by CCW | 25 March 2015 21:21
This is the fourth of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here[1], the second here[2], and the third here[3].
The Lenten project of penitential adoration undergirds the whole life of Christian Faith but it reaches a kind of climax in Passiontide and especially in the events of Holy Week. As we have seen from some of the poets and preachers of the Anglican tradition, the Passion is a central concern throughout the whole of the Christian year and contributes to the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage of faith in terms of the interrelated principles of justification and sanctification as well as glorification that inform the character of spiritual life. At issue is the constant task of understanding the Passion which can only happen through our constant reflection upon it.
But “they understood none of these things,” Luke observes in the Gospel reading for Quinquagesima Sunday. What things? The things of the Passion. Jesus tells the disciples what will befall him in Jerusalem and yet “they understood none of those things.” Part of the Lenten journey is about seeing and understanding. It is not by accident that the Gospel reading continues with the story of the blind man on the roadside between Jericho and Jerusalem, symbolic of the earthly and the heavenly cities respectively. The purpose of going up to Jerusalem with Jesus is about seeing and understanding the Passion of Christ more and more clearly.
The Annunciation frequently falls within the season of the Passion. Mary responds to the angelic salutation that she is to be the theotokos, the God-bearer with a question, “how shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Her question is not about doubting but about understanding what God seeks for our humanity. Her question leads to her ‘yes’ to God, her “Be it unto me according to thy word.” But that means as well a commitment to the constant learning about God’s will and purpose for our humanity. As Simeon profoundly remarks at the occasion of Christ’s presentation in the Temple, “yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” His words point already to the Passion and to our learning and understanding what it means both for Mary and about us and for us.
George Herbert’s poem, Prayer (1), provides a wonderful and rich collection of images that range over a broad spectrum of areas of thought and experience from the explicitly theological and biblical to the natural and the domestic. Yet the poem ends with the words “something understood.” Prayer is something understood in and through these images. Among the images in the sonnet is “Christ-side-piercing spear / six-daies world transposing in an hour,” juxtaposing the Passion and Creation and connecting them both to Christian worship by which we participate in Creation and Redemption. Prayer, after all, as the sonnet begins, is “the Churches banquet, Angels age,/ God’s breath in man returning to his birth.”
Two of Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday sermons emphasize our looking upon the Crucified, one through the text from Hebrews, “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith,” the other upon Zechariah’s text, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced.” The conjunction of the Annunciation with Passiontide complements the ideas of beginnings and endings and Christ pierced upon the Cross. John Donne’s poem Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608 turns on the paradox of Christ coming to us in his Incarnation through Mary and his going from us into death through the Cross. The penultimate word of Christ on the Cross, his “it is finished,” is yoked to Mary’s fiat, her “be it unto me;” the whole story of Christ is seen as concentrated in the conjunction of these two moments.
At once a son is promised to her, and gone,
Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity [meaning in grief],
At once receiver and the legacy;
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of the angels’ Ave, ‘and Consummatum est.
The abridgement of Christ’s story reveals the interplay of Passion and Annunciation, itself the beginning in time of Christ’s incarnation. The Annunciation is his conception in Mary. The conjunction of that feast with Good Friday brings out the connection between them; each illumines the other without which neither is thinkable. The map imagery serves to underscore the connection as well for “as in plain maps,” meaning flat maps and not a globe, “the furthest west is east,” endings remain joined to their beginnings, each is present in the other.
In a Nativity sermon, Lancelot Andrewes observes the power of concipiet which is said scripturally and credally about Mary in contrast to such rhyming terms as decipiet and recipiet, deceiving and receiving in contrast to conceiving. “To conceive is more than to receive,” he notes, “it is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also.” Mary is not simply a passive vessel through whom God passes into our world. As he explains,
A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The blessed Virgin is, and therefore is because she did. She did both give and take. Give of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Ghost, whereby was supplied the office and the efficacy of the masculine seed. This is concipiet.
The point here is the full and free willing nature of Mary’s participation in God’s work of human redemption and the larger sense of theological anthropology which requires our participation in what God initiates and accomplishes. Only so can something be brought forth or born out of faith; concipiet leads to pariet. As Donne remarks, God will not save us without our wills, only through our wills; in short, our wills willing what God wills for us. The great exemplar of this is Mary. So too in Passiontide and Holy Week we are not merely passive spectators; our looking upon the Crucified is the activity of thinking faith, the form of our participation in work of human redemption, especially through the sacraments. “Christ-side-piercing spear,” to use Herbert’s image, recalls the moment in the Passion where the dead Christ is pierced by the spear of the Roman soldier and “forthwith came there out blood and water,” as John tells us. Following the doctrine of the Fathers, divines like Hooker, Andrewes and Donne understand this to symbolize the sacraments of holy Baptism and holy Communion.
Our looking upon Christ crucified is about something understood or at least about coming to understand. To conceive is also to understand. Donne plays upon this conceit, this idea, in a remarkably complex sonnet in a series of sonnets known as La Corona, seven sonnets in which the last line of each is the first line of the next forming a circle or a crown. The seven sonnets of La Corona emphasize certain doctrinal moments in the life of Christ envisioned as a complete whole, “a crown of prayer and praise” encompassing Annunciation, Nativity, Temple, Crucifying, Resurrection and Ascension which brings us around to “this crown of prayer and praise,” the last line of the seventh sonnet returning us to the first line of the first.
In the sonnet entitled Annunciation in that series, Donne begins with the theme of human redemption. “Salvation to all that will is nigh,” the sonnet begins. Salvation cannot be automatic; it is for all that will it; in other words, that want it. It is near but something is required of us, our desire for it. He plays on the different senses of “all.” In the first line, all refers to everybody who wills but in the second line, ”That all, which always is all everywhere” refers to God, “that all” in his ubiquity, eternity and self-sufficiency. God is always all God and always everywhere himself all God. This provides the platform for the paradox of redemption. “Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,/which cannot die, yet cannot chose but die.” But how is this redemption to be accomplished?
In the fourth line of the octet, the narrative voice addresses Mary, “Lo, faithful Virgin,” echoing the angelic salutation to Mary. “Lo, faithful Virgin, yields himself,” meaning that “that all,” God, “yields himself to lie/ in prison, in thy womb.” The imagery is classical and patristic. God the Creator limits himself to his own creation; the idea of the divine condescension is emphasized as well as the paradox of the womb as prison, an enclosed space, but even more an intimate and material reality. “Thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb” as the Te Deum puts it. It is a way of signaling the wonder of the Incarnation but already in terms of bearing sin and choosing death, the themes of the Passion.
Donne proceeds to indicate his high doctrine of theological anthropology and of the pure humanity of Mary. He says “and though he there/ Can take no sin,” meaning that God is without sin and cannot be tainted by sin by virtue of yielding himself to lie in Mary’s womb, but even more “nor thou give,” suggesting The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which is about Mary herself being conceived without original sin because of her role and place in the economy of salvation. A controversial doctrine about which there was debate in the middle ages between Franciscans and Dominicans, the one for, the other against, it did not come to be a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until 1854. It lacks any clear basis in Scripture – a limiting point for Anglicans and other churches of the Reformation – but there were theologians who held to the idea but not as something to be required to be believed by all for just that reason. But in terms of understanding the Incarnation and Redemption, it contributes one approach to the mystery of salvation. Here Donne invokes the idea in relation to the themes of the Incarnation and the Passion.
The octet ends on this note: “Yet he ‘will wear / taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.” God becomes man through Mary that he may encounter the power of death. Thus far in the sonnet, God has not been named as God or in the terms of the names of the divine persons. Indeed, the word God has not been mentioned, only indicated in terms of “that all, which always is all everywhere.” In the sestet, however, God is clearly identified in terms of the second person of the Trinity.
“Ere by the spheres time was created, thou / Wast in his mind, who is thy son, and brother.” Mary is understood to be in the mind of God from before the foundations of the earth, before the beginnings of time; in short, from eternity. She is in the divine mind of him who is her son and brother; Christ as Mary’s son, Christ as brother to all humanity. But even more and especially in terms of understanding, Donne plays upon the different sense of conception. “Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived.” Mary is intellectually conceived in the divine mind even as she conceived Christ in her womb. It is all part and parcel of something understood.
The sonnet doesn’t end there. “Yea, thou art now /Thy maker’s maker, and thy father’s mother.” The paradoxes of relation continue to build up as a way of explicating the mystery of human redemption in terms of Mary’s role as the Mother of God, the one through whom God becomes man. The sonnet ends with the contrast between light and dark, immensity and enclosure. “Thou’ hast light in dark; and shutt’st in little room,/Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.” Yet the whole sonnet shows the necessary interrelation of the Passion and the Incarnation and opens us out to the nature of our active participation in the work of human redemption.
Our “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” in Lancelot Andrewes’ sermon on that text brings us to the image of Christ crucified. He explores the concepts of author and finisher thoroughly and exhaustively.
“Author and Finisher” are two titles, wherein the Holy Ghost oft setteth Him forth, and wherein He seemeth to take special delight. In the very letters, He taketh to Him the name of “Alpha” the Author, and again of “Omega” the Finisher of the alphabet. From letters go to words: there is He Verbum in principio, “the Word at the beginning.” And He is “Amen” too, the word at the end. From words to books. In capite libri scriptum est de Me, in the very “front of the book” He is; and He is Ανακεφαλαιωσις (Anakephalaiosis), “the Recapitulation,” of conclusion of it too. And so, go to persons: there he is Primus et novissimus, “the first and the last.” And from persons to things: and there He is, “the beginning and the end;” whereof αρχη, “the beginning,” is in Αρχηγος, the Author; and τελος, “the end,” is in Τελειωτης, the Finisher. The first beginning a Quo, He “By whom all things are made;” and the last end He, per or propter Quem, “by, for, or through Whom” all things are made perfect.”
It is a linguistical tour-de-force, explicating the range of meanings associated with the Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, going from these titles to letters, from letters to words, from words to books, from books to persons, from persons to things. And yet even this does not exhaust the complete range of consideration; it has to be brought to the Cross.
Were He “Author” only, it would serve to step forth well at the first. But He is “Finisher” too: therefore we must hold out to the last. And not rend one of them from the other, seeing He requireth both – not either, but both – and is indeed Jesus, a Saviour of none but those, that follow Him as “Finisher” too, and are therefore marked in the forehead with Tau the last letter of the Hebrew, as He Himself is Omega, the last of the Greek Alphabet.
He brings us to the Cross and to the sign of the Cross through something understood in our “look[ing] upon him whom [we] have pierced,” the text for his 1597 sermon on Good Friday. We are made participants in the Passion through the forms of our active looking upon the crucified. “Look upon Him and be pierced,” Andrewes exhorts us; “look upon Him and pierce your sins” which are the cause of Christ’s being pierced, he tells us; but above all, he says, “look and be pierced with love of Him that so loved thee, that He gave Himself in this sort to be pierced for thee.” In short, look and love.
The Passion helps us to understand the deep love of God for our humanity. “He was pierced with love no less than with grief, and it was that wound of love made Him so constantly to endure all the other.” That is why for Andrewes, “Christ pierced on the cross is liber charitatis, ‘the very book of love’ laid open before us.” Like Herbert’s image of “Christ-side-piercing spear,” so too with Andrewes by way of Bernard of Clairvaux, we come to “something understood” by our contemplation of the Passion of Christ. “This love of His,” Andrewes says, “we may read in the cleft of His heart” and goes on to quote Bernard, “‘the point of the spear serves us instead of a key, letting us through His wounds see His very bowels’ the bowels of tender love and most kind compassion, that would for us endure to be so entreated.” We look upon Him that we may understand something of the love of God for us.
Prayer, Herbert suggests in the last line of the octet of his sonnet, Prayer (1), is “a kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear.” It complements the final two words of the sonnet, signaling to us about what is wanted in contemplating the Passion of Christ and in so doing, participating in its meaning. Only so can it begin to be “something understood.”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Annunciation, 2015
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