What mean ye by this service?
Holy Week is about our participation in the Passion of Christ. In the spectacles of human evil, particularly of envy and the betrayals of justice, we learn about the goodness of God and about redemptive suffering. That counters our easy default to a kind of gnosticism, to acquiescing in a dualist view of reality. The deeper lesson of the Passion has to do with God making something good out of our evil, an evil which is always predicated upon the assumption of the goodness of existence and of human will and reason.
The problem lies with the way in which our will and our reason, our knowing, are compromised, twisted, and perverted. We think we see clearly when we don’t see at all. We think we know what it is that is right to do without a glimmer of an awareness of the limits of our knowing and without any sense of the destructive power of our will. In a way, the Passion of Christ intends to confront us with these realities that belong to the human condition in its fallenness. Our loves are in disarray. To learn this is our good.
Thus we need to learn about the true vocation of our humanity wonderfully signaled in the Morning Prayer lesson from Isaiah, the first of the so-called suffering servant songs and one in which the vocation of Israel and thus our human vocation is concentrated in a single figure. For Christians, this is Christ, the one in whom and whom alone that vocation can be realised. The corollary of that claim is that only in Christ can we embrace the vocation to be “a covenant to the peoples,” “a light to lighten the nations,” “to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon” and “the darkness” of ignorance and folly; in short, “to establish justice.” As the second lesson from the 15th chapter of John shows us that is only possible through our incorporation into the life of Christ. “I am the vine; ye are the branches” … “abide in me” … “abide in my love,” Jesus tells us. Powerful words which signal something positive.
And yet at the same time, as this evening’s first lesson from Wisdom reminds us, human evil arising as it often does out of envy against the good of another, leads to violence and conspiracy against the righteous man. “They hated me without a cause,” as Jesus says in tonight’s second lesson. Why? Because the good convicts us of our evil. It is a kind of folly on our part because what we are really saying is that our good is found in denying the good of another and in reality denying our own good. We are in contradiction with ourselves and a danger to others. Yet as Wisdom reminds us in our reasoning we are often led astray “because [we] did not know the secret purposes of God. We forget that “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity,” an echo from Genesis of our being made in the image of God. This is the profound teaching and insight of the Wisdom literature in its grasp of the true dignity of our humanity. It is the counter to all that we see in the Passion of Holy Week.
“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus says in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel. Somehow the vocation of our humanity now deepens into the possibilities of friendship with God, friendship with the good, with wisdom and truth. And yet what the Continuation of the Passion According to St. Mark shows us is precisely our evil and, indeed, the evil of envy, that most destructive and violent of the seven deadly sins. That is what we are given to see along with the betrayals of justice through callous expediency and indifference to what Pilate himself knows as false in the claims against Jesus. Why? So that through the spectacle of human evil we might see what the Centurion looking on the crucified sees and say with him, that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to look at the Cross which though veiled is knowingly present before us and which convicts us of our faults and failings.
That is the break-through moment that reveals the meaning of this service, the meaning of Holy Week. The spectacles of human evil can only reveal the goodness of God and how that goodness for our humanity can be brought out of the horrors of suffering and sin and evil.
In this week of broken hearts, the spectacle of the burning of the iconic cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is utterly heartbreaking. For me the most moving image is the picture of the Cross shining above the smoke and overlooking the devastation and wreck of burnt timbers in the nave. There is more than just the devastation. The cross shines forth in mystic glow, as the Passiontide hymn puts it, and illumines us even in the midst of sin and sorrow, of loss and devastation. Such, after all, is the meaning of Holy Week.
What mean ye by this service?
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2019