Day: March 27, 2018

Sermons

Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week

“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

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

King’s-Edgehill School Holy Week Newsletter

Standing afar off, beholding these things

What things? The things of the Passion of Christ. Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals within the greater spectacle of God’s love without which we cannot behold these things.

Palm Sunday to Easter is really one long, continuous liturgy. We immerse ourselves in the Passion. In the classical Anglican understanding, that means all four of the accounts of the Passion by each of the four evangelists. It is an act of remembering in a very intense way what belongs to the Passion of Christ.

Passion here means being acted upon. Christ wills to be acted upon, to be delivered into our hands. Holy Week presents us with the whole range of human emotions in all of their disorder and disarray, in all of their confusion and uncertainty. We confront ourselves in our encounter with God in Christ and especially in his sufferings of which our sins are the real cause. The point is to find ourselves in the crowds which circle around Christ and his cross. We go from greeting Christ in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the shouts of Hosanna to the deeply disturbing cries of Crucify, Crucify. These are our contradictions, our confusions. Christ’s crucifixion shows us what they literally look like.

The cross is absolutely central. That is often a difficult concept for the contemporary world which is more inclined to see it as a symbol of cruelty and hate. The point of Holy Week in its concentration on the Passion of Christ is to see the cross as the symbol of love and forgiveness, of reconciliation and hope. By beholding the things of the Passion we participate in the Passion and its meaning for us in our lives. It is a great check upon our pride and presumption, upon the ways in which we get so caught up in ourselves and lose our very humanity.

The narratives are extremely intense and thought-provoking in the way in which they reveal things about ourselves in our “thoughts, words, and deeds” but in such a way that we are not destroyed by what we see about ourselves. They provide no place or occasion for complacency or self-righteousness. We are changed in some sense by what we see, or, at the very least, there is that possibility.

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Prayers and liturgy

Tuesday in Holy Week

The collect for today, Tuesday 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 Lesson: Isaiah 50:5-9a
The Continuation of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Mark
The Gospel: St. Mark 15:1-39

El Greco, The SpoliationArtwork: El Greco, The Spoliation (The Disrobing of Christ), 1577-79. Oil on canvas, Sacristy of the Cathedral, Toledo, Spain.

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