by CCW | 2 April 2017 16:00
“April”, it seems, “is the cruelest month of all” (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland). Hardly the time for a pilgrimage, a journey unless it is like that of the Magi “with the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter” (Eliot, Journey of the Magi) all over again with more snow! Yet we enter into the deepest and most intense pilgrimage of all, the inward pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God and in God, the pilgrimage of Passiontide.
The Cross is veiled, present and yet unseen. Such is the paradox of Passiontide. We see but “in a glass darkly.” We know and yet, we do not know. We make our way to the Cross. The first word that we will hear is “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The darkness of our ignorance is so much greater than we realize. It embraces our willfulness, too, signaling our willful ignorance born out of pride and prejudice, born out of folly and pretense, born out of presumption and envy. Such are the realities of sin.
Yet, this is the way that somehow we must want to go, if nothing else than for the clarification of our desires and the purification of our wills. We are on a journey with Christ, only now to discover that he and he alone “by his own blood enter[s] in once into the holy place” to obtain “eternal redemption for us”. We can only follow. We can only be among the crowd, at once deceivers and deceived, and yet to learn and be changed. The Epistle reading from Hebrews presents the stark and uncompromising logic of the atonement. Christ is the Mediator between God and Man whose labour of love makes us at one with God despite ourselves, and even in and through the darkness of our ignorance and the danger of our arrogance, and even more because of our betrayals of his love. Passiontide is really the parade of our betrayals.
We want what the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons want. What is that? We want the very best for ourselves and for our children. But, inescapably, what we want for ourselves and for our children sets us and them at odds with everyone else. A benefit for a few is necessarily at the expense of the many. The poignancy of Passiontide lies precisely in the awareness of that paradox; our good is often sought for at the price of another’s hurt.
And what is that very best? Do we really know? The cross is veiled because we do not know the full meaning of the very principle of salvation and life even when it is unambiguously presented to us. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many”. The principle is sacrifice and service, without which there can be no good for us and for others. This is the deep lesson of Passiontide.
Such things run directly counter to the priorities of our age and culture. We want the assurance of possessed goods, things that are tangible and felt, things that are experienced. We want to possess the moment. But the moment passes, as it must. Eternity alone is forever. The logic of the economic is the logic of the more or the less, the logic of the few against the many. We have, perhaps, lost the capacity to think the comprehensiveness of what is truly universal both in terms of God and our humanity.
“To give his life a ransom for many”. It is not about what we can achieve either on our own merits or on the strength of who we know and whom we can lobby for special favours which benefit some at the expense of others. No. Passiontide confronts us with the paradox of our wills – we want what we do not really know that we want and what we cannot have apart from the sacrifice of our wills.
“A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. Why? What is so great about a broken and a contrite heart? Simply this. It is the heart that knows its darkness and folly, its weakness and conceit. It is the heart that is pierced with the knowledge of its own evil in the light of the known love of God. It is the heart that seeks the good only to discover its own evil, the necessary evil of our mixed, incomplete, and impure motives. The broken heart knows the cause of its own brokenness. It is not others; it is ourselves in the discovery of the contradictions within ourselves and within the culture of the contemporary with its siren calls to conformity.
Christ addresses the ignorance of our desires, “ye know not what ye ask”. What we want is hid in the mystery of his passion; “to drink of the cup that I shall drink of and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with”, things which confer no automatic status and privilege, yet things that belong to the pilgrimage of deep Lent. “To sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father”. In other words, it is hid in the mystery of the passion, the mystery of the son’s sacrifice of himself to the Father’s will. Such is the mystery of our salvation.
We want to convert the kingdom of heaven into this world, into the immediacy of our own wills and desires, into the immediacy of our own experiences and demands. We want to collapse the discourse of salvation into the conceits and parlance of the middle class. We want to conform the gospel to the world, to the ceaseless demands of special interest groups, whether of the right or the left in the political and economic spectrum of our world and day. We want to make God in the image of our own confusions – the sexual, social, psychological and political confusions of contemporary culture. We shall learn, if ever indeed we shall, that such is not the kingdom of heaven.
The paradox of Passiontide is that we can only begin to enter into the setting right of our broken and wounded wills through the breaking of our hearts. We enter into Passiontide to try to see more clearly the nature of our betrayals of the goodness and the mercy of God. We do so through the power of these words at once convicting and convincing us that “[w]e know not what [w]e ask”. Such is the power of the discourse of Revelation. It opens us out to the mercy of God precisely through our awareness of our limitations.
Only through the Passion of Christ might we learn to seek the Father’s will through the sacrifice of the Son who prays in his passion, “Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me, yet not my will but thine be done”. Christ in the agony of Gethsemane, Christ in the pageant of his passion, confronts our willful ignorance, our not knowing what we ask. He names our ignorance and redeems our desires and draws us into the mercy of his sacrifice. Paradoxically, it is all that we can do, namely, to confront our ignorance and its cost. It requires that we go with him on the way of the Cross. Only then, does the greater mercy begin to appear in the one who “give[s] his life a ransom for many”.
Will we be among the many for whom he gave “his life a ransom” or will we be among the few who seek God only for ourselves and for our own benefit? Will we begin to learn what to ask for by entering into the passion of the Son who opens us out to the will of the Father?
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday
Christ Church, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/04/02/sermon-for-passion-sunday-8/
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