Category: Sermons

“All the people hung upon his words”

This is Luke’s word to us, too. And on this day especially, it is our challenge to hang upon the words of him who hangs upon the Cross for us and for our salvation. Only so can this day be in any sense Good Friday.

“He borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” Athanasius famously observes. He borrowed, too, a tomb, it seems, which becomes the womb of new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.

Luke gives us three of the seven words of Christ from the Cross. In the traditional understanding, the words of the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father from St. Luke: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” and, as we just heard, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, as Luke tells us, “having said this, he breathed his last.” Christ dies. Then, and only then, are we left with the intriguing picture of “all the multitudes” having “assembled to see the sight” and “return[ing] home beating their breasts.” The sight of Christ crucified and the words of the Crucified are meant to affect us, indeed, to convict us and move us to acts of contrition and confession, even “beating our breasts.”

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Holy Week reaches a crescendo of intensity in the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of the Passion: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Out of that disturbing and passionate intensity comes the radical reality of new life, the life of the Resurrection. We cannot think the one without the other. And we cannot think about either without hanging upon the words of Christ, especially in the pageant of his Passion.

The words par excellence, perhaps, that the Christian Church hangs upon, and certainly most frequently, are the words of the institution of Holy Communion, the words of Christ in the Upper Room on the night that he was betrayed, this night, this very night. “Take eat, this is my Body which is given for you”; “Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant.” These words so familiar to us from the service of Holy Communion are at the heart of the Passion and derive from the accounts of the Passion and from Paul. They are the words of Christ to the disciples on the eve of his Passion; words which signify so much of the Passion and its deeper meaning and which signal the form of our continuing and constant participation in his Passion and Resurrection.

The Church has hung on these words because they define the being of the Church as the body of Christ. They express the meaning of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the Christ whose sacrifice is the radical overcoming of sin and death, the Christ who gathers us into his eternal thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, the phrase defines the meaning of this day, Maundy Thursday. Maundy derives from the Latin, mandatum, which means commandment. The Passion is about the love of God for us, the love which commands us to love as he has loved, and provides for us the means of our living in his love. Only so can his love begin to be realised in our lives.

Sin and love are the great lessons of Holy Week, to be sure, but it is through the sacramental life of the Church that we constantly participate in the life of God, in his constant triumph over sin and death, and in the constant reality of his love in itself and for us.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

It isn’t really a very pretty picture. There is very little good that can be said about our humanity in The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark. We are forced to contemplate the hideous realities of human sin in a variety of forms ranging from the miscarriage of justice by Pilate, giving into the machinations of the chief priests who manipulate the crowd, to the mockery of Christ by the soldiers in the Praetorium and, then, to the cruelty of his Crucifixion, reviled at once by those who looked on and even by the two thieves who were crucified with him. Perhaps, Simon the Cyrenian might serve as the only counter to this negative picture of ourselves but even he has to be compelled to bear Christ’s cross to the place of crucifixion. This stands in stark contrast to Christ’s freely willing our redemption.

In this picture of Christ we behold the spectacle of the ultimate good and righteous man whose very goodness is the occasion of our rage and spite as the lesson from Wisdom suggests. Yet, as Isaiah indicates in the Matins’ lesson, “this is my servant, my chosen … in whom my soul delights,” the one who “bring[s] forth justice to the nations,” the one who is “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” the one who “open[s] the eyes of the blind” and “brings out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison.”

Here in the continuation of Mark’s Passion, we see the meaning of another one of the servant songs from Isaiah, the meaning of Christ as the one who wills to bear all of the injustices of our sinfulness, the one who gives his “back to the smiters” and who “hid not [his] face from shame and spitting.” We hang upon the words of Scripture which present the unvarnished picture of human cruelty and meanness, on the one hand, and the picture of the suffering Christ, on the other hand. Nowhere is that image of the suffering of Christ more disturbingly presented to us than in the horrifying cry of dereliction. “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?”

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“All the people hung upon his words”

There is hanging and there is hanging. What exactly does it mean to hang upon the words of Christ? It means at the very least to ponder the wonder and mystery of the readings of Scripture in the pageant of the Passion. Today we begin the reading of the Passion according to St. Mark, and what a powerful and poignant beginning that is!

We begin with the woman who “having an alabaster box of ointment, very precious” breaks that box and pours the ointment upon his head. It is a powerful image and the reading ends with what pours out of Peter when “he called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him.” Tears. Tears of compunction. Tears of contrition. Tears that signal the beginnings, perhaps, of confession. Tears flow as plenteously and as efficaciously as the precious ointment from the broken alabaster box. There are few images more compelling and touching than this: the conjunction of the broken alabaster box of precious ointment of spikenard and the precious tears of Peter when he recalls the words of Christ.

That is what it means to hang upon the words of Christ. It is to be effected by what we hear and by what we remember of what we have heard. Therein lies the wonder and the power of the liturgy. We are constantly exposed to the words of Scripture. In a deeper theological understanding of things, they are all the words of Christ; that is to say, they all belong to a theology of revelation, however neglected, ignored and utterly absent from the mind of the contemporary church such a concept may be.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Here is the place from which our text for today and this week comes. It is Luke’s account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and about the reaction to his coming. You will note the paradox. Luke’s phrase about all the people “h[anging] upon his words” is the reason for Jesus’ not being taken captive immediately by those who “sought to destroy him”, namely, “the chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people.” Because “all the people hung upon his words,” he is protected by the people. And yet, the contrasts of this day reveal how he is betrayed by all of us. Somehow we have to hang upon his words which name our sins and betrayals and without which we ourselves are lost.

The lesson from Isaiah presents what is known as The Fourth Servant Song. The passage is rich in its allusions and associations. It is not hard to see how the images of Israel portrayed as an individual and as a righteous servant “afflicted” and “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities” comes to be associated with the figure of Jesus Christ. Isaiah’s imagery enters into the pageant of the passion. The suffering servant is not simply Israel; it is Jesus Christ who wills to suffer for us all, “pour[ing] out his soul to death,” being “numbered with the transgressors,” “[bearing] the sins of many” and “ma[king] intercession for the transgressors,” indeed, “mak[ing] many to be accounted righteous”; in short, the theological images of atonement and reconciliation.

The parallels between the Isaiah’s suffering servant and Luke’s account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover are unavoidably and richly suggestive. It is really a matter of how we see Christ and that depends entirely upon our hanging upon his words. Only so shall we be saved for we shall find ourselves enveloped in his love.

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“All the people hung on his words.”

It is a Palm Sunday word, a text from the second lesson at Evening Prayer, and yet one which expresses so much of the meaning of this special day and week. In a way, Luke’s comment captures the intensity of Holy Week – but only if we hang on the words of Christ.

That is where it all hangs, as it were. Holy Week, in the essential catholic understanding of classical Anglicanism, is about the fullness of the Passion of Christ. Hanging on his words is about paying attention to the accounts of his Passion as presented by all four Evangelists. Nothing expresses so concisely and completely the essence of reformed Catholicism.

Nowhere is it more concisely and completely expressed than in the pattern of Scriptural readings for Holy Week in The Book of Common Prayer. That is the challenge of this week: to enter into the Passion of Christ in all of its fullness. And so today, we have The Passion according to St. Matthew. On Monday in Holy Week, we begin the reading of The Passion according to St. Mark which we complete on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we read The Beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke, which is continued and completed on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday, we read The Passion according to St. John. And, in and through it all, are the various liturgies that complement and reinforce the deep Scriptural logic of the reading of the Passions: Tenebrae and the Liturgies of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days, that concentrate the meaning of the Passion so powerfully and so wonderfully.

The intensity of Holy Week is nothing less than the intensity of the Passion as seen through the lenses of all four Gospels. No other Church provides such a fullness.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn?  Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.

This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.

When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.

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This is the third of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio.  The first is posted here and the second here.

“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”

“Then the sermons begin,” one critic of the Purgatorio has observed, commenting on an important and integral feature of the journey of ascent. One of the essential ways of pilgrimage is the way of illumination; one form of illumination is through learning and learning through instruction and discourse. It says, perhaps, more about our world and day than much about Dante’s that we are ambivalent, if not hostile to instruction and learning. Sermons, it seems, are much to be endured and little to be appreciated.

The upward journey of the soul through the cornices of the Purgatorio entails a number of discourses. They are didactic accounts and yet they are fully part of the imaginative ascent of the soul to God. They belong to the essential orthodoxy of Dante’s poetic vision and they relate to a number of critical and important Christian and philosophical and theological ideas. Along with the discourses, there are as well two dreams.

Dreams and discourses. Both contribute to the way of illumination, the path of learning. “Friend, go up higher” could be the refrain of the Purgatorio. The first dream happens in the transition from the terraces of Ante-Purgatory to the cornices of Purgatory proper. The second dream is “the dream of the siren” that appropriately marks the beginning of the purgation of “love excessive” on the last three cornices of Mount Purgatory, the purging of the deadly but lesser sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust.

The discourses deal with an interesting array of questions: questions about the super-expressive nature of the Good which when shared is increased not decreased; questions about love and free will as the explicit counter to all and any kind of material determinism – just one of the ways in which Dante speaks to every age; questions about the forms of bodies, of spiritual bodies; questions, too, about human individuality countering the Islamic Philosopher, Averroes, whose teaching about the “passive intellect” effectively denies the rational and immortal individual soul without which the whole journey is meaningless; but, above all, the discourses underscore the essential insight about amor, love, as the defining principle of the soul’s life and character.

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“Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?”

For our food obsessed culture, this gospel story is either welcome relief or anxiety inducing. It just might get our minds set on our bellies, thinking of food and all manner of kinds of breads and cakes! Relax! This Sunday you get to have your cake and eat it too but only after the service.

In a way, that is the real point. It is a question of spiritual priorities. What defines us? Are you what you eat? Though sometimes attributed to the French gastronomer or connoisseur of food, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, it is literally a phrase from the 19^th century theologian Ludwig von Feuerbach, who influenced Marx, in his Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, suggesting that our minds are affected by food and other aspects of the physical world. It was also the title of popular British TV dieting programme, “You-are-what-you-eat”. Food r’us, it seems! What eats and drinks today walks and talks tomorrow.

I want to suggest that this gospel story belongs to a theology of food that is really about our lives spiritually and sacramentally. As the great patristic preacher, St. John Chrysostom put it, “we do not preach so as to eat; we eat so as to preach.” We do not live for food; we need food to live for God and for one another. If we are part of a culture where “people treat food like religion,” as has been recently observed (Dr. Yoni Freedhof, National Post, Sat., March 29^th, 2014), then perhaps we need to think about the role of food in religion.

“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world and all our woe,” begins Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost. It all begins with food, it seems; that is to say, the story of human suffering and woe. The story of the Fall away from God is told in mythic form by way of eating what was forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We fall into a world where there is not only sweat and tears – working in the sweat of our brow and in the literal labour pains and tears of child-birth – but blood, sweat, and tears are the realities of human experience as the fall-out from “man’s first disobedience.” Yet food – bread – becomes an integral part of redemption. It belongs to the story of our return to God.

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This is the second of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio.  The first is posted here, and the third here.

“Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”

Blessed, indeed, is Mary, the fruit of whose womb is Jesus. Blessed, indeed, is Mary among women and blessed, indeed, among us all. The Feast of the Annunciation falls, more often than not, in the season of Lent yet properly belongs to the consideration of the Beatitudes. No one is more rightly named blessed among humans than her through whom all our blessings come. The Beatitudes are really about the quality of our life in Christ, our being defined by our end in him and our life with him. Mary in so many ways signifies the perfection of our humanity considered simply in itself; the real vocation and purpose of our humanity is seen in her.

The connection between the Beatitudes and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dante’s Purgatorio is about the vision of our humanity in its purity and truth. Just as there is an appropriate Beatitude for each sin that is being purged in relation to the corresponding virtue that is bestowed, so, too, Mary, in Dante’s vision, appears as the exemplar of human virtue in relation to each of the seven deadly sins. Mary serves as the example of the virtue to be acquired over and against each of them and so there is a correspondence between Mary and the Beatitudes in Dante’s careful vision and understanding. She is always the first example of the necessary virtue to be acquired on each of the cornices of Mount Purgatory.

On the cornice of Pride, Mary is the outstanding exemplar of humility which stands in stark contrast to pride. The proud penitents contemplate, while bent double, the images of the Angel’s Ave to Mary and her response, Ecce ancilla Dei, Behold the handmaid of God (Dante substituting, for reasons of meter, Dei for Domini), and, assuming in a kind of ellipsis the rest of her response, her fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word;” words which capture the very essence of humility. It is about our ‘yes’ to God, our being defined not by self-will but by God’s will working through and with our wills; all of which is wonderfully concentrated in the figure of Mary who represents the perfection of our humanity qua human. Only in her purity and perfection – as created by God – can God become man and effect our salvation.

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