Category: Sermons

“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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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word of response to God provides a chilling and yet intriguing commentary on the heart of The Passion According to St. Mark. At the heart of the Passion, we have the most notorious and most difficult word of Christ from the Cross, the only word from the Cross that Mark and Matthew, too, pass on to us. It is the word that troubles us most and grieves our hearts, as it should. “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.”  “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is heart-breaking.

At once a question, it is one of the dozen or so Aramaic phrases in the New Testament and yet it is actually a transliterated quote from the Psalms, from Psalm 22. The only word of the Crucified Christ in two of the canonical gospels, it must give us pause to consider and weigh its import and message. How is this word according to thy word? And yet, how can it be understood in any other way? It captures precisely if indeed somewhat terrifyingly the meaning of Christ’s Passion. He has entered into the land of the darkness of human hearts, of our refusal and denial of God himself. The statement of the Psalmist is testimony to the sense of being bereft and abandoned; in a way, this is the true reality and result of sin. That we don’t see it is because of our own weakness and blindness; paradoxically, because of our own sinfulness. Christ sees it and names it from within the experience of the moment, the moment of utter estrangement and remove from the Father. But note, not from God.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word to God frames our reflections upon Christ’s Passion  this Holy Week. The accounts of the Passion are read in their fullness from all four Gospels during this week. On Monday in Holy Week we begin The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark and conclude his account of the Passion on Tuesday.

The beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark is framed by the story of a woman having a box of ointment of spikenard which is broken open and used to anoint Jesus’ head and by the story of Peter’s weeping upon the realization that he has betrayed Jesus. In a way, the tears of Peter and the outpouring of the spikenard signal the only good things that we can say about our humanity on this day. For in between lies all of the deceit and folly, compromise and violence, miscarriage of justice and forms of convenience, not to mention betrayal, that belong to the untruth and darkness of our human hearts. Not a pretty picture, we must say. The thoughts of many hearts are indeed revealed to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word in response to God’s word to her through the angel Gabriel provides the interpretative principle for our Holy Week pilgrimage. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the lesson from Isaiah (Is. 52.13-53 end) presents us with the picture of the suffering servant. At once, Israel, in the discovery of her vocation “to be a light to lighten the gentiles”, a vocation to be God’s chosen people for all people precisely through the experience of suffering, the image of the suffering servant is understandably transferred to Christ in his passion. Jesus, we might say, is the suffering servant. And in Luke’s memorable phrase, “all the people hung upon his words” (Lk. 19.48). There is something captivating and compelling about the spectacle of Christ’s passion. It has precisely to do with the way in which the images of the Jewish Passover are transformed into something new and strange.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, with the accounts of Matthew and Luke about Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the growing sense of foreboding and unease about what this will mean. The Passover is the great Jewish celebration of the liberation of the children of the Hebrews from Pharaoh’s oppressive yoke in Egypt. At Morning Prayer on Palm Sunday, we are reminded of the Passover of the first-born, that striking illustration of the divine power that discerns the first-born of man and beast, passing over only the first-born of the Hebrews, “that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel” (Exodus 11. 7). This week will challenge us about ourselves, about our inmost selves, about the commitments and principles that define us and defeat us. “A sword shall pierce through your own soul, also”, Simeon had said to Mary upon the occasion of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk. 2.35). The intention of Holy Week is to reveal the thoughts of our hearts to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Palm Sunday is a day of striking contrasts conveyed through conflicting words. Our words are in contradiction with our hearts. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the most intense and disturbing spectacle, dare I say, that we shall ever see, all the world’s holocausts, genocides, slaughters, and wickednesses notwithstanding. You see, Palm Sunday is for us, in all of the confusions and contradictions of the western democratic societies which we inhabit, the most alarming counter-cultural spectacle that we shall ever face. It is not new, of course. Sadly, it has been cheapened by our familiar customs, perhaps, as if it were a mere cultural phenomenon. As if we are simply going through the motions of ‘we have always done this’ without thinking for half-a-second just what this week we call Holy Week really means.

On the other hand, the willful retreat by so many from the life and witness of the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks volumes about a message that you have not received though it has been completely before you. It has nothing to do with the sad and pathetic banalities of our criticisms and complaints about one another, the various and mean defenses and accusations that we hurl at one another to avoid ourselves and the picture of ourselves which Palm Sunday presents and which is revealed more fully in Holy Week which Palm Sunday inaugurates.

No. Holy Week provides the picture, year in and year out, of a very profound truth about ourselves and one which we do everything in our power to avoid. We don’t want to see this picture of ourselves but, truth be spoken, you and I are in utter contradiction with ourselves, you and I in ourselves are hell. And only this week, at least in the meaning of this week, can offer us something more than the hell of ourselves. But, paradoxically, it may seem, only by going through the hell of ourselves in the pageant of Christ’s passion for us. Only through our seeing the forms of hell in ourselves can we begin to understand the joy of human redemption. Holy Week bids us contemplate the contradictions and confusions of our hearts and minds.

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Fr. David Curry has compiled his four Lenten Meditations on the Parable of the Prodigal Son into a single pdf document, which can be downloaded by clicking here.

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