by CCW | 16 April 2025 20:00
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.
The lesson from Leviticus complements this theme. It focuses on the Aaronic priesthood and the intriguing and, perhaps, disturbing idea of the scapegoat upon whom the “sins of Israel” are symbolically laid. The scapegoat becomes the sign of all our sins as sent out into the wilderness. The idea is about the sending away of our sins through the sacrificial scapegoat. In the logic of the Passion, Christ is the scapegoat, the victim of all our sins and evil. Only in him, can that which destroys and diminishes us and makes us less than who we are in God’s eyes be removed so that we can be restored in the truth of our God-created human dignity.
The readings for the Mass for Holy Wednesday belong to these deep theological reflections on the poetry and texts of the Scriptures. The lesson from Hebrews is a treatise on the scriptural and spiritual idea of Christ’s sacrifice, a way of gathering up images from the Old Testament and pointing us towards their transformation in ‘the one and only’ sacrifice of Christ. “But now, once for all, at the end of time, he [meaning Christ] hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself … so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” This is quite a commentary on the traditions of sacrifice now raised to a deeper purpose and understanding. “We shall not see Christ crucified a second time,” Augustine observes. We look to him in glory but only through the Cross where he is lifted up before us at once “made sin for us” and the love made visible which overcomes all sin. As Andrewes will put it, “Christ crucified is the book of love opened for us to read.” The interplay of these scriptural passages help us to understand more deeply the radical meaning of human redemption.
They complement most wonderfully the beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke whose Passion account we read today and tomorrow. Luke provides us today with his account of the Passover supper of Jesus with his disciples in anticipation of his betrayal and death, on the one hand, and offers an intense portrait of the inner struggle and turmoil in Christ himself in the Agony of Gethsemane, on the other hand. These are most touching and moving scenes, testament to ‘the gentleness of Christ’ as Dante notes about Luke’s Gospel. Luke, he says, is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The beginning of his account of the Passion shows this in compelling ways. Perhaps nowhere more so and nowhere more movingly than in the last scene in Luke’s account of Peter’s threefold betrayal of Christ.
In Luke’s account, after Peter denies Christ for the third time, “while he yet spake, the cock crew.” Luke provides the masterly artistic touch. He and he alone tells us that “the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” What is that look? Condemnation and judgement or mercy and love? That look causes Peter to remember “the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.” It is a marvellous and poignant moment of the conviction of our consciences. Christ looks at us in the moment of our betrayal of him. It is a look of love in forgiveness in the face of our knowing and our unknowing of what we do. As such we learn to feel more and more the intensity of the Passion. And it is all for our good as captured in Luke’s first word of Christ from the Cross.
Fr. David Curry
Holy Wednesday, April 16th, 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/04/16/sermon-for-wednesday-in-holy-week-8/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.