by CCW | 27 March 2018 20:00
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.
Suffering. It is an important part of the all of world religions. Buddhism is defined, one might say, by its relation to the question of suffering, the origins of which lie in desire, in the idea of the self. Get rid of desire means getting rid of the false idea of ‘you.’ ‘You’ do not exist. There is no ‘you’. ‘You’ are but an illusion. For other religious traditions and philosophies, denying oneself is a key concept. Only so can we be present to and with others.
“God is suffering,” as the mystic theologian, Meister Eckhart suggests, providing a very provocative approach to suffering. I suffer therefore I am but my suffering is in God, a suffering without suffering, a suffering in which there is a kind of radical comfort, a comfort in the suffering. We easily forget that suffering belongs to the human experience and without denying its reality we forget that God makes a way to himself through it. Such is “the most burning love of the Crucified,” as Bonaventure puts it. God’s love of his own goodness burns through all of the follies and wickednesses of our humanity. Even suffering in this view of things brings us to the truth of our humanity which is found only in God. Even the cross, that hideous thing becomes a “beauteous form” which, as John Donne puts it “assures a piteous mind,” a mind that knows its need of pity and mercy and so is open to it.
Lancelot Andrewes, one of the great poetic preachers of the soul’s return to God remarks about the spectacles of Christ’s crucifixion that it is all liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read. That is the challenge and the joy of Holy Week. Embrace the suffering and find the joy. It is all in our beholding these things and letting them shape our souls.
I wish the blessings of Holy Week and Easter to all of you.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/03/27/kings-edgehill-school-holy-week-newsletter/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.