Christ Church

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Our Easter Vigil is a greatly simplified version of the ancient liturgies and rites of “this most holy night.” Vigils are about watching and waiting. As such they are about anticipation and expectation for something more. Holy Week has immersed us in the Passion of Christ, using Mary’s fiat as our mantra to enter into the narratives of the Passion; “be it unto me according to thy word,” the word which has gathered into itself all of the madness and disorders of our words. But in so doing we have been aware that we are participating in something great and wonderful, something which belongs to the mystery of human redemption.

That mystery recalls us to the deeper meaning of God’s creation. We can only participate in the Passion through the Resurrection. For here is the great wonder. It is the Resurrection alone that makes our participation in the Passion both possible and necessary. Tonight we wait expectantly and profoundly upon the mystery of God in the fullness of redemption. We await the new creation, the Resurrection.

How do we watch and wait? First, in the quiet darkness in which the Paschal Candle is blessed and lit and the great prayer, the Paschal Praeconium or Exultet, is sung, itself a wonderful and moving set of Scriptural and theological images about the Passion and the Resurrection, sometimes attributed to St. Augustine or more likely St. Ambrose. It is really a kind of Eucharistic Prayer or Canon. It proclaims the triumph of light over darkness, of life over death, of good over evil. Then, we listen to a few of the great prophecies and readings that illumine the mystery of human redemption. That prepares us for an important feature of the Vigil.

Traditionally, the service provided the occasion for baptisms, indeed, in its fullest expression, there was baptism, confirmation and then communion. In the baptisms at the Vigil, there is the renewing of our baptismal vows. In other words, there is a constant circling back and into the mystery of our incorporation into the Body of Christ.

Our country vigil ends with the lauds or praises of Easter morn. Our vigil brings us to the Resurrection, to the Alleluia’s that resound in praise and thanksgiving to God. The Resurrection is the triumph of good over evil, the triumph of God himself in his very truth and being giving himself for us in the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. Such is the word heard and seen that defines us, Word and Sacrament through which we participate in Christ.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2018

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s fiat, her “be it unto me according to thy word,” has provided the mantra for our Holy Week meditations on the Passion of Christ. Now all is done. All is at peace. Christ lies in the tomb, a borrowed tomb at that. It is finished. Holy Saturday recalls the sabbath rest of God in the Genesis accounts of creation. All we can do, it seems, is rest ourselves in the peace of this moment to ponder the mystery of human redemption.

The trauma and the horror of Good Friday is past and there is that sense of psychological release in us, perhaps, that gives way to a contemplative possibility in us to think about what Christ’s Passion and Death mean. Holy Saturday provides us with that possibility now become our necessity, the necessity of trying to make sense of it all. The word that we wait upon is the word of Christ in the tomb, the word in death. Holy Saturday emphasizes the reality of the death of Christ at the same time as it points to the power of the divine word. The word that defines our contemplation is perhaps, Peter’s word, drawing on Zechariah’s imagery, that “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”

The Epistle from 1st Peter reflects on Christ’s death in terms of the Noahic Covenant which is extended to become a simile for Christian baptism. Wonderful but what is going on here in this extended Scriptural reflection? What is the underlying insight? It is simply this. Holy Saturday reminds us of the radical meaning of human redemption accomplished by Christ’s death on the Cross. It is universal; it is for all. God seeks the reconciliation of the whole of our sinful humanity. This provides a necessary counter and check on our all-too-human judgements about one another as to who is saved and who is not. Not for us to know anything more than the Comfortable Word, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

“Look to Jesus,” Calvin tells us, ”he is worth to me more than a thousand testimonies.” He is our predestination. Human redemption is about the divine love of God’s own truth and righteousness that cannot be contained or constrained to the limits of finite reasoning, to the realm of the temporal, the world of past, present, and future. No. It is all about how time is gathered into eternity and itself is nothing more than the moving image of eternity, to use a famous Platonic image taken up by the metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan.

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The collect for today, Easter Even, or Holy Saturday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that, through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:17-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:57-66

Artwork: Titian, Pieta, 1576. Oil on canvas, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. (This is Titian’s last painting. In 1576 he succumbed to the plague that was raging in Venice.)

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

But which word? There are seven after all, the seven last words of Christ from the cross, words which define us in relation to God in Christ.

On Good Friday we contemplate Christ crucified. Through the Passion accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we have pondered something of the mystery of the crucifixion that brings us to this moment itself as seen through the eyes of John. All four Gospels contribute to our remembering the Passion.

Such remembering is absolutely central to Christian Faith and Christian life. Why? Because comfort, our consolation and blessedness, is entirely found in the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice and suffering for us. Good Friday means that it is good for us to behold the one whom we have pierced, to draw upon the passage from Zechariah that John himself uses. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” For “they” read “we. “

To what benefit? What good is there for us in looking upon the crucified? To behold ourselves in our sins and wickedness is a great and necessary good. Our sins are the immediate cause of his Passion. But there is something more. The good for us is to behold the love of God in Christ crucified. No symbol, no sign is more powerful, more effective really than this at signifying the divine love for our humanity precisely in the horrifying spectacle of our humanity’s attempt to annihilate God from the horizon of our lives. The deep meaning of Good Friday is that we kill God. God is dead, dead in the crucified Christ, the one who is God and man. He has “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius); our body, our death. But he is God made man. In Christ, God dies for us.

There can be no greater good, no greater paradox than the overcoming of our deaths by the death of Christ. What does it mean? It is the death of death. On Good Friday we behold death as the consequence and meaning of human sin and wickedness. We behold what our rage and spite accomplishes – death. We see exactly what happens when we are left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We see our nothingness. This and this alone is the great good of Good Friday because only so can we see the greater goodness of God.

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The collects for today, Good Friday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:1-25
The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint John
The Gospel: St. John 18:33-19:37

Artwork: Rogier van der Weyden, The Crucifixion (Escorial), c. 1455. Oil on panel, Monastery of El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

And so it begins. The Triduum Sacrum are the three great holy days of the Passion in which we seek to immerse ourselves or be immersed in the Passion of Christ; in short, to be defined by the word of God. That has meant confronting all of our words of disarray, our words of sin and evil, in the words of Christ, especially the words of Christ crucified. Luke gives us three of those words: Christ’s first word from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do;” Christ’s response to the penitent thief that “today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” and, what is taken as the last word from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” With Luke we have the first and last word of the crucified, a beginning and an ending with a prayer to the Father. Such is the wonderful intimacy of Luke’s Gospel. He is, as Dante understood so well, scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.

Maundy Thursday is a day rich in ceremonial and symbolism. We recall tonight not just The Passion According to St. Luke but the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples and with all of its gentle intensity. “He carried himself in his own hands,” Augustine wonderfully suggests. Christ puts himself into our hands and we are left to our own devices. We betray him and crucify him. But he carries himself in his own hands and provides another way for us to be with him and for him to be with us. He provides the way in which his sacrifice on Calvary will both be remembered and participated in through the sacraments.

Baptism and the Eucharist are the two dominical sacraments. Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flow the sacraments of the Church, as the Fathers often said; water and blood, baptism and communion, respectively. It requires a holy remembering on our part, a sacramentum memoriae that connects the sacrament with its meaning. It is both sign and thing signified. “This is my body … This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” “Go forth and baptise.” These are not maybe’s but must be’s. It is what is required of the Church.

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The collects for today, Thursday in Holy Week, commonly called Maundy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also he made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O GOD, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion: Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption; who livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 11:23-29
The Continuation of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke
The Gospel: St. Luke 23:1-49

Artwork: Nikolai Ge, In the Garden of Gethsemane, 1869. Oil on canvas, Ivanovo Regional Art Museum, Ivanovo, Russia.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Shadows are a feature of Luke’s account of the Passion and complement the ancient service of Tenebrae on the Wednesday of Holy Week. It is a largely the psalm offices of the Triduum Sacrum sung in anticipation of the three great Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Through the psalms in particular there is a kind of shadowing forth of the events of the Passion and their meaning.

The Psalms are the Prayer Book and Hymn Book of the Church. How to read them? How to pray them? Sometimes as the words of Christ to us; sometimes as our words to God; sometimes as our words of violence and vengeance. Yet the psalms help us to enter more fully into the Passion of Christ. They are super-charged with a feeling intensity and a deep insight into both human character and God. Their intensity is complemented by The Beginning of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, and especially, it seems to me, the scene of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.

Luke looks at things in a more inward way. He provides us with an imaginative feel for what is going on inside the heart of Jesus. With Luke, more than any of the Evangelists, we feel the Passion of Christ. “Being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It is a most compelling and powerful image that suggests something of the mind of the Evangelist, the mind of Luke, who is so powerfully moved by the scene itself. He paints a picture of the agony of Christ.

It is Luke, too, who gives us an even more intense understanding of the Peter’s betrayal of Christ. “The cock crew,” Luke tells us in an economy of expression. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” It is an exquisite moment. What is the look? A look of contempt, of judgement, of despair? No. I think it is the look of loving compassion. “For this is a true saying, and worthy of all to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Peter, remembering the word of the Lord and so confronting his threefold betrayal, himself as a sinner, “went out and wept bitterly.” Just so do we learn how to be defined by the word of God. Sometimes it is through our tears. Discovering something of the deep love of Christ in the shadows of our lives. We see “in a glass darkly” but at least we see. Here is a look that springs from the heart of Christ in his suffering for us.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, 2018

The collect for today, Wednesday in Holy Week, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 9:15-28
The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Luke
The Gospel: St. Luke 22:1-71

Artwork: Giuseppe Cesari (Il Cavaliere d’Arpino), The Taking of Christ, c. 1597. Oil on panel, Staatliche Museen, Kassel, Germany.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Somehow out of the spectacle of violence and cruelty a good and great word emerges. Not from within Israel but from the centurion present at the awful events of the crucifixion itself. Christ, in Isaiah’s words “neither turned away back” but “gave [his] back to the smiters”. He endures the shame and the spitting, the cruel actions that belong in one way or another to all of us. He does so in Isaiah’s vision out of trust “for the Lord God who will help [him].” Not us, it seems.

At this point in The Passion According to St. Mark, we can only behold what human sin and wickedness accomplishes, on the one hand, and what comes out of that spectacle, on the other hand. We go through the gruesome charade of his trial before Pilate and Pilate’s betrayal of his own truth and conscience, being “willing to content the people,” the mob, that is to say, and so releasing the murderer Barabbas and delivering Jesus into our hands of vicious violence. We witness the mocking and the scourging of Christ at the hands of the Roman soldiers in the Praetorium. Thus Jews and Romans have their hand in this outrage but only to make us realize our place with them.

There is no one to help. No one to stop the horror. Even the cross bearer, Simon a Cyrenian, is compelled to carry his cross. And even as crucified, we cannot let him alone, but are in the crowd of the passers-by who mock and deride him along with the chief priests. It is an ugly, ugly scene which reveals the ugliness of ourselves both in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. And that is the point.

Out of the intensity of this scene comes one word from Christ, the great and troubling yet profound word, the cry of dereliction. At once quoting the very first verse of Psalm 22, it is a prayer. Not to the Father, but to God. It is as if the horizons of our lives have narrowed down and there is an eclipse of any personal relationship. In the agony of the crucifixion, he cries out “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the only word from the Cross that is a question. Yet questions belong to our acknowledgement of truth. His word is a prayer to God, a prayer that as a question reveals the utter intensity of the Passion and its truth. This is not play-acting. It is suffering in its truest and deepest form: the sense of utter abandonment and loneliness.

Christ voices what belongs to all of the lonely sufferings of our world and day. But he voices it to God and that makes all the difference. The Centurion senses and knows this, seeing somehow a great good that emerges out of such a great horror. His word becomes our word; “Truly this man was the Son of God.” He gets it. Will we?

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2018