Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week
Wednesday in Holy Week 2025:
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
The shadows of the Cross stretch forwards and backwards. The theme of forgiveness in the face of the uncertainties and limitations of our knowing is signalled in the remarkable passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that we read in Holy Week along with the intensity of the readings from John’s Gospel in the Offices. These readings, I am trying to suggest, help to better our understanding of the Passion of Christ. The shadows of the Cross at once adumbrate or shadow forth the events of the Passion and illuminate something of its radical meaning. One of the traditional services for Holy Wednesday is Tenebrae, a Latin word which means shadows or darkness. Tenebrae is a ‘psalm office’ that anticipates the Sacrum Triduum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday that bring us to the Vigil and Celebration of Easter.
On this day we have two intriguing Old Testament lessons, one from Numbers at Matins, and one from Leviticus at Vespers. Those are two rather forbidding books and yet the passages read this day speak directly to the meaning of the Passion. Jesus, very early in John’s Gospel, tells Nicodemus about the heavenly things of spiritual life and new birth in terms of his ascending and descending from heaven. “No one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” He goes on to explain this: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
This is a commentary on a scene from the Exodus recorded in Numbers about the murmuring of the people of Israel against Moses and God. As a consequence, they are visited by fiery serpents “so that many people of Israel died.” Moses intercedes to the Lord that he “take away the serpents from us.” The Lord directs him to “make a fiery serpent” out of bronze and to set it on a pole, “and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”
John has this passage in mind and it complements the whole pageant of the seven last words of the crucified encapsulated in the first word. Think about it. The people of Israel behold the image of their own sin made visible to them and thus are healed. We behold Jesus crucified in all of the events of the Passion and in so doing behold our sins made visible in the one who overthrows our sins and wickedness. John Donne notes that there is a great difference between the creeping serpent, alluding to the story of the Fall of the serpent in the garden, and the crucified serpent, meaning Christ, “the serpent of salvation,” the serpent raised up as in Numbers. It is really all about the direction of our thinking. The creeping serpent looks downward to the dust but we are meant to look upward at once to the bronze serpent on a pole and even more to Christ crucified on the Cross. “They [we] shall look on him whom we have pierced,” as we will hear at the very end of the Passion According to St. John on Good Friday. But already that idea is anticipated; indeed, adumbrated or shadowed forth.
