Year: 2015

This is the third of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first reflection is posted here, the second here, and the fourth here.

The poets and preachers of our Anglican tradition help us in the spiritual journey of Lent by opening us out to the nature of penitential adoration. As Lancelot Andrewes notes in his Good Friday sermon in 1605, we are always to be “looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith” but most especially upon Christ crucified. Paul, he says, “knew many, very many things” yet he decided “to know nothing … except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” “The perfection of our knowledge is Christ; the perfection of our knowledge in or touching Christ, is the knowledge of His Cross and Passion.” Somehow it is our comfort, the strengthening of our faith.

The Fourth Sunday marks the midpoint of the Lenten journey. Variously known as Mothering Sunday, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians about “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all,” and, Refreshment Sunday, because of the Gospel story from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, and Laetare Sunday, because of the Introit at Mass from Isaiah 66. 10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her,” it recalls us to the end of the Lenten journey; in other words to its purpose and meaning. It opens us out to “the comfort[s] of thy grace by which we may mercifully be relieved” as the Collect for The Fourth Sunday in Lent puts it, even given the knowledge “that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished.” The juxtaposition of punishment and comfort is instructive about the dialectic of redemption.

Tonight, too, is The Feast of St. Patrick, which somehow can be allowed to pass without celebration, even in Lent! Yet, the Saints are part of our spiritual journey; “the cloud of witnesses” that compass us about in our “running the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”

George Herbert in his poem on Lent speaks of it as a “deare feast.” It is on The Fourth Sunday in Lent and the week which it graces that perhaps we get a glimpse of what that means. As he begins the very last poem of his collection of poems known as the Temple, a poem called Love (III), “Love bade me welcome” and, indeed, that captures the meaning of Lent as the pilgrimage of Love. Laetare Sunday reminds us that the Love of God provides for us. The end of the journey is equally what sustains and provides for us in the way of the journeying. The eschatological, meaning the last things, and the eucharistical, pertaining to communion, are inescapably connected. They are about our being gathered to God. As Andrewes says in a Nativity Sermon “even thus to be recollected at this feast by the Holy Communion into that blessed union, is the highest perfection we can in this life aspire unto. We then are at the highest pitch, at the very best we shall ever attain to on earth, what time we newly come from it; gathered to Christ, and by Christ to God.”

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This is the second of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Lent is the season of penitential adoration. It concentrates our attention upon the Passion of Christ. But the term passion is complex and perplexing for us. We tend perhaps to associate it with our desires, what we often term our passions and more often than not we associate it particularly with erotic desires.

Plato, to be sure, uses the term eros in a more extended sense than simply the erotic in his dialogue The Symposium, using it to signify the passionate desire to know, the eros that compels us up the ladder of being and knowing. The Symposium means literally a drinking party but one in which we decide not to drink but to think, an idea that perhaps has some connection to the disciplines of Lent.

“Welcome deare feast of Lent,” the poet George Herbert begins in a poem called, Lent. “Who loves not thee,” he says, “He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie, /But is compos’d of passion.” Passion but not the Passion of Christ. Passion here is juxtaposed with temperance and authority. Lent would bid us discipline our bodily appetites – our passions or desires for sensual pleasures. Temperance is the virtue of self-control, the self-control of our appetites for food, drink, or sex. “Authoritie” here refers to the Scriptures, to the Church, and, ultimately, to the authority of all authorities, God, the author of all things. There is the paradox that our strong desire, our passion for God, means the disciplining of our passions; our spiritual passion or desire vying with our bodily passions. The point of Lent is about setting our loves, our desires, our eros, in order. Ultimately, in the Christian understanding of things that brings us to the Passion of Christ.

His Passion signifies his being acted upon; passion meaning suffering. Buddhism, too, recognizes the problem of suffering which arises from our attachments and desires, all of which belong to our attachment to ourselves. All desire is suffering. Get rid of desire, you get rid of suffering but it means getting free of the idea of you. There is no you is the radical insight of Buddhism. This contrasts with the Christian idea of redemptive suffering. The Passion of Christ is what we have to contemplate in order not to be free of passion but to set our loves in order. Christ’s Passion is about his suffering the consequences of the disorders of our passions; in short, our sins. Herbert’s poem calls us to the disciplines of Lent as the way of “starving sinne” and in ways that have to do with compassion towards others, “banqueting the poore, /And among those his soul,” as he puts it.

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This first of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ was originally delivered on the Feast of St. Matthias, 2015. The second reflection is posted here, the third here, and the fourth here.

The conjunction of The Feast of St. Matthias and the first week of Lent complements our Lenten programme. Matthias is chosen to take the place of Judas in the company of the Apostles. His feast day frequently falls within the Lenten orbit and reminds us of the interplay of the theological themes of justification and sanctification that belong to the classical Eucharistic lectionary including the propers for the Saints that expand the range of our incorporation into the life of glory.

The Epistle from Acts (Acts 1. 15-26) tells the story of his being chosen by lot and situates his election within the context of Judas’ betrayal. Lent bids us confront all our betrayals for such is the deep reality of sin but in the choosing of Matthias we also see the theme of restoration and redemption; the conquest of sin, we might say, by divine love.

Sin and love are the grand and great themes that belong to Christian meditation especially in the season of Lent. Some of the poets and preachers of our Anglican tradition help us to think about the themes of sin and love as concentrated in the Passion of Christ.

What I purpose is to consider certain poems by George Herbert and John Donne, especially, as well as some of the Lenten and Passion Sermons by Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne; all figures from the later 16^th and early 17^th century who contribute greatly to the praying imagination about the centrality of the Passion of Christ and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God.

These poets and preachers all recognize the centrality of the Passion of Christ. It is not too much to say that it is a consistent and common emphasis for all of them. Donne and Andrewes are emphatic that the whole life of Christ is concentrated in the Passion.

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