Month: April 2022

“Truly this was the Son of God”

“The dogma is the drama,” the novelist and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wisely noted. Nowhere is that idea more concentrated than in the liturgy of Palm Sunday. It begins the one long liturgy of Holy Week which culminates in Easter. It is the drama of salvation but only if we learn what the liturgy of Palm Sunday and Holy Week teaches us in and through its intensity.

We are not the victims in this story apart from the being the victims of ourselves in our judgements and vilification of others. In a strange way, there is a kind of reversal of the “scapegoat mechanism”. For the scapegoat of all our discontents, our hatred, and our fear of others is transformed, first, by Isaiah in the Servant Songs, and, then, in the Gospels  into the Lamb of God. “Behold, the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospels read at the end of the Trinity Season and in Advent, and so in the intensity of the Passion in the Good Friday sentences (BCP, p.173). But in him we confront ourselves not as victims but as persecutors. Palm Sunday and Holy Week confront us with ourselves in the disarray, the chaos and the evil of human sin which wreaks such havoc in our world and day.

As the sociologist, philosopher and literary critic, René Girard, observes, major social and political crises, such as the Black Death in the 14th century (not unlike the Covid-19 pandemic), result in the dissolution of all cultural distinctions, the things which belong to our individuality within a community of order. The resulting confusion and fear leads to fixing blame for this confusion and break-down of order and life; hence, the scapegoat figure, someone or some group who stands out as different in some way or another becomes the target of our discontent, our fear, and our hatred. Thus in mythology and history, scapegoat stories are really persecution narratives.

This is inverted in the biblical understanding, especially in the Gospels. We confront ourselves as the persecutors in a radical internalizing of sin. The spectacle of Holy Week which begins with the drama of Palm Sunday is the spectacle of our humanity in all of the forms of its disarray, on the one hand, and the figure of Christ, on the other hand, in whose presence we are revealed to ourselves. Paradoxically, in the sense of a profound yet dialectical truth, that is the mercy, the good, if you will, of the Passion.

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“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”

The Letter to the Hebrews is a very rich and demanding theological text. It is intriguing to see when passages from Hebrews are read in the classical lectionary. Hebrews is read at Christmas – the thundering words about the pageant of God’s word culminating in the Word and Son of God (Heb.1.1-12; BCP, p. 105). It is read today on Passion Sunday, the beginning of deep Lent, and, indeed, the end of the Epistle reading this morning (and our text) is the beginning of the Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week (Heb. 9.15-28; BCP, p. 163). Hebrews is read on Good Friday (Heb. 10.1-25; BCP, p. 174). Hebrews is read in the Octave of All Saints for the commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (Heb. 11.13-16; 12.1-2, BCP, p. 302), reminding us of our heavenly citizenship, at once “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” and “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”  It is read on Ascension Day at Evening Prayer and throughout the Daily Offices of Ascensiontide, thus informing our understanding of the Ascension as the culmination of the Resurrection. Such things suggest the theological significance of Hebrews.

And it is not by accident that Hebrews 9.11-15 is read today just after a thematic selection of readings from Leviticus on Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening just past. In a way, Hebrews is the Christian re-working of the forms of reciprocity in worship that belongs to Leviticus and especially in terms of the ethical demands that the worship of God entails with respect to our dealings with one another and the land; in short, the love of neighbour, which includes the stranger and the sojourner, and our  respect and care for the land. Such considerations speak to the idea of atonement, to our being at one with God and through God with one another in God’s creation. This is the significance of Jesus as “the Mediator of the new covenant.”

The idea of mediation assumes conflict, a division between parties. But the Mediator here is not about seeking some sort of compromise between competition over partial goods, trying to find some sort of consensus which we agree upon and make. The issue of mediation here is about the yawning and unbridgeable gap between God and man owing to human sin and evil. The divide or opposition which we have caused cannot be overcome or mediated by us. The Book of Leviticus, with all of the rigour of its proscriptions about ritual and sacrifice, takes seriously the relation between Israel and God as grounded in God’s own holiness. “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19.2). “I am the Lord your God” is a constantly repeated refrain in Leviticus, a constant reminder of the holy otherness of God as the ground for our actions towards one another and towards the created order. But such things presuppose our separation from both God and nature and from God and one another.  What Leviticus seeks is atonement, actions commanded by God that seek the reconciliation of our humanity with God and with one another and with the created order.

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