by CCW | 17 March 2013 15:40
Passiontide begins with two powerful and suggestive readings, not to mention the gradual psalm[1] set to one of Bach’s passion tunes. We ignore them at our peril. The epistle reading from Hebrews lays out the profound theology of atonement and redemption. Christ is the Mediator of the New Covenant, the new understanding of the relationship between God and Man accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice. The gospel reading from Matthew relates a critical set of exchanges, first, between Jesus and the mother of the sons of Zebedee, secondly, with the sons themselves, and, then, with the rest of the disciples. The dialogue is altogether about two things: sacrifice and service.
“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus said, in the gospel read on the Sunday just before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday. Not just I go up. Not just you go up, but we go up. In some sense that is the meaning of Christian pilgrimage. It is about a journey to God and with God. The meaning of that journey takes on an heightened sense of intensity with Passiontide. Suddenly more and more of what that journey entails begins to become more and more apparent. It challenges all our worldly aims and ambitions. It is not about success as the world counts success but neither is about being losers. No. There is altogether something here that is much deeper and grander. It speaks to our souls.
The Letter to the Hebrews is a theological treatise. It seeks to explicate the theology of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Atonement is one of its major themes. Atonement simply means being at one; in this case, being at one with God. But the whole reality of human experience is about our estrangement from God. The story of the Fall is played out in each of our lives individually and collectively. We are not at one with the world. We are not at one with one another. We are not at one with God.
This is the stark reality of the human condition. We are anxious and fearful about the world, particularly the natural world, the physical and material world over which we claim a kind of dominance and mastery, on the one hand, and a kind of despair about what that we have done as a consequence, on the other hand. We are not at one with one another as a world of endless conflicts and wars bears more than ample and sad testimony and in the brokenness of our families, our communities and our churches. All these estrangements arise in a fundamental sense from our estrangement from God. This is emphatically and inescapably the religious and theological perspective of the Christian Faith. It argues in the strongest way imaginable that the forms of our estrangement from the world and from one another arise from our separation from God.
Yet at the heart of Passiontide is the divine will to be reconciled with his creation. Our willful separation is the old story of the Fall, the story of disobedience and a betrayal of truth. The new story is what God does to reconcile us with himself. That is the story of Christ, a story which has its most concentrated form in the Passion of Christ. The struggles of our humanity in all our disarray and confusion are drawn up into the heart of God. Indeed, Passiontide reveals the heart of God to us. It is the heart which is broken for us on the Cross. It is the heart of sacrifice and service.
We cannot begin to comprehend the wonder of the divine will to be at one with the creation which has constantly been in rebellion and destructive disarray. Yet this is what we are given to see in the events of the Passion. Take away the divine will to be reconciled with his world and people and the story is nothing but an unedifying, gruesome, and meaningless tale. But see in the story the divine will to reconcile us with himself through the Incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God and then, then you begin to grasp the strange wonder, joy, and delight of the Christian faith.
Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant, Hebrews instructs us. We have, perhaps, become accustomed and blasé about mediators in the world of business and employment conflicts and in the conflicts between the warring nations of the world. What is presented here is something greater and more profound. The gap between God and Man caused by sin cannot be overcome by us. However much we wish it to be overcome we cannot make it so. There are our desires, to be sure, like the desire of the mother of the sons of Zebedee. We look for what is best for our children and for ourselves. We seek to get ahead in the world which, by definition, means trampling someone else down. There is no getting ahead in the world on the world’s terms that is not at the expense of others. My gain is your loss. So much for human mediation, it seems..
It is not so with God. Passiontide ushers us into the greatest of all revolutions. God puts himself in our place to bring us to himself, to our place with him. It happens through the most challenging feature of the Christian Gospel. Christ is our Passover, our sacrifice, the Divine Mediator between God and Man, the one who bears the whole sorry packet of human stupidity and willful sinfulness that defines the sad reality of the human condition. He gives himself for us and invites us to be with him in his sacrifice for us. He calls us to love as he has loved. It is only his love in us that can make it possible for us to love. He makes something out of the futile nothingness of our empty lives. Redemption is the new creation.
That is what Passiontide presents to us: the divine will to be reconciled with us and to gather us to himself. We are in the story. We must want to be at one with God, with his world and one another, but our wants and desires cannot accomplish what we want. What we want is simply what we know we do not have. That is what makes Passiontide so wondrous and poignant. God gives us what we want but cannot attain ourselves.
This is where the dialogue of the Passion Sunday Gospel comes into play. The sons of Zebedee answer Jesus’ question about his cup and his baptism. “We are able,” they say. Jesus acknowledges this. “Ye shall indeed drink of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.” We are allowed to participate in Christ’s Passion. It is his sacrifice for us and yet he allows us to be with him to drink of the cup of his Passover sacrifice and to be baptized into his death and resurrection for us. Such is the radical meaning of our Holy Week liturgies. It is not entertainment. It is exactly what this gospel story suggests. It is God’s act with us, Christ’s sacrifice – unique, pure and perfect – and yet for us so as to be in us. And it is about service, itself the living form of sacrifice, day in and day out. “For the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
This is our vocation. To let the sacrifice of Christ define us and to lead us into service for one another and for our world. But only out of our service to Christ. His sacrifice accomplishes our atonement but we have to live it in our lives of sacrificial service, in the giving of ourselves as Christ has given himself.
Passion Sunday coincides this year with St. Patrick’s day and so it may be appropriate to say something about Patrick, the patron saint of the Irish. What we commemorate are not shamrocks, shillelaghs and snakes, the stuff of legend but something rather more profound, namely, the transformation of a culture. Patrick is the Apostle of Ireland, the one who brought Christianity to its shores, bearing the light of Christ to Ireland in a time of darkness, lighting the paschal fire on the Hill of Tara and banishing the pagan darkness. Thomas Cahill juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of a culture in its conversion to Christianity; the one, beautifully carved and deliberately broken, symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice; the other beautifully engraved and whole, capturing the names of the apostolic fellowship; the one, a century or two before Christ is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century AD is known as the Ardagh Chalice. There is, I suppose, all the difference between a cauldron and a chalice; in this case, the juxtaposition captures the transformation of a culture.
The great poem and hymn St. Patrick’s Breastplate[2] or Lorica is associated with St. Patrick and largely attributed to him. It lives and breathes the patient, pastoral, impassioned and devout spirit of St. Patrick; the very qualities needed for dealing with the Irish. As that great hymn emphasizes, the Creator of every created thing is the Blessed Trinity. “I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity.” By cup and by baptism we are granted to participate in the life of God, the life of the Trinity.
Christ asks the question of us, “Are ye able?” Will we like the sons of Zebedee say “we are able?” If so, then that leads inextricably to service, to the sacrifice of ourselves for the good of Christ’s church and people, for the good of his world. Only so shall we discover our atonement with God, with his world and with one another.
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday
March 17th, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/03/17/sermon-for-passion-sunday-4/
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