Day: April 4, 2015

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

We can only watch and wait. That is the nature of our looking upon him whom they pierced. It is actually in some real sense the meaning of our Christian lives. We watch and wait upon God. We “look upon him whom we have pierced,” looking for the redemption of our souls and our world, looking for what is accomplished in the events of the Passion.

What we look for we also celebrate. All of our looking upon Christ crucified this Holy Week is only possible through the fruit of his passion in the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and “behold, it is I, handle and see, a spirit hath not flesh and blood as ye see that I have.” Christ is risen! Alleluia, Alleluia! The Resurrection makes possible the Passion even as the Passion helps us to understand the true joy of Easter. No Passion, no Resurrection but paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion!

The events of Holy Week concentrate our attention on Christ crucified but only through the optic of the Resurrection which gives those events meaning and significance. Tonight we have watched and waited for the great and grand act of Resurrection. And what is that except God making something new and wonderful out of the nothingness of our sins and folly?

At Easter and throughout Eastertide we shall look on him whom we have pierced and contemplate in his wounds the very nature of divine love, the love which restores and redeems, the love that makes us lovely. Without that we are nothing. The Resurrection is about the something more of God’s love seen on the Cross but is more than the Cross. That is the point. Easter is about a new and greater creation, about redemption, about a reality that is more than the mundane experiences of our everyday lives. We live for God and with God because of his Passion and Resurrection.

(more…)

Print this entry

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What is there to see on Holy Saturday? Christ is dead and buried. Nothing to see here, nothing to look upon except the closed tomb. We gather in the presence of the absence of Christ crucified.

But there is another sense to our looking upon him whom we have pierced. It is about our reflection upon the meaning of his crucifixion. The lessons for this day remind us about two things; the bodily reality of Christ’s death and burial, and the creedal concept of the descent into Hell. Both speak to the Passion as the radical meaning of divine love. Both speak to the meaning of redemption. God wills to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation.

Holy Saturday would have us look upon things which cannot be seen but only understood. If there is any image at all, it is one which belongs to Eastern Orthodoxy in an icon for this day, the icon which depicts Christ raising Adam and Eve from the grave, capturing the idea offered to us in Zechariah and the Epistles of Peter about Christ preaching to the souls in prison. God’s love seeks to redeem and restore the whole of our sinful humanity.

I love the idea of Christ’s descent into hell and to his preaching to the souls imprisoned there. Why? Because it says so much about the nature of our humanity, that we are rational souls with bodies and that both matter and they matter in terms of our relation to God.

Holy Saturday celebrates the peace between God and man, between God and his creation. It is paradise regained and yet this is but an interlude before the greater business of our looking upon Christ crucified and contemplating the mystery of human redemption. The greater business is the fruit of Christ’s passion in the radical new life which flows out of his reconciling love. For that we can only await in the peaceful quiet of this day, keeping vigil at the tomb in solidarity with Christ and his death for us, and then, this evening waiting and looking in expectancy for what God and God alone makes out of the realities of human sin and death.

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2015

Print this entry