Day: April 14, 2019

“What mean ye by this service?”

The lessons at Morning Prayer for Palm Sunday provide the larger context for the readings at the Holy Communion. The first lesson is Exodus 11 which is the story of the event of the Passover itself after which we have in the next chapter the institution of that remembrance which is our Holy Week text or mantra, “What mean ye by this service?” The second lesson is the chapter which immediately precedes the Passion account of St. Matthew, the first of the four accounts of the Passion read in their entirety in Holy Week. We immerse ourselves in the Passion in all of its intensity.

What about this evening’s readings? The lesson from Isaiah is the last of the four so-called servant songs and is the most intense in its expression about the idea of substitutionary suffering. The suffering of Israel for the sake of others is further intensified in the Christian understanding by the sufferings of Christ. Christ is “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted by grief.” “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows … he was wounded for our transgressions … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Is. 53. 3-7), … “he makes himself an offering for sin” (Is. 53.10). The imagery concentrates the theme of the Passion as being the sufferings of Christ for us and in the face of our wickedness and indifference.

This evening’s second lesson provides St. Luke’s account of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, complementing the Palm Gospel at Mass from Matthew. He adds as a kind of postscript to the cleansing of the temple the theme of animosity towards Christ by “the chief priests and scribes and the prominent men of the people” who “sought to destroy him.” Yet, as Luke marvellously puts it, “they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words.”

Holy Week is about our hanging upon the words of Christ, learning a great good even in and through the spectacles of sin and violence, in and through the miscarriages of justice and the betrayals of trust and goodness. We are in these events at one with “the chief priests and scribes and prominent men of the people” whose self-interest and pride and presumption are indeed challenged and threatened by the words and presence of Christ and at one, too, with “all the people” that “hung upon his words.” The latter suggests a spirit of longing and learning that is the counter to all our illusions of power and control. In hanging upon his words in the pageant of Holy Week, we journey with Christ in his passover for us. The meaning of the services of Holy Week is our participation in the sacrifice of Christ. Such is our freedom and our good.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, EP, 2019

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“What mean ye by this service?”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week of the intensity of Christ’s Passion. In it we confront all of the contradictions in our souls and in our lives. We confront our betrayals of the good, our betrayals of God. This awakens us to the radical nature of that goodness. We are given to see ourselves and to find ourselves in the events that belong to this holy week. It is the week of the Passion of Christ, the week of the Passover which undergoes a radical change of meaning through the sacrifice of Christ. In the Christian understanding, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”.

The connection to the Passover story is undeniable. The question that belongs to the Jewish celebration of the Passover becomes our question. “What mean ye by this service?” (Ex. 12.26). The question reverberates throughout the whole of Holy Week.

Holy Week is one continuous liturgy, one continuous service. It is marked by different degrees of intensity and expression but in essence we enter into the Passion of Christ as modelled upon the ancient Passover celebration that defines Israel. It is about God’s deliverance and thus signals the redemption of our humanity. It is about the liberation of the Hebrews from the yoke and tyranny of Pharaoh. How? By God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews, their lintels daubed with the blood of a lamb, the passover lamb, and thus sparing them the plague of the first-born. A sign that signifies and effects what it signifies, we might say. The rituals are the sacramental ways in which God’s defining acts of deliverance are recalled and re-lived, re-presented for the Jewish people. They, in turn, shape the central act of Christian worship in recollecting the words and actions of Christ in the week of his Passion and the way in which those words and deeds are remembered and reenacted by us. We enter into the Passion of Christ sacramentally. Only so can we feel the thought, feel the Passion which we are required to contemplate and think always but throughout Holy Week especially.

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