by CCW | 22 March 2016 22:00
Jesus’s word in Bethany highlights the necessity of contemplation. Holy Week is about our contemplation of the Passion of Christ as revealed in all four Gospels. Tonight we complete our reading and contemplation of the Passion according to St. Mark. What is the one thing needful here?
Certainly, there is the unfolding of the different forms of human sin and betrayal; Pilate’s betrayal of justice because he was “willing to content the people”; the mockery and abuse of Jesus at the hands of the Praetorian guard; his being crucified between two thieves; his being “railed on” by those who passed by and by the chief priests. It is not a pretty picture. It is altogether about human cruelty and abuse. That is the meaning of Christ as the “Suffering Servant” as the lessons from Isaiah both at Mattins and at Mass make clear and the meaning of Christ as “the righteous man” who is inconvenient to us in our wickedness as the evening lesson from The Wisdom of Solomon shows; Christ is the righteous one who suffers our unrighteousness. And yet, as the lessons from John’s Gospel at Morning and Evening Prayer also make clear, Christ is the vine in whom we live and abide, abiding in his love for the Father. His crucifixion shows us the radical meaning of love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. Jesus goes on to say something quite radical and profound. “You are my friends”, he says, “if you do what I command you”.
His love is proclaimed in the face of our betrayals of that love. What he bears, we too shall have to bear, namely, the hatred of the world. Christian persecution both active and passive is a feature of our witness and increasingly so in our post-Christian world. “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you”. “And all this they will do to you”, he says, “on my account, because they do not know him who sent me”. They do not know the Father and so they do not know the Son. But the Spirit of the Father and the Son will bear witness to the Son and so too we are to be witnesses “because you have been with me from the beginning”. At issue for us is about being with Christ faithfully. It is about abiding in his love even in the face of the enmities and hatreds of the world. And in a way we are given to see two moments in Mark’s account of the Passion here that have to do with what belongs to our contemplation of the Passion as witnesses and participants in the Passion.
First, there is the figure of Simon, a Cyrenian who is compelled “to bear his cross”. What the force of compelled is here remains unclear. What is clear is that he bears Christ’s cross. So must we who are Christ’s. Secondly, there is the figure of the Centurion who seeing and hearing the cry of Christ as he dies, says, “Truly this man is the Son of God”.
The first of the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah is about Israel’s vocation as “a light to lighten the nations” about the justice and truth of God. In that vocation there is liberation and enlightenment for the world. In the Christian understanding of things, the Suffering Servant is a figure of Christ. Simeon in his song, the Nunc Dimittis, greets the child Christ with these words from Isaiah. Christ is “the light that lightens the world and the glory of thy people Israel”. In Wisdom, he is “the righteous man” who “opposes the actions” of the wicked, who “professes to have knowledge of God”, who “calls himself a child of the Lord”, who “boasts that God is his father”. Because of his righteousness and goodness he is “put to the test” and condemned by the wicked “to a shameful death”; a set of images which are seen in relation to Christ’s passion. As Wisdom makes clear wickedness blinded them about the secret purposes of God for our humanity. For “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his party experience it”. In the story of the crucifixion, God in Christ experiences death and only so can it be truly overcome.
Christ’s crucifixion is about the overcoming of the world, the overcoming of human sin and the overcoming of death, the death of death, we might say. But none of that can make any sense to us apart from the spectacle of his death and certainly not apart from the intensity of his Passion. On Palm Sunday we heard Matthew’s account of the Passion. Tonight we complete Mark’s account. The one thing needful in both their accounts is the strange and disturbing cry of dereliction and abandonment. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ cries. It is the only word of the crucified in their accounts of the Passion. And yet, out of that cry comes the word of the Centurion about Jesus as the Son of God.
Christ’s cry is a prayer not to the Father but simply to God. He voices the experience of utter desolation and abandonment. Where is God? Many ask that question in the times of their suffering and dying. But do we still cry out to him? Here the relationship of Son and Father seems obscured and even absent and yet there is still a cry, a prayer that is made to God, and to the God who is still “My God”. Only in hearing this word can we begin to contemplate the mystery of the Son’s love for the Father. Only in hearing this word can we begin to understand what it means for us to bear the cross in our lives. It is the one thing needful.
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/03/22/sermon-for-tuesday-in-holy-week-6/
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