Year: 2020

“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in my love”

John’s Gospel, we have said, provides a strong underlying foundation for the movement of the pageant of the Passion throughout Holy Week. Today’s readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel are especially powerful. We are presented with the last of the so-called seven “I am” sayings of Jesus, metaphors that identify Christ with the God revealed to Moses in the burning bush and that envision the forms of our participation in the divine life. “I am,” Jesus says, “the bread of life,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” “the Resurrection and the life,” “the door of the sheep,” “the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep,” “the light of the world,” and here, “the true vine.” Powerful images that belong entirely to our life with Christ. “Our whole life says Our Father,” Origen notes, because of the Word and Son of the Father who bids us pray, “Our Father.” We are drawn into an intimacy of the relation of the Father and the Son. “I have called you friends for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.”

And yet, in the Continuation of the Passion, the one word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew give us is Christ’s cry of dereliction, of desolation. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is not, it seems, a cry to the Father. It is as if the intimacy of that relation is utterly hidden in the agony of the Passion. But it is a prayer, a prayer to God. A quote from the beginning of Psalm 22, it underscores for us as no other word does the full meaning of the desolation of sin. Sin is about our separation from God. Christ voices that sense of alienation and its devastating desolation in this word, what will come to be known as the fourth word of Christ from the Cross.

The readings from John’s Gospel highlight the organic nature of Christ’s relation to us. That is the power of the seventh “I am” saying. It is about God living in us, about the life of  Christ in us without which we have no life. But this chapter is also about the dynamic of the Son’s life with the Father. We place Christ’s word of desolation in the love of the Son for the Father. “He who hates me, hates my Father also,” Jesus tells us. We are to feel something of the radical nature of sin in this word, in the suffering of Christ for us in this word. He suffers in this word the radical nature of our sin. And all because, as Isaiah tells us, the suffering servant did not turn back but embraces “the shame and the spitting” out of confidence that “the Lord God will help me” even when he feels to the fullest possible extent the alienation of sin.

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“I knew you in the wilderness; in the land of drought”

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.

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“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”

Our cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to “let him be crucified.” And so it begins, and ends, on Palm Sunday. It begins with the exultant note of rejoicing but ends with the grim spectacle of Christ’s death on the Cross. Yet that ending also marks a beginning. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. For only then can we say that “truly, this was the Son of God” (Mt.27.54). Already something comes to birth, to light, out of the darkness of Christ’s suffering and death.

The global pandemic has made the world a rather fearful place. That is, perhaps, the greatest danger of the Covid-19 crisis; the fearfulness that brings out the worst kinds of despair and anxiety as we contemplate the growing numbers of fatalities globally. Churches are closed and media headlines suggest that preachers wonder, ‘where is God in all of this?’

Where is God? Right where He always is, right in the midst of the struggles and sufferings of our wounded and bent humanity. Never more so than in Holy Week and in the drama of the Passion of Palm Sunday. The question is not, ‘where is God in all of this?’ The question is where are we in our thinking and our caring about the ethical and about one another? The whole point of Holy Week is to confront us with the contradictions that belong to human sin and wickedness without which we cannot be awakened to the truth of our humanity in God. Such are the deep lessons of the Passion. We are to be where he is. As Rowan Williams puts it in his lovely book Being Christian, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering” That is where we are.

“There were they in fear where no fear was,” the Psalmist says (Ps. 53.6). In a way, such words speak to our current state of isolation. For as cooped up in our homes we are, it seems, largely insulated from contagion but not from the fears of our minds and hearts about others in our families and communities, fears about those in the front lines of health care, fears about deaths in Nursing Homes, fears about ourselves and a growing fear, suspicion, even hatred of others, precisely because of our isolation. No doubt, too, there are fears about the necessities of life, fears about other kinds of illnesses that belong to the human condition quite apart from the coronavirus. Our fear is very much a fear of the other, a fear of bodies, a fear of nature. At the heart of our fears is uncertainty. Yet the Passion of Christ is all about God’s willingness to subject himself to the bodily realities of human suffering. God wills to suffer. That is the striking paradox and meaning of Holy Week.

Such is the radical truth of the Incarnation, recalled for us in the Annunciation of Mary which fell in Passiontide this year. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God being with us and so with human suffering. Her Annunciation marks his conception in her womb. Only so can God suffer for us and with us. In the body. And why? To bring us to the truth of ourselves in his will for us. To do so through suffering.

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