by CCW | 6 April 2020 08:00
Holy Week is the week of our betrayals of God and of one another. To contemplate such betrayals is the good of this week. Why? Because it is only possible through the love of Christ. We immerse ourselves in all four of the accounts of the Passion starting with Matthew’s Passion on Palm Sunday followed by the Passion according to Mark today and tomorrow, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and ending with John’s Passion on Good Friday. This is one of the remarkable features of our Anglican Prayer Book tradition.
But the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer also contribute profoundly to our meditation and understanding of the Passion of Christ in all of its scriptural fullness. The Gospel of John is read at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout Holy Week until Holy Saturday. It functions like a basso continuo, an underlying bass line which grounds and holds together all of the chaos of Holy Week, the chaos of human sin and evil. What we contemplate is the dynamic between sin and love. Such is the agony of Holy Week, wonderfully encapsulated in George Herbert’s poem, The Agonie. Who would know Sinne, the poem asks, and answers “let him repair Unto Mount Olivet” to the garden of Christ’s agonie, to see “a man … wrung with pains” and all “bloudie be,” a reference to Christ’s tears coming down like great drops of blood on the one hand and an anticipation of the actual blood outpoured on the Cross, on the other hand. Herbert gives us a very powerful image of sin. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” Such is the ugly intensity of the Passion.
But we are to know Love in and through Christ’s Passion and to know that love intimately and sacramentally, that is to say in terms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, he in us and we in him. His sufferings freely bearing our sufferings and showing us his love. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, /Which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine.” Such is the beauty of the Passion.
Hosea is the great Love prophet of the Old Testament whose words in the 13th and 14th chapter contribute to our reflection upon the Passion. “I knew you in the wilderness,” God says (Hosea 13.5). Holy Week is about our going into the wilderness of sin and suffering. It is from Hosea that Paul takes the famous words that have become part of the funeral liturgy, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Hosea bids us “take with you words and return to the Lord thy God,” words which are echoed by Luke in last evening’s second lesson about hanging on the words of Christ.
That is what Holy Week is about. The readings from the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel draw us into the heart of Jesus as he goes to the Cross. It is all about “going to the Father” through suffering and death. “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” No greater work than the Passion of Christ; no greater testament to the indwelling love of the Son and the Father. “If you love me you will keep my commandments,” Jesus says, for then “we will come to [you] and make our home with [you].” We are drawn into the Son’s love for the Father but only through the outpouring of the Son’s love. “I will not leave you desolate;” that is to say in the wilderness, “I will come to you.” How badly we need to learn this in our current fears and worries, in the wildernesses of our isolation.
This is what we see in the lesson from Isaiah which is one of the suffering servant songs. “In all their [our] affliction,, he was afflicted.” The Beginning of Mark’s Passion provides a set of complementary images about what is poured out and which signals both love and sin. The first is the image of the broken “alabaster box of ointment of spikenard” from which an unnamed woman anoints Jesus’ head. It causes complaint from the disciples about the waste of the ointment. Yet Jesus makes it clear what her act means; it is an act of love which anticipates his act of love in his Passion. “She is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.”
The rest of the beginning of the Passion takes us through the ugly pictures of human sin and betrayal culminating in the arrest of Christ and Peter’s betrayal. “The second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.” The Passion of Christ is meant to convict us our sin but only so as to move us to love. “And when he thought thereon, [Peter] wept.” If we have hearts, then so must we weep. Our tears outpoured even as the precious oil is outpoured upon the head of Jesus and just as his blood is outpoured for us; God’s blood, which we, in the mystery of the Passion, feel as wine. Such is love for our wounded souls because of the one who suffers for us and in us. He knows us “in the wilderness; in the land of drought.”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, April 6th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/04/06/sermon-for-monday-in-holy-week-10/
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