Author: CCW

“All the people hung upon his words”

This is the night of watching and waiting upon the truth and power of God’s love, a love which is greater than the darkness of human sin and death. We watch and wait, once again, by hanging upon the words of Scripture. We watch and wait in expectancy for God’s great creative action, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The point is very simple. Christ dies but love lives and triumphs over death. All of the Scripture readings at the Vigil underscore this essential insight and truth. We are reminded that the goodness of God is and must always be greater than every form of evil. The Resurrection is Creation renewed by being recalled to the truth of God in love and forgiveness.

The divine desire to be reconciled with his sinful creation means the redemption of all sinners. It requires that we hang upon his words, listening to the great Paschal Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, listening to the Prophecies of Scripture that speak of God’s triumph over sin and evil, and then renewing our baptismal vows by which God has reconciled himself to each of us in his love for us. Then there is the simple joy of rejoicing in Christ’s redemption of our humanity with Lauds, the praises of Easter morning, the resurrection alive in us.

How? By hanging upon the words of Scripture that testify to the Resurrection. Dr. Johnson once said that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. Well, our hanging upon his words concentrates our minds even more wonderfully upon the reality of divine love. It makes us alive, restored and renewed in love. Such is the wonder and the power of the Vigil. Our hanging upon his words opens us out to the Risen Christ.

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2023

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Christ no longer hangs upon the Cross. It might seem then that we no longer hang upon his words. He is dead and buried.

Holy Saturday is the day of the greatest peace and the deepest silence. It recalls the Jewish Sabbath, to God’s “resting” on the seventh day after the labours of creation. On Holy Saturday, Christ rests in the tomb. Everything is at peace since all that stands between God and man has been overcome on the Cross. We have heard Jesus’ last words from John, “it is finished,” and from Luke, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” There is, it seems, only peace and silence. It reminds us of paradise. And yet, Holy Saturday is more than paradise and more than the Sabbath rest of God.

The Scripture readings speak of an activity that underlies all of the peace and silence of this day. We gather at the tomb of Jesus in the aftermath of the cruel events of the Passion and yet the Scripture readings speak of something else. “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us in a passage that echoes the first lesson at Matins from Zechariah. “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image of Sheol or Hades, of Hell.

The psalms, too, speak of Hell. “Thou wilt not leave my soul to hell;/neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption” (Ps. 16.11). “Thou, Lord, hast brought up my soul from hell:/ thou hast kept my life from them that go down to the pit” (Ps. 30.3). There is the sense that something is happening despite the quiet and the silence of this day. What is it? It is the Descent into Hell, as the Creed puts it. What does it mean?

Holy Saturday shows us something of the greater meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It shows us the fullest possible extent of God’s will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. And while all seems quiet and in silence, Christ descends into Hell to preach unto the spirits in prison. The redemption of our humanity means the gathering up of the spirits of all who have gone before us but again only by hanging upon his words. Our humanity finds its redemption only in hanging upon the words of Christ.

God’s Sabbath rest is about God’s delight in his creation. The Sabbath rest of Holy Saturday is the gathering of the whole of sinful creation to the living word of Christ so that we can take delight in God. Such is the radical meaning of the reconciling love of God for us, the love that returns us to “the bishop and shepherd of our souls,” as t 1 Peter tells us. It recalls the story of Noah, itself an Old Testament image of God restoring by the flood and Noah and the Ark the mess that human sin creates. Peter sees this as a figure of baptism which restores us in our minds to God.

We wait at the tomb given for the body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea. His action is an act of love and love is already active in ways beyond our imagining. Christ lies in the tomb but the tomb can never fully contain him. He cannot be spirited away by human cunning and deceit. He is always and totally defined by doing his Father’s will. God seeks the reconciliation of the whole of our sinful creation. In every way, we are gathered to God by hanging upon his words.

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, Matins & Ante-Communion 2023

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Never more so and never with more intensity of attention than on Good Friday. We hang upon the words of the crucified whom we behold pierced and dying on the Cross. We look and listen. There is literally nothing else for us to do and yet it is the defining challenge for us.

Guarda e ascolta, Dante the poet has Mathilda, the handmaid to Beatrice, say to him in the earthly paradise of the Purgatorio, itself one of the greatest images of the spiritual pilgrimage in which we are made “pure and prepared to leap up to the skies,” to the Paradise of God, the celestial paradise. “Look and listen,” she bids the pilgrim Dante. Look and listen to what? To the symbolic pageant of Word and Sacrament. At its center is a gryphon, a mythical creature at once wholly eagle and wholly lion, thus symbolic of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ.

Good Friday brings us to the Cross. In Dante’s great vision all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and all the books of the Christian New Testament converge and unite in Christ. All the words of the scriptures are the words of Christ and all those words converge in the figure of the crucified. We look upon him and listen to him who looks upon us and speaks to us. Sin and love meet in the crucified. Look and listen.

Our holy week pageant brings us to the Passion according to St. John and so to the completion and contemplation of the seven last words of Christ. Matthew and Mark have given us the one word of dereliction and desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, the word which derives from Psalm 22. Luke as we saw on Maundy Thursday gives us three words from the Cross; the first, second and seventh word. John gives us the third, fifth and sixth words of Christ. In the seven last words of Christ there is a kind of gathering up of the fullness of revelation, a concentration of Word and Sacrament.

Looking upon the crucified means listening to the words of the crucified. We are, as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, meant to look upon the piercèd Christ whom we have pierced in our sins and follies and be pierced in our hearts and souls; in short to be moved to contrition for our sins by the spectacle of love. The Good Friday devotions on the crucified Christ has been a part of our looking and listening, an essential feature of the life of the Church from the earliest times. “My Eros is Crucified,” as Ignatius of Antioch put it, to take but one example along with a host of Patristic, Medieval and Reformed homilies on the Passion of Christ, all following the idea as Paul states, that “we preach Christ crucified.”

In some places, and this has been a large part of my own experience, that meant a three hour service structured around the preaching on the seven last words of Christ, a serious and significant devotional practice which seems to have fallen into abeyance. The history of that practice is intriguing and surprising. It was actually developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in the late seventeenth century and in Peru following a series of earthquakes, especially in Lima.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Luke gives us three of the seven last words from the Cross. In some sense they shape the drama of salvation with a certain kind of intensity and poignancy. They are words which reveal us to ourselves as sinners at the same time as they reveal the deep love of God. That dialectic of sin and love is the drama of Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum.

We are meant to hang upon the words of Christ in the intimacy of the Last Supper as we heard last night at Tenebrae. One of the important features of Maundy Thursday is that it connects powerfully and essentially the Passion and the Eucharist, the celebration of the Christian Passover, if you will. In both we confront the spectacle of our betrayals of ourselves and God. As Christopher Lasch puts it, “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” Nothing could be more self-critical than Holy Week. “The nature of religion,” he notes, is “to console, but, first of all, to challenge and confront.” We have forgotten this in what has become for our culture and our churches ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ and now ‘the tyranny of the therapeutic’, as if our self-esteem were the highest good.

Holy Week and Maundy Thursday challenges that sense of the self in a way that is profoundly counter-culture. It is not about ourselves as the victims but as the victimizers because of sin and evil. We confront our betrayals of Christ and thus of ourselves in the scene at the Last Supper which Maundy Thursday reminds us about by way of the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians (as well as the Evensong second lesson from John 13). It is the betrayal of the fellowship of friends. We cannot celebrate the Eucharist without recalling our betrayals of that fellowship. “In the same night that he was betrayed,” the eucharistic prayer says; that same night is this night. Every Eucharist places us in the upper room where Christ carries himself in his hands and gives himself to us who are his betrayers.

This kind of self-criticism belongs to the good of the Passion. It is through confronting the limitations of our humanity in all the forms of our fallenness and sin that we learn the greater love of God for our humanity. It is all about confronting ourselves and being challenged by the words of Christ. That and that alone is our comfort. Our good intentions are not enough whether it is in the garden of Gethsemane or in the high priest’s house of the temple precincts. We may want to watch with him in companionship but are too weak. We may want to bear witness to him but betray him like Peter. We confront ourselves in these scenes in the hopes that the look of Christ upon us as upon Peter may move us to contrition and sorrow.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? Whose words? Those questions take on a certain poignancy of meaning in the service of Tenebrae. The Latin for darkness or shadows the ancient services of Tenebrae were anticipatory of the three great holy days, the Triduum Sacrum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The service of Mattins was sung solemnly the evening before each of those days. This reminds us that Holy Week is not simply a linear sequence of events but a cluster or crowd of events that belong to the credal understanding of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, events that are all interrelated doctrinally and which inform each other. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be understood independently and in separation from each other.

Tenebrae in the modern practice anticipates the Mattins of Maundy Thursday but includes a number of psalms and canticles that point us to the Resurrection. It is essentially a psalm office. The Psalter is the Hymn and Prayer Book of the Jews and of Christians. Thus many of the words we are meant to hang upon in an attentive and serious way are the words of the psalms. That is intriguing and poignant because the psalms present us with a number of different voices: the voices of our humanity in its distresses and fears, its disorder and violence; the voice of God in judgment and compassion; and the voice of Christ both as suffering victim in his humanity and as seeking our good. The psalter, as Calvin observes, presents us with an anatomy of the soul. We are meant to learn things about ourselves in relation to the truth of God. We are, yet again, learning the great lessons of sin and love in their interrelation.

Thus Tenebrae draws us dramatically into the Passion through the power of the psalms and the canticles, scripture songs which comment on the things of the Passion and human redemption. We are meant to find ourselves, our own souls, in these psalm prayers and hymns at the same time as we are meant to find ourselves in the deep embrace of God’s love for us and for our good.

The psalms of Tenebrae complement the first Mattins lesson for Maundy Thursday from The Lamentations of Jeremiah understood as the voice of Christ addressing us from the Cross revealing to us our rejections of God’s Word and truth made visible in the crucified. Thus it is Christ speaking directly to us about our evil and our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Powerful words and images that reveal Christ as bearing our sins in his own body, words that convict us.

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