“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire:/hearken unto me
for thy truth and righteousness’ sake”
I know. It is what we are all asking God for – less snow! Hear us, O Lord!
We live in a culture dominated by images. At their best, images can be icons of the understanding but they are really only as good as our understanding. One powerful image is the veiled cross. The cross at once present and yet not fully seen captures exactly the understanding that undergirds the pageant of the Passion.
We enter into Passiontide, into deep Lent where everything about the understanding of the Passion of Christ becomes more and more intense and more and more concentrated. As we have seen in our Lenten Programme on “Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ,” the Passion is a central theme throughout the whole year.
“The whole life of Christ was a continuall passion,” John Donne remarks even as Lancelot Andrewes notes that “Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross” This brings out an important feature of the Christian religion, though one which is often ignored or downplayed in the contemporary church. The point is this. The Christian Faith makes no sense apart from the Passion of Christ. It is altogether central. We can make no sense of Christmas without reference to the Passion. The Passion is what makes fully clear the meaning of the Incarnation. As Athanasius puts it, “he borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” in that way having from us what to offer unto God for us.
This inevitably brings into play the theological doctrine of the atonement, a doctrine downplayed if not dismissed altogether. Even the most theologically minded of the philosophical atheists, like Slavoj Žižek, have the greatest difficulty with the idea of the atonement. And he is not alone. How does the Passion restore and make right what was wrong? What is the injustice that becomes justice in the sacrifice of Christ? “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5.21). Hymns, too, are often the conduit of theology, like our first hymn this morning, Venantius Fortunatus’ celebrated Passion Sunday Hymn, Vexilla Regis, from the 6th century which offers the same teaching. “And there, to cleanse the heart of man,/ From out his side life’s torrent ran … “The priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” Still the questions raise all of our uncertainties, our doubts, and even our contemporary scorn and dismissal of Christianity.
And yet, that is the theme of the Epistle reading this morning from The Letter to the Hebrews. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” The Letter to the Hebrews is a theological tour-de-force at once of the atonement and the ascension. It opens us out to the power of prayer and, perhaps, it is in that context that we can begin to wrestle with the idea of our being made at one with God.
For prayer itself is about our seeking God’s will and purpose for our humanity. That already implies a separation. We can’t seek or want what we already have. Our prayers are about our desires. The Christian pilgrimage of Lent is about setting our loves in order, setting our desires aright. The clear implication and one which is borne out in human experience is that something is not right with us and that we know that. What we are less clear is about how we are to be made aright with God and with one another. That is why the Cross is veiled in Passiontide; as paradoxical as that may seem, it is a profound image of our seeing and not seeing, our not seeing clearly. “We see but in a glass darkly,” meaning imperfectly as Paul puts it in the Epistle reading from 1st Corinthians on Quinquagesima Sunday.
The whole purpose of Lent is to concentrate our attention on the Passion of Christ so that we may know and love more deeply God’s work of human redemption. We confront the reality of the human condition, on the one hand, and God’s response to our situation, on the other hand. As Hebrews puts it, “Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant.”
The new covenant is about setting right what is incomplete in us. This means more than just awakening us to the realities of human sin which are about our separation from truth and goodness; for at best such things as truth and goodness are only partly realized in us. A moment’s reflection makes us aware that all of us in thought and often in word and sometimes in deed, think, say and do what is wrong and hurtful. And yes, it matters for if we are going to be radically true to ourselves we have to acknowledge this and in so doing recognize a shortcoming, a failure, or, to be blunt about it, sin. It is a kind of willful blindness to excuse it away. The idea that is presented to us here is divine mediation; God’s response to our situation.
What makes the theology of the atonement so compelling is that it speaks to the deeper truth of our human desires. We seek for something more that is beyond our attaining because we are divided within ourselves in a myriad of ways. As one of the Lenten Collects (Lent 2) reminds us, “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” We are beset by so many contradictions and confusions about what we seek for ourselves or for others. We think, like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s Gospel, that we know what is best for our children. She is the original Helicopter Parent. We aren’t told what her reaction is to Jesus’ response. Like most helicopter parents, I suspect that she doesn’t quite get it but, then, the whole point of the Gospel is that none of us do. The radical point is that we are able to be baptized and to drink indeed of Christ’s cup, but that is not the full story and, wonderful to say, such things have everything to do with the more radical meaning of the Passion of Christ. It is about service and sacrifice; such things are the very antithesis of human ambition. To learn this and to discover our freedom in Christ is the project of Passiontide.
We can only learn, it seems, through our sacramental participation in Christ’s atoning work that restores our humanity to God. In a famous aphorism which goes back to Augustine but which was especially popular in the Reformation, our humanity is envisioned in three stages. Man, meaning our humanity, before the fall is said to be posse non peccare, ‘able not to sin’; man after the Fall, hence all of us in the divisions of our hearts which condemn us if left to ourselves, man is non posse non peccare, ‘not able not to sin’ – this goes down really hard for the contemporary world, all its destructive disarray notwithstanding; but, finally, man in Christ is said to be non posse peccare, ‘not able to sin.’ You’ve got to love what can be done in so few words – merely three in Latin!
The challenges for the theological traditions of Christianity are about learning what it means to be in Christ. And that is where the Anglican tradition of penitential adoration comes particularly into play. It means constantly “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” as Hebrews puts it, too, but most crucially, pun intended, it means looking upon the crucified, beholding in him the lessons of sin and love.
The veiled cross is the telling image of our not fully understanding what it is that we constantly seek to understand, the deep love of Christ, “the burning love of the crucified” (Bonaventure) who shows us what God seeks and accomplishes for us. Our task is to heed Christ’s words to his disciples that “whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” Such an argument turns on one thing: the meaning of Christ’s Passion. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Such is the radical meaning of prayer as learning through service and sacrifice. Such is the pageant of Passiontide. We enter into it seeking to have our desires considered and rectified in the truth and righteousness of God.
“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire:/hearken unto me
for thy truth and righteousness’ sake”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2015