the moment of the experience of being God-forsaken.
He bears our agony. He bears all that belongs to the suffering servant of ancient Israel. He bears and expresses, in all of the intensity of sin’s self-imposed alienation from truth imaginable, precisely the full meaning of Mary’s word, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” For it means suffering. “A sword shall pierce through thine own soul also.” Christ wills to suffer the full meaning of sin’s estrangement from God. The Word and Son of the Father quotes from the Word of God written. Nothing could capture more completely the agony of the Crucifixion. Nothing, too, can capture more completely, what it means to feel the agony, to feel the Passion. That is what makes the word here so compelling.
That sense of the compelling nature of Christ’s word of dereliction is captured most wondrously in the word of the Centurion looking upon these events, the word of a bystander, the word of one who to all appearances has no vested interest in these affairs of state. And yet, his word of response, like Mary’s word to the angel, expresses exactly the sense of what is universal and for all time in this story, if we have the capacity to feel it, to feel exactly what the Centurion, this Roman soldier, felt and expressed. His word complements the word of the Crucified and the word of Mary. “Truly,” he says, “this man was the Son of God.” It is the word which is drawn out of him because of what he has seen and heard.
His word restores the sense of Sonship to the experience of the Crucified. “Truly this man was the Son of God.” It is a powerful testimony to the divine will which embraces the depths of despair and desolation, the sense of utter dereliction. And yet, this unknown and unnamed soldier has grasped and glimpsed the inner reality and truth of this moment. He has, we might say, felt its truth and meaning. He has named the greater truth. “Truly this man was the Son of God.” What he is has expressed captures the deeper meaning of the Passion. It is, and can only be “according to thy word”, the word of the Father, however dark and despairing that experience may be. Here we glimpse already something of the sense of glory in the very heart of suffering. It is there in the response of the Centurion to the Crucified Christ. It arises, we might say, all in accordance with thy word.
Fr. David Curry,
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/04/03/sermon-for-tuesday-in-holy-week-2/
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