“All the people hung upon his words”
What words? The Nicene Creed says that “he suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures, the Creed does not mean the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament but the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament. Luke’s text however is about the words of Christ. Holy Week sets before us the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and complexity. Yet the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures help us greatly in grasping the radical nature of his Passion, Death and Resurrection. They provide the ground for the credal witness to Christ crucified.
Thus on Tuesday in Holy Week at Matins we read the first servant song of Isaiah, a passage which is understood in reference to Christ in the Christian understanding and to Israel in the Jewish understanding. Christ unites both, we might say. He accomplishes or fulfills what belongs to the vocation of Israel as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” even as Simeon identifies the child Christ in exactly the same language based upon exactly the same passage. And the redemptive nature of Christ’s work is also signaled here: opening the eyes of the blind, bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon and from the prison those who sit in darkness. These are the pilgrimage themes of illumination and purgation, of liberation from the prison of ourselves.
The reading from Wisdom tonight complements the first servant song from Isaiah and highlights the theme of Christ as the victim, the righteous one whose very being excites the wrath and envy of those who seek his destruction. For wherever the good is sought there too is the devil hard at work but always as a negative force, always as negating the goodness of being but as such reasoning blindly and foolishly. These texts throw light on the continuation of Jesus’s farewell discourse in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel.
Even more they complement and deepen our understanding of the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark which is a pretty full picture of human evil and the miscarriage of justice, of human cruelty and abuse and mockery which culminates in the crucifixion and the word, the one word of the crucified in both Matthew and Mark. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” We are meant to hang on that word of the one who hangs on the Cross and feels to the fullest possible extent the reality of sin and evil, feeling it more that we can imagine because of his greater goodness. We are meant to feel his sense of utter abandonment and alienation which is nothing less than what we have visited upon him in our abandonment and alienation from God.
What, then, is the good for us in the face of this awful spectacle of suffering and evil, of sin par excellence in several different registers? Simply this. The one word that comes out of the Centurion in seeing the crucified Christ. We are to hang upon the words of Christ that we might be able to say with the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to profess what we proclaim in the Creed about the crucified Christ who “suffered and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead.” But only if we hang upon his word of desolation and know ourselves as its cause and truth.
“All the people hung on his words”
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2023