Author: CCW

“What mean ye by this service?”

It will be the recurring question for this week. It all begins today, Palm Sunday. It is the beginning of Holy Week, the week of the Passover. Christ is our Passover. But what does that mean?

Our liturgy shows us what it means. It all begins today and ends at Easter. It is one continuous liturgy. Christ crucified and Christ risen. The story captures the whole range of human emotions and experience, the whole range of sin and evil, the whole picture of human redemption. All of it is focussed on the figure of Jesus Christ. In a way, the whole story of Christ is concentrated in the events of this day and week. Palm Sunday makes us confront the paradox of contradiction that exists in our own souls.

“Hosanna to the King,” we cry, only to turn around and cry, “Crucify him.” The one, a cry of exaltation and delight; the other, a cry of violence and viciousness. This is what we cry. We are not merely by-standers. No. The whole point of Palm Sunday and Holy Week is that we are participants in the drama of human redemption. We are part of the unfolding of the spectacle of human redemption. It is the Passover of the Lord. We are in the story of this week.

But what does this mean? The ancient story of the Passover underlies the meaning of this week. Jesus enters triumphantly into Jerusalem. He does so to celebrate the Jewish Passover. Everything that transpires in the spectacle of this week relates to the Passover story.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”

Passion Sunday. It is, perhaps, a curious and a rather perplexing term. What does it mean? What are we to make of Passiontide?

Suffering. That is what it means. Passion Sunday marks the beginning of our intense participation in the Passion of Christ; in other words, the sufferings of Christ. The suffering is for us and in us. The suffering is redemptive, even celebratory, and all the more so if we attend to the sufferings of Christ, which is what the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is suggesting. The Gospel reading, too, points to the redemptive nature of this suffering and to the themes of discipleship and service and the idea of learning through sacrifice.

But suffering? Surely there is more than enough suffering and on a far greater scale than any of us can really imagine in our own world and day. It has been scarcely weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and already it is fallen off the front page and, indeed, was often eclipsed by the fears and worries about nuclear fallout. The loss of life and destruction of property along the coast of Japan was overwhelmingly huge, the magnitude of the earthquake and flood unprecedented. But humans can bear only so much truth, even the truth of suffering, it seems. And yet, suffering is the main concern of Passiontide.

Whose sufferings? Ours? Yes, in a way. Suffering here is seen as part and parcel of the human condition in its brokenness and fallenness; part and parcel, too, of a fallen world where things are not always as certain and stable and as safe as we would like them to be. Suffering in the Christian viewpoint is a result of sin, original and actual, personal and collective, but in Passiontide, all of it, I repeat, all of it, is concentrated on the figure of the Crucified.

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This is the fourth and final Lenten meditation on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here and here.

“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

It is, as we suggested on Sunday, a rather powerful statement about the nature of human redemption. It appears in the Eucharistic gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent and may serve as our final word in this little series of reflections about the meaning and nature of original sin.

We are in the wilderness with Jesus. That makes all the difference in the world, all the difference in heaven and earth, we might say. In the earlier gospels of the Sundays in Lent, Jesus has been in the wilderness of our temptations, our sorrows and anxieties, our desolation and despair. It is as if we are more or less like on-lookers or spectators; somewhat passive in relation to what is unfolding before us and yet is something for us. We contemplate the theological aspect of the justifying righteousness of Christ for us.

On the First Sunday in Lent, he is in the wilderness alone, tempted by the devil, having been driven there by the Holy Ghost (and not in some sort of fancy chariot), and only after overcoming the threefold temptations is he attended by angels. On the Second Sunday in Lent, Jesus encounters the Canaanite woman, the non-Israelite, who serves to remind us of our sorrows and anxieties about our children and, even more, about the truth of God that is for all people. The encounter recalls at once the vocation of Israel as the holy people through whom “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” as well as suggesting the fulfillment of that vocation in Jesus Christ. Somehow, as this amazing woman senses, even “the little dogs” from outside of Israel are fed from “the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.” How much more are we fed from what is left-over from the wilderness banquet of God’s redeeming love!

The Third Sunday in Lent presents us with the dark picture of human desolation and emptiness when we have forgotten our desire for God. To be aware of our need for God is part of the message of original sin. To know that things are not right with us and our world and to know with a fall of our own hearts that “the heart is deceitful above all else” is part and parcel of the legacy of original sin. The good news is that such an awareness opens us out to God, to our desire for God and to the divine will which seeks our good. In this gospel, God is with us. It makes all the difference.

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