Year: 2014

“All the people hung upon his words”

Here is the place from which our text for today and this week comes. It is Luke’s account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and about the reaction to his coming. You will note the paradox. Luke’s phrase about all the people “h[anging] upon his words” is the reason for Jesus’ not being taken captive immediately by those who “sought to destroy him”, namely, “the chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people.” Because “all the people hung upon his words,” he is protected by the people. And yet, the contrasts of this day reveal how he is betrayed by all of us. Somehow we have to hang upon his words which name our sins and betrayals and without which we ourselves are lost.

The lesson from Isaiah presents what is known as The Fourth Servant Song. The passage is rich in its allusions and associations. It is not hard to see how the images of Israel portrayed as an individual and as a righteous servant “afflicted” and “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities” comes to be associated with the figure of Jesus Christ. Isaiah’s imagery enters into the pageant of the passion. The suffering servant is not simply Israel; it is Jesus Christ who wills to suffer for us all, “pour[ing] out his soul to death,” being “numbered with the transgressors,” “[bearing] the sins of many” and “ma[king] intercession for the transgressors,” indeed, “mak[ing] many to be accounted righteous”; in short, the theological images of atonement and reconciliation.

The parallels between the Isaiah’s suffering servant and Luke’s account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover are unavoidably and richly suggestive. It is really a matter of how we see Christ and that depends entirely upon our hanging upon his words. Only so shall we be saved for we shall find ourselves enveloped in his love.

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“All the people hung on his words.”

It is a Palm Sunday word, a text from the second lesson at Evening Prayer, and yet one which expresses so much of the meaning of this special day and week. In a way, Luke’s comment captures the intensity of Holy Week – but only if we hang on the words of Christ.

That is where it all hangs, as it were. Holy Week, in the essential catholic understanding of classical Anglicanism, is about the fullness of the Passion of Christ. Hanging on his words is about paying attention to the accounts of his Passion as presented by all four Evangelists. Nothing expresses so concisely and completely the essence of reformed Catholicism.

Nowhere is it more concisely and completely expressed than in the pattern of Scriptural readings for Holy Week in The Book of Common Prayer. That is the challenge of this week: to enter into the Passion of Christ in all of its fullness. And so today, we have The Passion according to St. Matthew. On Monday in Holy Week, we begin the reading of The Passion according to St. Mark which we complete on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we read The Beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke, which is continued and completed on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we read The Passion according to St. John. And, in and through it all, are the various liturgies that complement and reinforce the deep Scriptural logic of the reading of the Passions: Tenebrae and the Liturgies of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days, that concentrate the meaning of the Passion so powerfully and so wonderfully.

The intensity of Holy Week is nothing less than the intensity of the Passion as seen through the lenses of all four Gospels. No other Church provides such a fullness.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn?  Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.

This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.

When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.

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