“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?
And so it begins. We enter into deep Lent, into Passiontide, which is nothing less than our participation in the Passion of Christ which enfolds us into the life of the Trinity. We enter into the radical mystery of God’s love which turns the world on its head. It is profoundly counter-culture, the counter to the culture of fear and resentment that seeks power and dominion at all costs and at the expense of the deeper truth of God and of our humanity in God. The paradox of Passiontide is set before us in today’s readings and on a Sunday which also marks the commemoration of St. Patrick. The conjunction is, I think, wonderfully providential.
Christ is “an High Priest of good things to come,” Hebrews states, but only in the paradox of being victim and sacrifice, for “by his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Priest and victim. The Gospel reading from Matthew emphasizes the same paradox: not power but sacrifice. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” This is a complete inversion of the power structures of the world and a complete counter to the victimhood culture of our day. Christ is priest and victim. God provides himself the lamb for the sacrifice that redeems us to eternal life; our life in God.
The medieval historian Jacques Delarun captures this in a book entitled “To govern is to Serve.” It chronicles some remarkable experiments in the ordering of monastic communities among a number of twelfth and thirteenth century orders influenced by the personalities of St. Dominic and St. Francis. They were attempts to embody the radical equality of Christ as the shepherd of the sheep who cares for one and for all equally; omnes et singulatim, all together and each one individually. To enter into the Passion is to learn the sacrificial nature of the divine life, the self-giving life of God as Trinity.
The mother of Zebedee’s children comes with her sons to Jesus seeking preferment and privilege for them, that they “may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” His gentle yet firm reply to her speaks to our humanity in its ignorance and presumption. “Ye know not what ye ask.” It is a striking indictment of our fallen humanity and anticipates his first word from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The privileges we seek for ourselves are invariably at the expense of others and negate our common humanity by treating some as better and greater than others. Jesus then addresses her sons. His questions point explicitly to his Passion and stand in complete contrast to the presumption in their quest and to that of the ten disciples as well. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”, he asks. The questions point to our sacramental participation in Christ’s own sacrifice through baptism and communion.
As Jesus makes clear to the other ten disciples, it is not about dominion or power over others. That is not the Christian way however much this has been betrayed by our sinfulness and folly, institutionally and individually. “But it shall not be so among you,” he says, “but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” It is a complete inversion of the polities of the world and a standing indictment of the pretensions of power in every age. As Jesus makes clear, he has come “not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” This Gospel follows directly upon Matthew’s account of what we heard from Luke on Quinquagesima Sunday about going up to Jerusalem with Jesus.
The language of ransom simply emphasizes that human redemption depends upon what God does in what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity. The language of ransom belongs to the theology of atonement. The meaning of Christ’s Incarnation is found in his Passion. As Richard Hooker puts it:
The world’s salvation was without the incarnation of the Son of God a thing impossible, not simply impossible it being presupposed that the will of God was no otherwise to have it saved than by the death of his own Son. Wherefore taking to himself our flesh, and by his incarnation making it his own flesh, he had now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us.
Palm Sunday and Holy Week immerse us in the pageant of the Passion. It reveals to us the radical nature of the divine love which alone seeks the good and perfection of our humanity. It can only happen through our going with him into his Passion and learning its fuller meaning for us in our lives. He is as Hebrews states, “the Mediator of the new covenant,” and he is so “by means of death … [that] they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” The Passion is about nothing less than our participation in the eternal life of God.
This too belongs to the witness of St. Patrick (c. 401-500), the patron saint and apostle of Ireland. It is not for shillelaghs, shamrocks and snakes, let alone green beer that we commemorate St. Patrick, but for bearing the light of Christ to Ireland in a time of darkness, lighting the paschal fire on the Hill of Tara and banishing the pagan darkness. Thomas Cahill, in his book “How the Irish saved Civilisation” juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of the conversion of Ireland to Christianity. The silver cauldron, beautifully carved and deliberately broken, is symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice. The silver chalice, beautifully engraved and whole, bears the names of the apostolic fellowship. The one, dated a century or two before Christ, is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century AD is known as the Ardagh Chalice. There is, I suppose, all the difference between a cauldron and a chalice; in this case, the juxtaposition captures the transformation of a culture and its participation in the apostolic fellowship and communion in the life of God. We are not the victims; Christ is. His life is given for us and lives in us.
Through the Passion we find our life in the self-giving life of the Trinity. The hymn “St. Patrick’s breastplate” or Lorica attributed to St. Patrick captures powerfully the essential Christian witness to the Passion and the Trinity. It is # 812 in our hymn book. It offers a wonderful collection of images that deal with the power and grace of God in relation to us through nature and scripture, through spirituality and theology, and even psychologically, we might say, but all as contained within the Trinitarian understanding that embraces and frames the entire hymn. It begins and ends with the invocation of the doctrine, the teaching about God as Trinity. The doctrine is itself at the heart of our devotion and worship of God.
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.
Everything comes down to the matter of Trinitarian orthodoxy – the wonder of the revealed teaching about the nature of the God in whose image we are made. It is not by accident that the Mattins First Lesson for Passion Sunday is the Exodus story of the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush as “I am Who I am.” In the Christian understanding of things as revealed in Christ, that means the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. At the heart of it is Christ: Christ with us, within us, behind us, before us, beside us, to win us, to comfort us, and to restore us; Christ beneath us, above us, Christ in quiet, in danger, in hearts of all that love us, in mouth of friend and stranger. Christ is all and all in God.
The paradox of Passiontide is that we enter into the darkness of human sin to learn the light and life of God through the Passion of Christ. In him is the love of God that is our life, a life that is service and sacrifice.
“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2024