Category: Sermons

“What mean ye by this service?”

This question, which frames our reflections during Holy Week, takes on a disturbing quality of intensity on Tuesday in Holy Week. Why? Because it is not a pretty picture of ourselves at all. What is our service in the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark? Well, it is simply more and more of the ugly spectacle of betrayal and hatred, of mockery and violence.

“What mean ye by this service?” What we see and hear is Pontius Pilate’s unwilling and unjust surrender of Jesus to the will of the crowd, being “willing to content the people.” That is itself an indictment of human justice. What we see and hear is the motivating principle that places Jesus in our hands. It is the “envy” of the Chief Priests. Envy is the most destructive of all the deadly sins. And the most ugly. It is about hatred. That theme, too, is more than amply explored in the First Lesson for Evening Prayer from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon and then even more directly stated in the Second Lesson from the Gospel according to St. John. “He who hates me hates my Father also.”

And that is all part of the spectacle of this holy week. What is on display is the human capacity to hate the good or to be more specific and more horrific, to hate God. Ultimately, our hatred of God is what is visited upon Jesus. This is the darkness at the heart of the Passion.

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What mean ye by this service?

The beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark, read on Monday in Holy Week, offers a sequence of rituals which revolve around the opening statement that “after two days was the feast of the Passover, and of unleavened bread.”

Mark’s account of the Passion includes the breaking open of “the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard” and the anointing of the head of Christ with the precious oil. It includes Judas’ plan to betray Christ to the chief priests for money; the preparation for the celebration of the Passover by the disciples; the amazing statements at the ritual meal of the Passover by Jesus himself; the prophecy of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus; the singing of an hymn and proceeding to Gethsemane to pray; the betrayal of Jesus by the kiss of Judas; the trial and mockery of Jesus. The beginning of the passion concludes with Peter’s denial and his conviction of conscience when the cock crew twice. For then “Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him … and when he thought thereon he wept.”

It is quite a sequence. It reveals our hearts of treachery and betrayal, our hearts of love and devotion, as well as our divided and sleepy hearts. It is not exactly a pretty picture of ourselves and our humanity.

“What mean ye by this service?” This is the question of the Passover. The opening scene of this beginning of Mark’s account of the Passion is most intriguing and important. The unnamed woman does an extravagant thing. She breaks open an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and she anoints Jesus’ head. What does it mean?

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“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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“Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost”

It is a powerful statement about the radical nature of human redemption. Coming as it does on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, it completes a pattern of reflection about our journey in the wilderness even as it marks a transition to the deeper wilderness of Passiontide.

We are lost in our temptations which set us in opposition to God. We are lost in our griefs and sorrows, our fears and worries about our children. We are lost in the utter emptiness of ourselves. These aspects of loss have been before us on the preceding Sundays in Lent. They have marked an aspect of the teaching about original sin which serves to catapult us more firmly into the redemptive grace of Christ.

Here, again, we are in the wilderness, but here we are fed in the wilderness. Loaves and a few small fishes. Even more, the fragments from the picnic are more than enough to sustain the redeemed community of our humanity. And in a way, that image of bread has been an underlying theme of the preceding Sundays reaching a kind of crescendo of meaning on this day which is sometimes known as Refreshment Sunday. The Fourth Sunday in Lent is Mid-Lent Sunday and it provides almost a kind of oasis of refreshment for our souls in the mid-point of the Lenten journey overall.

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This is the third of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here.

“A house divided against itself falleth”

In the course of these little considerations of the big theme of “original sin”, I have tried to locate our reflections in the propers for the Sundays in Lent. The Third Sunday in Lent would seem to offer a particularly dismal view of our humanity that complements perfectly the negativity, as some would see it, of the doctrine of original sin. To the contrary, I would hope to argue, since the doctrine of original sin is really part and parcel of the good news of human redemption. Without the honest appreciation of the sin-wracked nature of our humanity, it is pretty hard to make sense of human experience and the grace of Christ crucified.

In other words, the honest recognition of how compromised we are by the habits of sin is really the entry point to the transformative power of God’s grace that leads us as Dante puts it, “from misery to felicity.” It does so by working on our hearts and minds. We are drawn into the drama of our redemption. The doctrine of original sin belongs to that drama.

We are, in the words of the gospel, radically divided within ourselves. The many divisions and tensions and contradictions within the institutions that drive our social and political lives are really a further extension of the idea and the doctrine of original sin.

The doctrine of original sin is the necessary counter to a variety of social and political viewpoints in our world and day. It is the counter to the ideology of progress, the idea that things are always going forward, that our humanity is constantly on the march towards the more and the better, the better, of course, always measured in terms of the more. It is the counter to the idea that the future is ever brighter and the past always a yawning abyss, the proverbial dark ages. The doctrine of original sin reminds us instead of the perennial darkness of the human heart, the much more persuasive concept of “the heart of darkness,” to borrow Joseph Conrad’s title.

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“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

It is a terrifying picture really, the picture of the darkness of utter desolation. It is something which our contemporary culture knows about or, at least, experiences in one way or another. We have all been there. “I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist says. You know about desolations and miseries. It may because of sorrow and loss; it may be because of hardship and troubles. It may be because of the enmity of others or it may be because of our own sinfulness. “Look upon my adversity and misery, / and forgive me all my sins.”

It can lead to a sense of hopelessness, the sense of utter futility, the sense of the empty nothingness of life.

We live, of course, in a world that is seemingly full of everything; there is a fullness of images. We are constantly besieged and bombarded by a vast array of images which flicker and dance before our imaginations. The consequence is that our sensual imagination is overloaded. What are these images? They are the images of violence and self-indulgence; in short, the images of destruction and consumption.

And yet, there is a terrible emptiness to this fullness of images. They are, as it were, nothing worth and quite unsatisfactory. But, they consume us. We are possessed by what beguiles us. We find that we are strangers to ourselves. We are alienated from ourselves.

What shall we do? Shall we empty our selves of these empty images through some heroic effort of will? Just disconnect the internet? Pull the plug on the TV? Perhaps, but is it really “nirvana,” a state of empty nothingness that we seek? For in the culture of images even the emptying ourselves of the images of sensual immediacy is to find ourselves empty and lost. Whether we are full of these empty images or aware of their emptiness we are nonetheless empty and lost to ourselves. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

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This is the second of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditation is posted here.

“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David”

Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy upon us. It is the recurring refrain, not just of the season of Lent, but of our Anglican liturgy. In a way, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the condition of our sinfulness, the on-going legacy of original sin, if you will, the mystery which we are pondering in this series of Lenten addresses.

The Canaanite woman in the Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent cries out for mercy. It is, evidently, not a cri de coeur that is restricted to the people of Israel. It is universal. She cries out for mercy to Jesus for her daughter who is grievously vexed with a devil, deeply troubled spiritually or mentally, we might say. But that whole idea of being vexed by a devil suggests the power and hold of evil on our souls. Somehow it seems that we cannot just go and do all that we would like to do or even believe that we ought to do for ourselves or for one another.

Paul expresses that deep sense of how we are divided within ourselves. He states the condition of our divided wills, “the good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not do, that do I do.” We are a divided house and we cannot stand on the power of our strength of will, crowing to the universe, like Frank Sinatra, that “I did it my way.” Time and time again, the Church in the liturgy through the Collects and the Scripture readings especially, reminds us of this deeply disturbing feature of our human lives, the condition of our divided selves, the reality of our corrupted wills.

And yet, to pray for mercy is to acknowledge this reality without succumbing to the utter hopelessness of despair. To pray for mercy is to be open to God’s power and grace which is greater than the contradictions of our being. This is an important point, I think, because logically there is something incomplete in defining ourselves negatively. It presupposes something positive. Sin, original sin, is about privation, a lack or absence of being and truth. But it is totally dependent upon what it denies. Sin is nothing in itself.

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“Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table”

It is a powerful and amazing Gospel story. And very disturbing. I wonder if we can hear it. Sometimes, I think, ours is the culture of fragile, wounded and broken souls, strong, perhaps, mostly in its sense of entitlement and in its sense of injury. This story surely disturbs and disquiets us. Why?

Consider what we see here. A mother whose daughter is sick. Ordinarily, we may uphold the strength of a parents’ love for their children as being quite powerful and most strong. Isaiah, in a remarkable passage asks the question whether “a woman can forget her sucking child” and suggests that even that form of love is not as strong as God’s love. “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you,” he has God say. His point is that our human loves are always incomplete in comparison to the divine love. “Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands,” God says in a wonderful image.

And yet, we may wonder about such loves, the love of a mother for her child as a limited love and the unlimited, unforgetting love of God, in the wake of this story. We may see here the power of a mother’s love for her daughter, to be sure, but we may question the love of God. If the love of God is what we are meant to see in Jesus Christ, then that love seems very odd, harsh and strange; indeed, disturbing. So what then are we to make of this story?

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