“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.
Homo incurvatus in se, humanity turned in upon itself is a wonderful definition of sin which originates with Augustine. We are turned or curved inward upon ourselves and not outward towards God and one another. Such is the twisted nature of self-love which in one way or another manifests itself in all of the disorders of our lives. We are too much with ourselves either in the wrong way or for the wrong ends. Through the Passion of Christ we begin to learn about the true orientation of our passions to God.
It is all about setting our loves in order, a kind of untwisting of our twisted selves. It is not the negation of our passions but the reordering and restoring of our passions to the source of their truth and our life in God. This is the counter to the forms of obsessive introspection that puts us at the center of everything. That is the great lie of our twisted humanity. Holy Week in this sense is the great corrective to our modern therapeutic culture. It is not about “look at me looking at you looking at me” because that can only lead to the terrible emptiness of ourselves and thus to the loss of meaning and purpose. Instead what Christ seeks for us is the recovery of the truth of our passionate being as souls alive to the truth of God. The paradox is plain. We have to die to ourselves in order to live to God; the proper form of losing ourselves in all of our myopic self-interest and self-fascination is about finding ourselves in Christ.
John’s account of the Passion read on Good Friday ends with the poignant words from Zechariah (12.9): “they shall look on him whom they pierced.” It is not about looking obsessively at ourselves but at Christ crucified. This captures the fuller meaning of our two intertwined texts: “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” and “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” There can be no lifting up without a going down but in both those movements what we contemplate is nothing less than God in us even in our twisted brokenness. In this sense we are redeemed from the obsessive passions that imprison us in our own emptiness. It is not simply about ourselves.
“All that we see here is God,” to paraphrase Sophocles. Such is the point of the spectacle of Holy Week. We see ourselves in Christ in all of the ugliness and horror of human sin and wickedness and in the greater glory of his love. “For I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me,” Jesus says. The term is inclusive. The variants in the Greek manuscripts allow for either “all men” or “all things.” Redemption in this sense is cosmic and universal but only through the particularities of culture and human experience. We go into the hell of human sin to learn the heaven of God’s love in the One who is without sin and yet who became sin for us. All this is God. Sin and sorrow lifted up into joy and salvation.
The lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness by Moses is a powerful image taken from the Exodus story in Numbers. The people of Israel complained against God and his provisions for them in the wilderness. God seeks our good and we complain. In so doing we put ourselves at the center of the universe as if God were subject to our desires. Such is the twisted nature of our passions in disarray. What is the corrective to this twisted understanding? “Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many of the people of Israel died” (Num. 21.6) Wow. But consider the symbolism of the serpent. It recalls the serpent in the Genesis story of the Fall, itself an image of human reason turned against the truth that it knows. “Did God say?”, the serpent asks, when in truth we know what God said (Gen. 3. 1). We confront the form of our self-contradiction; paradoxically, it is also the awakening of ourselves to self-consciousness but only through separation and thus the beginning of the long pageant of human suffering.
The deeper point that Holy Week illustrates is that we are not the victims of external forces or circumstances. Christ is the sacrificial victim who reveals the nature of human sin to us. In Numbers, “the people come to Moses” in repentance, confessing that “we have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord” (Num. 21. 7). They ask for Moses to pray to the Lord to take away the serpents. God instructs Moses to “make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live” (Num. 21. 8). In other words the sin of their denial of God is made visible to them; they “look at the bronze serpent and live” (Num. 21.9). The logic is profound. Our sins are made visible to us as sin, as a kind of twisting and negation of what we truly are because of what God is.
Is this not what Jesus seeks for us in recalling this passage from Numbers and identifying himself with the logic of the story? “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.” Why? So that whoever looks upon him sees two things: sin and love. In Christ’s Passion, we contemplate the radical meaning of human sin in all of its twisted disarray but in so doing we behold the greater truth of our humanity. We are being lifted up out of the reality of our going down into the false and twisted forms of ourselves. “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.” Therein is the truth of ourselves.
Palm Sunday sets everything in motion but in reverse. We begin in joy, shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David” at Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem but those cries quickly turn to “let him be crucified” in Matthew’s account of the Passion. We already contemplate the contradictions of our hearts. But we do so by way of Christ crucified. Matthew, along with Mark, gives us the most disturbing word of Christ from the Cross, the word of our utter neglect and denial of God as voiced by Christ who bears the radical meaning of sin in his cry of desolation: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Sin is our desolation, the denial of the truth of our own being as found in the source of all life. Christ voices and makes visible the meaning of our rejection of God’s truth. To hear this and to see this is the task of Holy Week for in so doing we are lifted up into the eternal life of God in Christ. In being lifted up, he bears our sins in his body; we look upon him whom we have pierced and only so do we live.
“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2024