by CCW | 24 March 2013 15:58
“We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, St. Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). We have become a spectacle, but what kind of spectacle? A spectacle of what? we might ask, a spectacle of ourselves in our pride and vanity, in the celebration of our brokenness and woundedness, or the spectacle of Christ at once convicting us of our betrayals of his love and redeeming us by his love?
By ‘we’, I mean the Church or at least what claims to be the Church in its many manifestations. St. Paul’s challenge to the Corinthians is equally his challenge to us about what kind of spectacle we have become. The question is a constant challenge; one which is critically before us in the events of Holy Week. We are to see ourselves in the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals. We are very much on display in these events, caught in the conflicting storms of the emotions of our hearts. We are not spectators of others so much as we are spectators of ourselves as betrayers of Christ. This reality of our humanity is strikingly, poignantly and painfully present to us in our liturgy. We who cry “Hosanna to the King” then cry “Crucify, Crucify Him”! If we have hearts, then we cannot help but be convicted by the terror and the tyranny of our betrayals.
Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals. It simply concentrates for us the forms of betrayal which belong to the disorders of our lives individually and collectively. Somehow it belongs to our good to contemplate the destructive force of human folly and foolishness; only so can we participate in the serious joy of our redemption. In other words the events of this week, liturgically and sacramentally re-enacted, recall us to a joy that is greater than the mood swings of our hearts, to a joy that is deep and abiding, holy and true, precisely because there is something beyond ourselves which redeems us from ourselves. Indeed, our contemplation of “betraying the journey” actually belongs to the journey.
It belongs to our maturity, to the maturing of our vision and our witness, to contemplate the forms of our betrayal of Christ. We might say that it is built into the very meaning of our Christian identity. It means that we have to be constantly asking ourselves about what kind of spectacle we present, constantly challenging ourselves about our Christian witness, constantly seeking to keep the focus on Christ and not on ourselves, constantly being aware of how easily we make idols of ourselves. It belongs to the deep mercy of God in Christ that Holy Week lies before us as a corrective to the spectacle of ourselves. Only so can we be a community of grace.
Holy Week recalls us to the spectacle of repentance through the contemplation of our betrayals. We look to Christ in the folly and fickleness of our hearts. But he looks upon us with his eyes of divine compassion. We are at once convicted and convinced, convicted of our betrayals and convinced of his greater love. Then we become a spectacle of the redemptive love of Christ “to the world, to angels and to men.”
Fr. David Curry
AMD Palm Sunday 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/03/24/sermon-for-palm-sunday-200pm-service-for-atlantic-ministry-of-the-deaf/
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