“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”
It is finished. Done. Consummatum est. But are we? The pageant of the Passion in Holy Week has carried us through the accounts of the Passion from Matthew, through Mark and Luke, and now culminates with the Passion according to St. John on Good Friday. Christ is lifted up before us and we hear what is his last word from the Cross in John’s Gospel.
Yet it is the penultimate word of Christ from the Cross in terms of the ordering pattern of the seven last words as established by the native Peruvian priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in Lima in the late 17th century; a pattern which subsequently shaped the Good Friday devotional traditions in both Reformed and Roman Catholic churches in Europe and paradoxically returned to influence devotional practices in the Americas. That pattern arises from the immersion in the Passion accounts and seeing in them an interior logic or motion.
Three of the Seven Last Words derive from Luke, another three by John, while Matthew and Mark both provide us with the heart-rending cry of desolation, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” Luke’s account gives us the first and last word as the beginning and end of Christ’s prayer to the Father: “Father, forgive them for what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” This provides, as Fr. Bedoya understood, I think, a profound insight into God as Trinity and gathers into that relationship all the forms of human relationship in terms of penitence and loving care.
“Jesus remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom” is the prayer of the penitent thief crucified with Jesus that gives rise to Jesus’ second word in Luke’s account: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” itself an important feature of the radical meaning of human redemption understood in terms of the restoration of creation and our place in it. John’s first word is equally compelling because it speaks to us about the care of one another in the body of Christ. “Woman, behold thy son,” Jesus says to Mary and to the disciple, John, he says, “Behold thy mother.” It is the third word in the sequence of the Seven Last Words, the word in which Christ lifted up before us commends us to the care of one another, seeing one another in the familial intimacy of son and mother. It marks a kind of exchange in seeing ourselves and one another in Christ. Following the fourth word, Christ’s cry of dereliction which voices the radical meaning of sin as desolation and emptiness, the deeper meaning of our self-willed separation from God and the truth of his creation, we have the fifth word from the Cross which in John’s Passion is Christ’s second word. “I thirst,” and then his final word which is the sixth word in Fr. Bedoya’s sequence, “It is finished.”
It is the only word of the seven last words without any personal pronouns. It states a simple but profound spiritual truth about the meaning of the Passion as concentrated for us in the figure of Christ crucified as lifted up before us. It is a theological statement about redemption. What is finished?, we might ask. All that belongs to human redemption, all that the Son has come to accomplish by doing the will of the Father who sent him. That ‘all‘ is about the radical meaning of human sin and evil embraced in the Crucified who was made sin for us and in whom we see our sins made visible, even as the serpent was raised up in the wilderness by Moses. But that too is testament to the love of Christ who wills to bear our sins in his body, the body of his humanity.
As we have seen throughout Holy Week, sin and love are constantly set before us in their interplay. We cannot think the one without the other. Contrary to the limited forms of linear thinking in our current culture (too much left-brain thinking which is destroying us, as Iain McGilchrist suggests), we are asked to think two things together. Such is the pageant of sin and love together in the Passion of Christ.
We contemplate the love of God through the all-too-human spectacle of sin. “Was ever grief like mine?” This phrase from Lamentations is heard in the voice of Christ. Christ voices the meaning of our sins. George Herbert’s wonderful prayer, Sacrifice, uses this as the recurring refrain in a poem of sixty-two triplets, but ends the last verse with a slight change from the interrogative to the strong declarative to underscore the deeper point. “Never was grief like mine.” That is the point of Good Friday as expressed in the last word of John’s Passion. “They shall look on him whom they pierced.”
We are to look and be pierced ourselves, as Lancelot Andrewes suggests. We are to look and pierce our own sins in ourselves in repentance and compunction having acquired a new and deeper understanding of our twisted selves. But only through the greater spectacle of God’s love.
“It is finished,” the Crucified Christ says before he dies. But is everything finished with us? Is there anything more that comes out of this spectacle of sin and love? No and yes. Christ has borne all the sins of the world past, present and future, we must say. It is all accomplished in him but we are still in our pilgrimage as sinners all constantly seeking God’s redeeming grace proclaimed in his sacrifice and sustained by the grace of his redemption of our humanity.
The point is that we have not finished with Christ even as dead on the Cross. One of the soldiers takes his lance and pierces Christ’s side and forthwith out pours blood and water. On the one hand, it is simply part of the process of his being crucified, a way of testing that he is dead and thus avoiding the breaking of his legs – all gruesome details of death by crucifixion. On the other hand, it testifies to the radical meaning of his Passion out of which flow the sacraments of the Church. In short, the resurrection is already present in the Passion. This was a Patristic commonplace wonderfully expressed by George Herbert in the last two verses of his poem, Sacrifice.
Nay, after death their spite shall further go;
For they will pierce my side, I full well know;
That as sinne came, so Sacraments might flow:
Was ever grief like mine?
But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo[e], mans weal:and now I bow my head.
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine.
All is finished. Let me finish with the last poem in the first edition of the poems (1633-1669) of the poet-preacher, John Donne, entitled “A Hymn to God the Father.” Other manuscripts entitle it “To Christ.”
I
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.
II
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? And, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
III
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
In the lifting up of the Son of man on the Cross, all is finished and all are drawn to Christ. It is our joy to contemplate Christ crucified out of whom flows the grace of life and love.
“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2024