Author: CCW

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

On the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week we read Mark’s account of the Passion. His account is both informed by and informs the lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer – the readings from Hosea 13 and 14 and the beginning of the continuous reading from starting with chapter fourteen of John’s Gospel which will ultimately bring us to his account of the Passion on Good Friday.

In other words, the lessons help our understanding of the different accounts of the Passion even as the Passion illumines the lessons. Think of how Hosea’s words convict us in the betrayals of our hearts. “Men kiss calves,” he says, referring to our easy idolatries, mistaking the works of our hands for God. “I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour. It was I who knew you in the wilderness,” and yet, “when they had fed to the full, and they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.” Such betrayals can only have consequences. “Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction?” words which Paul will re-echo in First Corinthians as belonging to the victory of the Resurrection. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But we have yet to see that. What is before our eyes are the betrayals of our hearts which cut us off from God. “Compassion is hid from my eyes,” Hosea will say of God if only to illustrate the strong sense of sin’s separation from truth and love.

These words give added force to the heart-felt cry of God for Israel to return to the Lord your God. How? “Take with you words,” Hosea has God say, “and return to the Lord.” Why? Because he has an insight into the nature of God, an insight into the nature of the good which is always greater than our evil. “I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely,” and where there was wilderness, there shall be a garden. “They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden.” These are wonderful words which can only shape our sense of looking upon him whom they have pierced. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things,” Hosea concludes. This is precisely the project of the Passion.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

“They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as the Revised Standard version puts it, or, as the King James Version puts it, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” either way, it is an appropriate and powerful text for our Holy Week meditations. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the spectacle of Holy Week, not that we are merely onlookers standing idly by, but in a profound sense the whole of Holy Week is about the character of our looking upon the crucified. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ; our liturgy, literally, our public work or worship, the work of the people, is about the quality of looking upon the Christ whom we have pierced. How? By our sins.

That is one part of the deep message of Holy Week, the deep message of the Passion of Christ and one which is essential to the possibilities of any fruit of the Passion in us, namely, the Resurrection. No Passion, No Resurrection. It is as simple as that. There is a necessary and inescapable connection between the Passion and the Resurrection and it is the business of this week to make that point.

Holy Week starting with the Palm Sunday procession and the Passion Gospel of Palm Sunday is really one long, continuous liturgy that extends into Easter week. We contemplate as the poets of our tradition make so very clear, “two vast, spacious thing,” namely, “sinne and love,” as George Herbert puts it. We behold the spectacle of all our betrayals. It begins with the striking contrast, the utterly opposing moments that are the contradictions in our souls, made audible and visible on Palm Sunday in the cries of “Hosanna” while waving palm branches in the enthusiastic greeting of the coming of the King to his Holy City, Jerusalem, only then to cry out almost in the next breath, “Let him be crucified.” Our branches of Palms are cross-shaped to capture visibly the contradictions and the violence of our hearts. This is us.

We are part of this parade, this charade of human desires in disarray. It may be the tendenz of our age to want to celebrate our selves, to turn every parade into the charade of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me.’ It is so often the nature of many of our contemporary churches to turn religion into a mutual self-admiration society, tinged with not a little of that old Maritime vice of self-righteousness and sentimentality that makes such a mockery of religion, especially, the Christian Religion. Did we not hear last week Jesus’ strong counter to the ambitions of the Mother of Zebedee’s children who wanted power and prestige for her two sons? Did we not hear that domination and power – and what is self-regard and self-esteem if not a kind of assumption of superiority and arrogance? – are not to be named among you? Did we not hear instead about service and sacrifice? Did we not hear about the Son of Man coming “not to be ministered unto but to give his life a ransom for many”?

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“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire:/hearken unto me
for thy truth and righteousness’ sake”

I know. It is what we are all asking God for – less snow! Hear us, O Lord!

We live in a culture dominated by images. At their best, images can be icons of the understanding but they are really only as good as our understanding. One powerful image is the veiled cross. The cross at once present and yet not fully seen captures exactly the understanding that undergirds the pageant of the Passion.

We enter into Passiontide, into deep Lent where everything about the understanding of the Passion of Christ becomes more and more intense and more and more concentrated. As we have seen in our Lenten Programme on “Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ,” the Passion is a central theme throughout the whole year.

“The whole life of Christ was a continuall passion,” John Donne remarks even as Lancelot Andrewes notes that “Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross” This brings out an important feature of the Christian religion, though one which is often ignored or downplayed in the contemporary church. The point is this. The Christian Faith makes no sense apart from the Passion of Christ. It is altogether central. We can make no sense of Christmas without reference to the Passion. The Passion is what makes fully clear the meaning of the Incarnation. As Athanasius puts it, “he borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” in that way having from us what to offer unto God for us.

This inevitably brings into play the theological doctrine of the atonement, a doctrine downplayed if not dismissed altogether. Even the most theologically minded of the philosophical atheists, like Slavoj Žižek, have the greatest difficulty with the idea of the atonement. And he is not alone. How does the Passion restore and make right what was wrong? What is the injustice that becomes justice in the sacrifice of Christ? “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5.21). Hymns, too, are often the conduit of theology, like our first hymn this morning, Venantius Fortunatus’ celebrated Passion Sunday Hymn, Vexilla Regis, from the 6^th century which offers the same teaching. “And there, to cleanse the heart of man,/ From out his side life’s torrent ran … “The priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” Still the questions raise all of our uncertainties, our doubts, and even our contemporary scorn and dismissal of Christianity.

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