Day: March 24, 2024

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life,” John tells us in the 3rd Chapter of his Gospel (vs. 14). This text is further elaborated upon and intensified in another statement by Jesus voiced in the first person much later in his Gospel: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (Jn. 12.32). Together they provide a critical matrix of interpretation for the pageant of the Passion in Holy Week.

As a fragment from Heraclitus reminds us, “the way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning, I think, that the way to the principle and the way from it are really all about the principle itself in its self-motion and in its movements in us, a kind of exitus and reditus, a going forth and a return. That pertains to the challenge of Holy Week, too. It is all about our looking upon the pageant of the Passion in all of its intensity and meaning, in all of the ups and downs that it presents. It is really all about a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around the essential mystery of the Passion in all of its moments. We immerse ourselves this week in all four of the Passion accounts in the Gospels. That is quite powerful and highlights an important feature of our Common Prayer tradition that honours the centrality of the Scriptures understood in terms of credal doctrine.

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long and continuous liturgy that culminates with Easter. We begin in joy and end in joy; the joy of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the joy of his Easter resurrection. But that beginning and ending are not equal for us: the joy of the resurrection is greater. Why? Because in Christ we go “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23.4), “through the vale of misery” (Ps. 84.6), the parade of the miseries of our humanity in all of its twisted forms, yet finding in that parade a greater good, even a blessing. Such are “the pilgrim ways” in our hearts, going “through the vale of misery” but using it “for a well,” finding in it blessings.

The point is the drama of the dogma of our salvation in which we participate through the liturgy. We are in this story. The Passion of Christ is about what he freely wills to suffer for us and for our good, thus the passions of our souls are equally on display in the spectacle of the Passion; in short, the lifting up of the Son of man and our being drawn to Christ as Saviour. The story of our humanity is recapitulated and completed in Christ’s Passion. The sorrows and joys that belong to human life find their radical truth and meaning in what Christ undergoes for us and with us in his Passion. “His whole life”, as John Donne remarks “was a continual passion”, “a continuous cross,” as Andrewes notes.

Holy Week is the further concentration of his whole life and of ours. What we contemplate in his Passion are the different and various forms of our twisted selves, our incomplete and partial loves that result in one way or another in our being less than who we are in God. “We are,” as Rowan Williams says in a recurring phrase, “because God is. And we are what we are because God is what God is”. Holy Week is the pageant of the redemption of who and what we are in God.

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