Year: 2022

“Thou art the man”

“A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another,” Jesus says. But what is new about that? Haven’t we heard the commandment “to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” from Deuteronomy (6.5) to which Mark has added “and with all your mind”? Haven’t we heard from Leviticus (19.18) “to love your neighbour as yourself? How then is this a new commandment?

Because of the service and sacrifice of Christ which gives a new meaning to our lives and our loves. They are intensified in the Passion of Christ. What is given a more intense meaning is the depth of human sin, on the one hand, and the greater love of God towards us precisely in our sins, on the other hand. The new commandment to love is about service and sacrifice undertaken in a myriad of ways as the rites and ceremonies of Maundy Thursday indicate.

The washing of feet, the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the stripping of the altar, the going to Gethsemane in prayer and vigil, the traditions of the Sovereign giving alms to the poor, are among those rites and ceremonies. In a way, they are all about opening us out to a new and deeper understanding about the love of God and the love of man because they are concentrated in Christ, true God and true man.

Holy Week immerses us in the Passion of Christ. The rites and rituals of this day serve to bring us to ourselves as sinners and as beloved of God. We confront ourselves in order to find ourselves in the deep love of Christ for our humanity. “Thou art the man,” our Holy Week text, takes on a fuller significance in the Triduum Sacrum.

Perhaps no ritual is more intriguing than the Judas Cup ceremony instituted by the monks of Durham Cathedral in northern England in the 14th century. Following Holy Communion, a large cup or bowl called a mazer was placed before the monks. As Douglas Davies explains, “it was once called the Judas cup because the face of Judas was worked into its bowl so that when the monks drank from it they could see, as it were, the face of Judas looking at them and, in a sense, mirroring their own face.”

We are meant to confront ourselves as the betrayers and the persecutors of Christ. To see ourselves in all of the events of the Passion is the purpose of this week. It is profoundly counter-culture because it is not about pointing fingers of blame at others or about wallowing in the competing forms of victimhood. It is about confronting ourselves as the persecutors and betrayers of God, the principle of all truth and goodness.

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“Thou art the man”

Luke’s account of the Passion has a certain literary quality and a certain inner intensity to it. It takes us into the heart of Christ, on the one hand, and reveals to us our hearts, on the other hand. With Luke we see Christ’s interrogation of Peter at the last supper, itself a scene in which Luke provides a deeper understanding of the new covenant that his Passion and Resurrection accomplish. The interrogation of Peter serves to highlight the more dramatic form of Peter’s betrayal at the end of today’s Gospel reading.

With Luke we feel something of the intensity of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, the real struggle of the will of man with the will of God, “nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” The prayer of Christ is pictured in its intensity with the graphic image of his sweat being “as it were, great drops of blood.” The heart of Christ is opened to view.

But our hearts too are on display in the kiss of Judas – our betrayals of Christ, graphically signalled in Christ’s gentle but firm and haunting words, “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?” Our hearts are on display in the smiting with a sword of the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear – our violence in the intensity of the moment which is immediately countered by Christ’s word and act, “suffer ye thus far” and “he touched his ear, and healed him.” The contrast is powerful and telling between the disorders and violence of our words and deeds and the gentleness of Christ’s words and deeds.

The drama reaches a crescendo in Luke’s account of Peter’s betrayal and most especially in terms of how Peter confronts himself in his betrayal. In a masterly and almost painterly touch, Luke tells us that after Peter’s third betrayal not only does the cock crow but “the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” With Luke, it is the look that convicts Peter; “and Peter remembered the word of the Lord.”

What is that look? In keeping with the inner intensity of Luke’s portrayal of the agony of Christ and the gentleness of Christ, it is a look of compassion and love. Such a look convicts us far more than words of angry condemnation, far more than looks of judgement. “Thou art the man,” Christ’s look says to Peter, a look that recalls us to the truth which we have betrayed. In so doing, we are being recalled to the truth of ourselves as found in Christ’s love. It is over and against our sins but is accomplished through our encounter with ourselves. “Thou art the man,” indeed.

Such is the light of Christ which illumines us even in the shadows and the darkness of our sins. And such too is the meaning of Tenebrae in the intensity of the Psalms. They call us to account. They call us to Christ.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, Tenebrae, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

It is an ugly scene. The continuation of the Passion according to Mark sets before us the scene of Jesus being hauled before Pilate who then hands Jesus over to be crucified. He has acquiesced to the mob, to the madness of crowds. “Why what evil hath he done?”, he even asks while giving in to their will. “They hated me without a cause,” as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 35.19; 69.4) which John in turn references (Jn. 15.25).

The continuation of the Passion in Mark portrays us as the persecutors of Christ in its different modalities: the religious leaders of the Jews, the Roman authorities, like Pilate, the callous violence and mockery of the soldiers. Even in leading him out to be crucified, they have to “compel one Simon a Cyrenian” “to bear his cross.” There is no good to be found in ourselves. “Thou art the man.” We confront the forms of human evil in the figure of the crucified.

He is crucified with two thieves. “They that passed by railed on him” mocking and insulting him. Words of evil intent. Such is the viciousness of the madness of crowds; we are united only in our evil. We are meant to see ourselves in that crowd. But how can anything good come out of this?

Only by contemplating the one and only word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew alone provide. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It captures our attention. What is he saying? To whom is he calling? Elijah? We don’t even get that right. It is a prayer from the Psalms, Psalm 22, a prayer to God out of the depths of human sin and misery. It is Israel’s prayer out of the experiences of suffering and hardship, a prayer which gathers into itself the whole range of human sin and suffering in the feeling of abandonment, of desolation and aloneness. Yet as a prayer it looks to God; not as Father, a name which takes on a specific meaning of identity in the Christian faith, but simply as God. In this word, we confront ourselves in the radical meaning of sin which is nothing less than our alienation from God. “Thou art the man.” This is us in our sins.

But in confronting ourselves in our sinfulness made visible in the crucified Christ, we confront the truth of God which our sins attempt in vain to deny. Christ dies on the cross, crying out with a loud voice, and giving up the spirit, Mark tells us. Yet that is the moment when the Centurion seeing all of this says “Truly this man was the Son of God.” This is the good of the Passion in all of its violence and evil. To see the goodness of God in Christ precisely through the madness of crowds.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s words to David seek to convict his conscience about his sins. So, too, the accounts of the Passion present a compelling picture of our humanity in all of its sin and disarray, in all of the confusions of our incomplete loves. At the center is Jesus in his encounter with us. The Passion according to St. Mark begins with the encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman “in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, and as he sat at meat,” as Mark tellingly notes. It begins with Jesus in the company of the afflicted; in short, with us in our afflictions. As Isaiah puts it in the lesson, “in all their affliction he was afflicted.”

The unnamed woman – identified by John as Mary of Bethany and later in the commentary tradition as Mary Magdalene – breaks open an “alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and pours its contents on his head. She anoints him. Why? Is she acknowledging him as the Messiah, the anointed one of God? Her action excites indignation, anger and division as if she has done something wrong. Jesus responds “let her alone; why trouble ye her? She hath wrought a good work on me: for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good. But me ye have not always. She hath done what she could; she is come to aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He names his death, his embrace of the realities of human sin. Yet he acknowledges the good in her action even as he convicts our consciences about our neglect of the sufferings of one another. Her act belongs to one of the acts of corporal mercy with respect to the burying of the dead. Her act, too, is an act of sacrifice, an act of love towards Jesus.

“The poor you have with you always” does not mean our neglect of them. Jesus is challenging us about whether we make any effort to do good towards those in need. There is no illusion that we can solve all the problems of inequality and poverty and suffering in our world but there is no mistaking the idea of an obligation to do whatever we can. This goes to the logic of Christ as “the mediator of the new covenant” and so to the meaning of his passion as the ultimate reconciliation and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity. It means encountering ourselves in our dealings with one another. No sooner does Jesus say that what “she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her,” then Judas Iscariot goes to the chief priests to betray him unto them.

What unfolds is Mark’s account of the supper in the Upper Room where Jesus says to his disciples that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me.” It excites a questioning on the part of each. “Is it I? Is it I?” It is the point of the accounts of the Passion to excite in us self-examination about the ways in which we have betrayed the truth and goodness of God in one way or another. Jesus takes bread and takes the cup; he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover. It signals the sacramental ways in which we participate in his Passion. “This is my body.” “This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many.”

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