Author: CCW

Easter Vigil: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Our little country Vigil, as I like to think of it, is a very truncated and shortened form of the much more complex and dramatic service of the Easter Vigil. Our service consists of the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle, the singing of the Exsultet or Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, that is centuries old and sometimes attributed to Augustine, a reading of some of the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Testament interspersed with Scriptural canticles, the renewal of Baptismal vows, and ends with the Lauds of Easter morn.

At the heart of the Exsultet is the theological concept of Felix Culpa, ‘O happy fault.’ It highlights the profound idea that redemption is the far greater act of God than even creation because it signals the renewal and rebirth of our humanity and our world as accomplished by Christ’s sacrifice. It proclaims the potent idea that God and God alone can make something good and wonderful out of our sin and evil; hence O felix culpa.

At the Vigil we wait upon the motions of God coming to us as life and light that overcomes the darkness of death and evil. The signal note is joy and exultation at the new creation of our world and of ourselves as restored to fellowship with God. The Vigil celebrates the new and radical idea of Resurrection which changes death from being an end or terminus to death as a means or way, a transitus, as the gate or door through which we pass to something more and greater, everlasting life. It is not a renunciation of the past of sin and sorrow, of evil and death, but its radical transformation into grace and life, the grace and life which God seeks for our humanity. And if the Resurrection changes death, it also changes how we think about everything, about life and suffering, about good and evil. In every way it is about new life. The past is not eclipsed but transformed and so too for ourselves. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” on the things of God made manifest in the pageant of the Passion that issues in the parade of joy at Easter.

The Vigil teaches us that the forgiveness for which Christ prays on the Cross belongs to the essential life of God upon which all our thinking and being depends. As Joseph says to his brothers who had sought his life: “you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” Forgiveness leads to joy and gladness in the greater knowledge of God’s knowing love for our humanity. It leads to the Alleluias of Easter.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry

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Holy Saturday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Christ’s first word from the Cross in Luke’s Account of the Passion and in what has become the classical ordering of the Seven Last Words of the Crucified has carried us throughout Holy Week. It brought us to the Cross and now carries us to the tomb of Christ.

There is a wonderful silence and a sense of peacefulness to Holy Saturday, especially after all of the confusion, noise, and chaos of Good Friday. It suggests a kind of purgation of all of the disorders of our passions. We have had our way with God in seeking to annihilate him from the very reality of our lives, not understanding that he is the reality. Truly, we know not what we do. The peace and silence of Holy Saturday belong to our reflections on the Passion and to a deeper understanding of the divine forgiveness of the Cross. It reveals something more than what we think we know about life and death.

The Scriptural readings are profound. They point us inescapably to the creedal doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell which is really but the further extension of the forgiveness of sins and to what belongs to human redemption. Christ, we are told by way of images from Zechariah and 1 Peter goes and preaches to the souls in prison. This suggests the importance of the idea of coming to know things more fully which were not fully known before. What the Descent into Hell signals is the furthest possible extent of the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity: past, present, and to come, we might say. As such we are being drawn more completely into the life of the Trinity, into the essential life of God which overcomes all death, all sin and all evil.

The doctrinal idea is captured in the Icon of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ as drawing Adam and Eve out of the tomb, out of the place of death, Sheol, Hades, Hell. That image along with the Scriptures speaks to the radical idea of our being restored to the image of God which is the truth of our being. The image of God, the image of Christ, the image of the Trinity are all the same in a way and speak to the ultimate end or purpose of our humanity as found in the life of God.

On Holy Saturday we come to the tomb of Jesus. We come to honour the dead, to pay our respects to those who have died but especially to honour the one who has died for us. But our waiting at the tomb in a spirit of respect and honour already signals that our humanity is about more than death. We are more than our bodies, though not less, and as such we are more than our deaths as well. From that perspective our waiting at the tomb on Holy Saturday morning segues into the Vigil of Easter Eve, our waiting upon God’s new creation, the Resurrection which is simply, if I can put it that way, testament to what we both know and do not know. “As dying, we live,” Paul says. We have yet to learn that life is greater than death and even arises out of death.

But such is the point of our text about the forgiveness of God in Christ’s Passion and Death. It ushers us into an understanding of things we do not fully comprehend. Forgiveness is infinite in its extent. It is life in the midst of death.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2025

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Good Friday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

The first word from the Cross has provided the scriptural matrix through which we have pondered the Passion of Christ in Holy Week in all of its remarkable intensity. It brings us literally to the crux of the matter, to the Cross and Christ’s Passion and Death in all of its unvarnished power and truth. Once again, we attend to the lessons at the Offices which contribute to our understanding of the mystery of human redemption.

On Good Friday, the Old Testament readings at Matins and Vespers are from Genesis with the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, the promised son, and the third of the four Servant Songs from Isaiah. These readings in turn are complemented and deepened by the continuation of the readings from John’s Gospel whose Passion account is the main focus on Good Friday along with the rich theological tour de force of Hebrews about the meaning and extent of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. But our Holy Week text concentrates our thinking on the struggle to understand something of “the mystery of the man of sin,” as Hooker puts it, without which we cannot begin to comprehend the mystery of redemption and salvation. Ultimately it concerns nothing less than the deepening sense of being known and embraced in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity individually and collectively in Christ.

That we know not what we do convicts us of the limitations of our finite human knowing, on the one hand, and of human pretension and folly in our fallenness, on the other hand. But even more, it signals the greater truth upon which our knowing and doing properly and truly depends; the divine knowing which is the intellectual principle without which we are nothing. The wonder and mystery of Good Friday is that it concentrates the underlying theme of God’s will and reason as bringing good out of our evil. The paradox for us is that we can only begin to grasp that through the contemplation of ourselves in our sinfulness – that is at least one part of the great good of this day called Good Friday. To do so, however, is to begin to contemplate the surpassing power of God’s truth and goodness, to see in the spectacle of Christ crucified, as Donne puts it, “this beauteous form” which alone can assure or comfort our pitiable souls, our souls in need of pity. That would mean our awareness of the need for the divine mercy and pity that Good Friday so powerfully presents. We confront ourselves in Christ’s Passion only to discover the love of God about which we have such an incomplete sense of its all-encompassing power.

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Maundy Thursday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum and signals the beginning of the intensity of the Passion in all its fullness. The readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah at Matins and Vespers today provide a graphic complement to the continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke and anticipate the Solemn Reproaches on Good Friday.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow … [for] the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.” Lamentations begins with the sense of desolation and loneliness that our sins occasion. “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;” we hear in the evening lesson, “he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” And yet in the desolations of Holy Week, what is remembered and called to mind is that “the steadfast love of the Lord never faileth, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”

With Luke’s Passion, we have three of the seven last words from the Cross and in the late 17th century ordering of the seven last words by the native Peruvian priest Fr. Alonso Messio de Bedoya, Luke provides the first and last word, bracketing in a way our reflections upon the cross by gathering them into the motion of the Son’s twofold prayer to the Father: The first word is “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” and the last word is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

In one way, Maundy Thursday is a great and complex melange of liturgies and rites, ranging from the King’s touch and the washing of the disciples’ feet to the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the stripping of the Altar, and the Agony of Gethsemane, among others. Yet, in another way, everything focuses on the Last Supper. Redemption and salvation are concentrated for us in the Eucharist as the place where Christ gives himself to us sacramentally on the very night in which he was betrayed.

Passion and Eucharist are simply inseparable. “Jesus Christ take[s] our nature upon him, and suffer[s] death upon the Cross for our redemption,” as the Communion Prayer states. We are gathered into the embrace of the Trinity as the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the second lesson at Matins from John makes clear even as the second lesson this evening points us as well to the examples of sacrifice and service that belong to the drama and the wonder of human redemption.

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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.

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