Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
admin | 31 March 2015“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
The Continuation of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark is complemented by the lesson from Isaiah 50. 5-9. It is one of the four “Suffering Servant Songs” as they are called. An image in Isaiah about the suffering of Israel, a suffering which is seen to have a significance and a purpose, something redemptive, we might say, for the nations of the world, the intimacy and the character of the images of suffering have also been seen by Christians from the earliest times as ways of understanding the Passion of Christ.
Mark’s account of the Passion and this lesson in turn amplify our understanding of the lessons at the Offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer from Isaiah 42. 1-9, the first of the Suffering Servant Songs, from Wisdom 2.1, 12-end about the betrayal of the righteous man by our human wickedness in “reasoning unsoundly” and acting wickedly, and the readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. That chapter presents us with one of the greatest of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus where he says “I am the vine … ye are the branches … abide in me.” It signals the meaning of our life in Christ in and through his Passion. “Remember the word that I said to you,” Jesus says to us about service and about persecution. Even more, he commands us to “love one another” even in the face of the world’s hatred. Most tellingly, Jesus tells us that we his friends and that it belongs to friendship that we lay down our lives for one another. Sacrifice informs service and only so can we abide in love and discover joy. Strong words that help us in our “look[ing] upon him whom [we] have pierced.”
The continuation of the Passion focuses on the scene of Christ before Pilate, a further betrayal of justice as Pilate gives into the mentality of the mob and “delivers Jesus to be crucified.” But before his crucifixion we confront the equally hideous spectacle of Christ’s bring mocked and vilified. There is no end to human spite and viciousness, it seems, but how are we to understand it? Perhaps through the understanding of human evil that Wisdom identifies. It is about our hatred of the good, a mistake in reason to be sure since no one truly loves what is evil, it is always what we mistake to be somehow good, and yet Wisdom suggests to us a feature of our fallen humanity, namely, how willful we can be in our refusals of all that is right and true and good. We betray the very way in which we are made in the image of God. As Wisdom wonderfully notes “God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of his own eternity.” Envy is named here as one of the greatest forms of our betrayal of the image of God in us. “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world.”
The devil envies what belongs to God and denies his own good as a creature of God. All sin participates in this willful misuse of reason and truth. It is as if we hate the good which we are not and yet somehow want for ourselves. The Passion as illumined by Wisdom in turn illumines our understanding of what Wisdom says. Mark’s offers an object lesson of what Wisdom suggests.
The Passion reveals the disorders of our human hearts in such violent disarray but it also reveals the heart of the Son of God. Mark gives us but one word from the Cross, the word, too, which Matthew gives. It is the heart-rending cry of dereliction by Christ in the agony of the crucifixion. Yet it is importantly a prayer, a prayer if not to the Father at least to God. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
The full and true meaning of sin’s reality is captured in this agonizing cry. Sin is what separates us from God. Christ feels and experiences that alienation intensely and in far greater ways than we can imagine. He bears to the fullest extent the distance from God that all sin occasions. Nowhere is that expressed more acutely than in this cry, this word from the Cross. How are we to understand it? Mark ends his account very simply and most profoundly with the word of the centurion who when he “saw that he so cried out, and gave up the spirit, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.”
Out of the empty nothingness of our willful and destructive acts comes something profound and holy. It is already a kind of new creation – something made out of nothing. A confession of faith. A conviction about divine truth in the face of human wickedness. He has not “hid his face from shame and spitting,” to be sure. He has borne it all but what the accounts of the Passion show us is how intense the agony is. There is here no stoic sense of simply enduring suffering even though there is that strength of will to bear our sins and to pray the experience to God. What does it mean? It means that the full meaning of sin is known in the heart of God through the sufferings of Christ. Nothing could be more convicting and nothing brings out more fully the deeper meaning of the vocation of Israel to be “a light to lighten the nations,” “a covenant to the people, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”
Justice and light on a grander scale than social justice is indicated here and in ways that make such things more compelling. It is about the justice of God who bears all of the forms of our injustice and the terrible darkness of all our sins. We look upon him whom we have pierced and just perhaps, like the centurion, we can cry in faith, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” the miracle of divine truth in the very heart of human wickedness. The spectacle of the crucified compels us to sacrifice and service in our lives, if ever we will look and learn.
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2015