Author: CCW

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Vigil of Easter is most emphatically “according to thy word,” the word of prophecy and hope, the word of prayer and praise, the word of expectant excitement, and, above all else, the word of renewal and re-creation. The Vigil is all about our waiting upon the divine word, like Mary pondering the words that were spoken about the child Christ. We wait at the grave but we wait expectantly, waiting upon the word which called all things into being and now recalls everything to its truth and principle. It is by all accounts a new creation.

What we await is not about a return to Paradise. There can be no going back. No. What we await is something more, paradise plus, perhaps, for the creation as renewed and restored cannot mean the forgetting of all the folly and wickedness of the human experience, past, present and future. Indeed, the Resurrection presents to us the radical nature of our disobedience in order for us to consider the greater power of divine love. In other words, we await God’s new creative act in a spirit of anticipation, in a mode of holy expectancy. Why and how? Because of God’s word to us. We wait just as Mary waited for her time to come. We are waiting upon God in the knowledge of God that has been revealed to us.

It is not presumption but holy waiting. It is an essentially Marian attitude of faith best captured in her word, “be it unto me according to thy word.” We await expectantly as based on the witness of Scripture and the hope in God that arises from the strength and glory of ancient Israel. We await the great something new that will be wonder and delight, peace and joy abounding unto glory. Our waiting must be like Mary, a waiting that is always “according to thy word.”

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2012

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The radical nature of Mary’s word in response to God appears not only in the terrible intensity of Good Friday but also in the quiet peace of Holy Saturday. Through her word we have endeavoured to consider the creedal elements of human redemption. The crucified Christ dies and is buried. Holy Saturday reflects on the grave and death of Christ. In way, everything is at peace since all that belongs to the overcoming of all that separates God and man has been accomplished on the Cross. “It is finished,” as Jesus says in John’s account of the Passion.

But there is one further creedal element that belongs to the Passion and which is a further consequence of Mary’s ‘yes’ to God. It is the Descent into Hell. The readings on Holy Saturday take us to the grave but they also present to us this arresting idea and image of Christ “[going] and preach[ing] unto the spirits in prison,” as the Epistle reading from 1 Peter 3 puts it, and of the radical nature of “the blood of the covenant” which “will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” bringing salvation to the “prisoners of hope,” as Zechariah suggests. And as the Mattins lesson from 1 Peter 2 suggests, not only are we healed by his wounds but we are “returned unto the shepherd and bishop of our souls.” The radical nature of that returned is represented to us on this day and in ways that relate directly to Mary’s ‘yes’.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word brings us ultimately to the Cross, to the words of the Crucified. The conjunction of the Annunciation with Passiontide heightens the interplay of Christ’s coming to us through her and Christ’s going from us through his death on the Cross. Her word connects to his words, his last words, we might say, and provides us with a critical and interpretative way of pondering them.

Mary’s word is her ‘yes’ to the divine will and purpose for our humanity. That is accomplished on the Cross in the humanity which Christ assumes from her. She is the true and pure source of Jesus’ humanity, soul and body, without which there can be no passion, no death, and no redemption. At the heart of the Passion is the same intensity of commitment and willingness to suffer for the will of God, for the will of the Father.

Good Friday. It is a paradox. Christ is crucified and dies – a kind of judicial murder and yet one in which we are all, in some sense or another, totally implicated. “Were you there when they crucified the Lord?” as the old spiritual so strongly, eloquently and rightly expresses it. A rhetorical question to which the answer, though unstated, is yes; we were there, we are in the story! That is the point without which there can be no good for any of us on this day. And yet, this darkness of the human heart on this day is the occasion for what is precisely called good.  Good Friday.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

“Whatsoever he tells you, do it.” This, too, is Mary’s word, and not altogether unlike her word of response to God at her Annunciation, but it is her word to us at the Wedding Feast in Cana of Galilee. A direction and a command, it follows upon her assessment of the human condition, “they have no wine,” she says. But Christ will provide for us, turning the water into wine, but not before his strange and disturbing word to Mary. “O woman, what is that to you and to me. Mine hour has not yet come.” And not before her direction and command, “whatsoever he tells you, do it.” It is, we might say, but a further extension of her word of response to God, “be it unto me according to thy word.” And as with her so with the Church, and so with us, especially in the week of Christ’s Passion.

Tonight, we meet in the Upper Room with the disciples and Jesus. It, too, is a celebratory event, a celebration of the Passover, a celebration with bread and wine in honour of God’s deliverance of Ancient Israel from slavery in Egypt, a defining event in the culture of the religion of Judaism. But what strange and disturbing things are heard and seen in this Upper Room! “Do this”, Jesus says, to us in the Upper Room; “do this in remembrance of me.” Defining words for Christians.

“He carried himself in his own hands,” Augustine notes, calling attention to the strange marvel of Maundy Thursday, reminding us of the strange wonder of Christ’s words in the Upper Room. He identifies himself with the elements of the Passover Feast; the bread and the wine of the celebration of the Passover are spoken of here as his body and his blood, the bread and wine of liberation and salvation. What kind of provision is this and how shall we understand it?

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Tenebrae, meaning shadows or darkness, is the great Psalm Office that anticipates the Triduum Sacrum of Holy Week, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday which culminate in the mystery of Easter, the mystery of the Resurrection. The theme of anticipation is intriguing and not a little confusing, perhaps, though it has to do precisely with the deeper meaning of the form of our participation in Christ’s passion. The drama of salvation is more than a narrative tale. The Passion is about the way God addresses the radical disorder of our humanity; darkness and shadows indeed, and yet bearing a wondrous grace. “Thou’ hast light in dark” and “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb” as the poet, John Donne says about Mary in his poem, entitled Annunciation, and about her place in the drama of human redemption. A wondrous grace indeed.

And, perhaps, nowhere is that idea of “light in dark” seen more compellingly and yet more gently than in Luke’s account of the Passion which we begin to read on the Wednesday in Holy Week. That we read it along with one of the most theologically challenging and exciting passages from The Letter to the Hebrews only heightens the sense of Mary’s word, “be it unto me according to thy word.” The conjunction between Luke and Hebrews through the critical matrix of Mary’s response is remarkable and, I think, most compelling. By word I mean something more than just what is spoken or written; it is also about understanding and meaning; in short, something theological, something that pertains to the logos of God.

“Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant” the Letter to the Hebrews states, a new covenant initiated “by means of death,” a new covenant that is quite literally and metaphorically about blood, a word which appears seven times in the epistle reading. The point is dramatically captured in the arresting phrase, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Human redemption is about the divine forgiveness bestowed upon a wayward and foolish humanity steeped in violence and folly and wickedness. But there is a cost. There is blood.

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