by CCW | 22 March 2024 13:00
Such is the hope for ourselves as we enter into the Passion of Christ. The joint commemoration of Benedict, the founder of Benedictine monasticism, along with Thomas Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer, suggests the legacy of the Fathers for the continuing life of the Church. Benedict (480-547) was the founder of Benedictine monasticism which has shaped the European world. It was in the Benedictine monasteries that the writings of the Fathers were largely preserved and passed on as living presences and voices in the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. What we have come to call ‘Anglicanism’ is itself an inheritor of that tradition with its attention to “the mind of the Fathers.” Diarmaid McCulloch observes that Gerlach Flicke’s iconic 16th century portrait of Cranmer[1] (1545) captures the essential features of the English Reformation project: the reading of the Scriptures through the Fathers, principally, though not exclusively, Augustine. Augustine, however, is certainly the dominant and seminal figure for the shaping of Benedictine monasticism and its heirs.
The one, who founded the spiritual and intellectual traditions which remain with us, at least for those, who, as Jesus says, “have ears to hear,” complements the other who was an Archbishop and a martyr. Together they contribute to our Lenten reflections on reading with the Fathers especially with respect to Passiontide. I want to offer a few passages from Origen, Chrysostom, and Leo on the symbolic meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem which emphasize the centrality of the Passion. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (b. ? – d. 461) concentrates the doctrinal emphasis for us: “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” That marks the character of our participation in the Passion through the pageant of Holy Week.
Origen (185-254) the great theologian and biblical exegete par excellence, commenting on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, states what becomes a common approach of the Fathers to the Scriptures. “It is,” he says, “worth while in such places in the Gospel to apply our minds to the meaning and purpose of the writers, and to consider why, after they had related the wonders and portents of the Saviour’s actions, they should also record these things which reveal nothing of this sort.” Something is to be learned even in the seemingly minor details of the Gospel narratives. As he says:
It is understandable that the Evangelists should commemorate the restoration of sight to the blind man, the healing of the paralytic, the raising of the dead, the cleansing of the lepers, in order that those who would read their writings might be strengthened in Jesus. But what purpose had they in mind in this place in which it is recounted, that, after Jesus had with His disciples drawn near to Jerusalem, and had come to Bethphage close to Mount Olivet, He sent two Disciples with the command that they should loose and bring to Him an ass that was tied, together with its colt [?]; He Who frequently made long journeys on foot, and did not refuse to complete His sojourn here on foot, as when He had come to Jerusalem, and passing through Samaria arrived at the well, and being weary from the road had sat down by it? And what did Jesus also mean when He bade them loose the ass that was tied, and the colt with her, telling them to answer any man who asked them: ‘Why do you loose him?’ to answer, ‘that the Lord hath need of them: and forthwith he will let them go?’”
He goes on to reflect on the prophecy of Zechariah in the Palm Sunday Gospel, dealing with the differences of detail in the accounts of the Evangelists, but only to arrive at its symbolic meaning for us in the journey to “that Jerusalem which is above, [which] is free, which is the mother of us all,” recalling for us the Epistle reading for Lent IV.
And see also if these actions of the Saviour are not symbolical: loosing by means of the Apostles the beasts of burden from their bonds; that is, those who from this people or from the Gentiles who would confess His faith.
The loosening of bonds connects the Passion to the Exodus, to the loosening of the bonds of slavery to the Egyptians and of the greater bonds of human sin. His reflections contribute to the reflections of other Fathers about the ass and the colt of the ass as images of the forms of our humanity, whether as Jew or Gentile. Underlying it, though, is the greater theme of redemption from sin; the loosening of the “ancient bonds,” as he puts it, that free us to God but only through Christ’s sacrifice and passion as it unfolds from his entry into Jerusalem.
It truly becomes the Son of God, since He is human, to have [this kind of] need of the ass that was tied, and of the colt that was tied with it; for His need was that, seated upon them He might rather refresh from toil and restore those upon whom He sat, than that they should give rest to Him.
The divinity and the humanity of Christ are emphasized as well as the relation between the Creator and the created as a way of illustrating the purpose of the redemption of all things to God. Origen proceeds to connect these details of the entry into Jerusalem with the first two Beatitudes. This, too, becomes a recurring theme: seeing the passion in relation to the Beatitudes as the ultimate expression of the restoring of our loves in disarray to who we are in God. The blessing of the poor in spirit is the kingdom of heaven; the blessing of the meek is the possession of the land, of the earth, but seen in terms of the dynamic unity of all the Beatitudes as bringing us to the kingdom of heaven. The meek shall possess the land, he says, but “not as though they are to be on it for all time: for after they have been comforted [meaning those who mourn], and because they have hungered and thirsted after justice, and been filled with it, and have received mercy, and seen God, and have been called Children of God, they shall be restored again to the Kingdom of heaven.”
Origen goes on to connect our humanity to these dumb beasts of burden, suggesting that they are wiser than us, though all human wisdom is far less than God’s wisdom.
For before the Majesty of God, and before His Word, not only are we as beasts, but they also [are they] who are wiser and more intelligent than we are. Compared with the power of mind of Our Shepherd we are His sheep; for the mind of even the wisest of men compared with the wisdom which is in the Word is remoter from it than the mind of an ass or a colt or of a sheep is from that of a man.
Christ as meek and humble riding upon an ass and the colt of an ass redeems us from our burdens by his going up to Jerusalem.
But after they have come there they are no longer a beast of burden and its colt but now, transformed and enriched, made sharers of the divinity of the Word, and of His sublime doctrine, and changed by the Lord, they may, for the glory of God, be returned to the place whence they were loosed; receiving this as a reward for carrying Him, that they are sent back to their former place but not to their former service. For being freed from their bonds, and honoured by carrying Christ, Our Lord Jesus Christ would not send them back again to bondage, and to baser tasks than that which they fulfilled when they had borne on their backs the Son of God.
It is a lovely reflection on the radical nature of the Passion as belonging to the redemption of the whole world and to the connection between all aspects of the created world as taken up into God’s redemption.
Later in the fifth century, John Chrsysostom, the golden-mouthed preacher in Constantinople will build upon the traditions of exegesis inaugurated by Origen to call attention to the meaning of Zechariah’s prophecy in terms of Christ’s humility and meekness. Christ comes, Chrysostom says “not drawn in a chariot like other kings, not demanding a tribute, nor surrounded by officers and guards; and in this also showing meekness. Then ask the Jews: What king has ever entered Jerusalem riding upon an ass? There is not save This One.” He goes on to reflect on the symbolism of the colt and the ass as signifying the Church universal embracing Jew and Gentile.
For by the colt the Church is signified; and also the new people, who before were unclean [meaning the Gentiles], but became clean as soon as Jesus had rested on them. And note with me how everywhere the allegory is continued. For it is the Disciples that loose the beasts. And it is through the Apostles that both we and they have been called to the faith, and through the Apostles have we been brought to Jesus. And because the glory of our calling has made these others envious, so the ass is seen to follow the colt.
Ultimately, as Chrysostom says, it all turns not on questions of dominion but service and sacrifice; the themes which are explored and expounded on Passion Sunday.
Leo’s Sermon # 62, De Passione Domini XI, provides a remarkably complete theological account of the Passion of our Lord. He acknowledges the difficulty and the necessity of speaking about the Passion. “Let human weakness bow down before the glory of God.” For “the great mystery of the divine compassion” can only be approached in humility, “since this subject, in that it is unutterable, gives matter without end for speaking; nor may what we say fall short, for of what we speak never can there be enough.” The mystery is inexhaustible. “It is good for us,” he says, “to learn how little we truly know of the Majesty of God.”
And among all the works of God, before which the mind grows faint with awe, which so rejoices yet overwhelms the soul as the Passion of our Saviour? For as often as we dwell, as best we can, upon His Omnipotence, which He shares with the Father in one and the same nature, more wondrous does His lowliness seem to us than His power, and with more difficulty do we grasp of His emptying Himself of the divine Majesty, than His sublime uplifting of the form of a servant. Yet it helps us greatly to understand, that while One is the Creator, one the created – One the inviolable Divinity, one the suffering flesh – what belongs to either nature meets in the single Person: so that whether in might or in suffering, His the humiliation Whose also the glory.
This is, he says, what we are taught by the Creed. “By this rule of faith, which we learn from the beginning of the Creed on the authority of Apostolic Teaching, we confess, that the Lord Jesus Christ, Whom we declare to be the Only Son of God, the Father Almighty, was also born of the Holy Ghost from the Virgin Mary. Nor do we deny His Majesty when we believe that He was crucified and died, and that on the third day He rose again. For His divinity together with His humanity has fulfilled all that was required of God and of man: yet so that while the impassible was present in the passible, Power was not diminished by infirmity, nor infirmity swallowed up by Power.” This defines the faith of the Church. “The strong Christian faith … fears not the gates of death” for it “confesses One Lord Jesus Christ Who is both True God and true man; believing that the Same is the Virgin’s Son Who is the Author of the mother; that the Same was born at the end of Ages Who is the Author of all times; that the Same is both Lord of all Majesty and one of the race of mortal men; and that He Who is without Sin in the likeness of sinful flesh as offered up in behalf of sinners.”
Christ’s Passion is the overcoming of all evil and sin, the overthrowing of the Devil and all his fury because, as Leo puts it, the devil “was tricked by his own wickedness.”
He inflicted a torment on the Son of God which was changed into a medicine for all the sons of men. He shed innocent Blood, Which then became both the price and the drink which restored the world.
He explains the logic of the exchange. “The Lord took upon Himself what He had freely chosen.”
Such was the tenderness of His love, even for those who put Him to death, that from the Cross He begged His Father, not that He be revenged, but that they might be forgiven; crying out, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
What we see and hear if we have eyes to see and ears to hear has the power to transform and change us. It is the meaning of our going into the Passion of Christ. Christ’s intercession on the Cross concentrates the whole meaning of the Incarnation and changes us. “Through the power of this intercession [Christ’s prayer for our forgiveness],the hearts of many of those who had cried, ‘His blood be upon us, and upon our children’ were changed to repentance.”
It means immersing ourselves in “the whole order of events, as narrated so fully in the Gospel”, explicitly in the four accounts of the Passion in all four Gospels. Why? As he says, “that while believing in what was done when the passion of Christ was being fulfilled, we may come to understand that in Christ, not alone were our sins remitted, but there was set before us the perfect model of love.”
The Passion of Christ reveals the perfect model of love and sets our loves in order, transforming our twisted and disordered passions into the true form of our humanity revealed in Christ’s sacrifice. “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” May our brief readings with the Fathers deepen us in our understanding of God’s compassion and love for us and for all creation.
Fr. David Curry
Commemoration of St. Benedict & Thomas Cranmer
March 21st, 2024
Lenten Programme III: Reading with the Fathers
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