Category: Sermons

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

“He carried himself in his own hands.” Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum meaning commandment and refers to Christ’s repeated statement in John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” And as we have seen in the Office readings from St. John that commandment turns upon our keeping his words and abiding in his love. That love is the love of the Trinity.

But “a new commandment”? In what sense is it a new commandment? Do we not find the commandment to love God with the whole of our being in the Torah of the Jewish Scriptures as well as to love our neighbour? Yes, to be sure. Yet in the intensity of Holy Week and, especially on this holy night, those two commandments are uniquely concentrated for us in the figure of Jesus Christ. They are not just what we ought to do (but which of course we fail to do). They are radically fulfilled in Christ’s words and actions on this night understood precisely in anticipation of his Passion. What makes the new commandment new is the Cross in which God in Christ gives his life to us, for us, and in us. His sacrifice is his love lifted up before us already even before his being lifted up on the Cross. Hence the wonder of Augustine’s remark that “he carried himself in his own hands” in reference to the one of the central features of this day of many moving parts, the scene of Christ with the disciples in the Upper Room at the supper of the Passover. Take, eat; drink. This is my body; this is my blood.

The symbolism becomes increasingly clear. It is captured in Paul’s great statement that we proclaim in joy at Easter: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” Christ is the Passover, the Paschal Lamb who gives his life for us. The new commandment is his sacrificial love at work and moving in us. Such is service and sacrifice which Maundy Thursday illustrates in its various moments: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the agony in Gethsemane, as well as the other events such as the liturgical stripping of the altar, the King’s touch, and the Royal Maundy or giving of alms. They all belong to the Passion and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. They are all about sacrifice and service.

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“And I, If I be lifted up, will draw all unto me.”

Our Parish custom has been to pray the Service of Tenebrae on the Eve of Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae is the liturgy of anticipation. It is about praying the monastic services of Mattins and Lauds of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. It suggests the way in which the Passion is shadowed forth before us and enlightens us even in the shadows. The word comes from the responsories of Good Friday, Tenebrae factae sunt cum crucifixissent Jesum as derived from the accounts of the Crucifixion. “There was darkness when they crucified Jesus.”

The office or service of Tenebrae is a way of going in and through the Passion in part through the Psalms with their Antiphons. The Antiphons are scriptural passages that frame each Psalm and provide an interpretative matrix for its meaning and understanding in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalms are seen in the light of the Passion through the Antiphon even as the Passion is further illuminated by the Psalms. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Hebrew Scriptures and those of the New Testament.

Of particular significance are the readings tonight from Lamentations with its haunting and convicting question “Was there ever grief like mine?” understood as said by Jesus himself. Read along with his high priestly prayer in John 17, they provide the theological principle for the whole Passion and Life of Christ. It is all part of the theology of the atonement, about our being made at one with God through Christ’s sacrifice understood as love.

George Herbert’s poem “Sacrifice” recounts the whole story of Christ as revealed in the Gospels by way of using the phrase from Lamentations as a recurring refrain. We will hear it again on Good Friday in the Reproaches. Tenebrae in every way anticipates and intensifies the Passion and its meaning for us.

Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of joint. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax,” as Psalm 22 so powerfully puts it. But this is us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, twisted and turned in upon ourselves and away from God, homo incurvatus in se.

But it is in this sense of darkness and disarray that we sense the transformation of images, the transformation of the nature of our relationship with God. It means going through the Passion in this intensely focussed and rigorous way, constantly exploring a great range of images that turn in one way or another upon the reality of our life with God. The challenge of the Holy Week liturgies is about accepting the rich confusion and complexity of things and finding that what holds everything together is God and God alone. Anticipating the Passion only serves to heighten its intensity and its meaning in us.

Tenebrae is one way in which we pray the Passion through the Psalms in particular and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness and shadows of human experience something of the light of Christ.

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all unto me”

The office readings for Tuesday in Holy Week offer interesting insights into The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark and thus to the spiritual meaning of Christ being lifted up and our being drawn to him. At Matins, we have the first of the four suffering servant songs of Isaiah which signals the purpose of Israel’s mission as “a covenant to the people,” “a light to the nations,” “to open the eyes of the blind, and to bring out from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” These images all belong to the idea of human redemption and divine revelation recapitulated and made visible in the figure of Jesus Christ. The suffering mission of Israel for the world is fulfilled in Christ, too. This suggests complementary universalities rather than simply competing ones. The servant songs in Isaiah have contributed greatly to the Christian understanding of the person of Christ. The reading points to the sense of mission and purpose.

The first lesson at Vespers from Wisdom reflects profoundly on the nature of human sin in the forms of envy and resentment that are so prevalent in our world. The righteous man is inconvenient to us in our unsound reasoning. “He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us.” Therefore “let us condemn him to a shameful death.” The passage highlights our sinfulness which is visited upon him, ultimately upon Jesus who is made sin for us. In Wisdom our sins are about our reasoning as having gone astray and thus blind to the secret purpose of God, for we have forgotten or denied that “God created man for incorruption” and that we have been made in “the image of God’s own eternity.” Once again we confront the sad parody of the truth of our humanity; such is the twisted nature of our sinfulness.

The readings at Matins and Vespers from John’s Gospel, chapter 15, highlight the deeper communion between God and man that God seeks and makes for us. Such is redemption in our abiding in Christ as the branches in the vine. How? Through his word abiding in us, making us his friends and reminding us that we are not of the world but of Christ in his service and sacrifice.

These readings along with the lesson at Mass, the third suffering servant song of Isaiah, contribute to the deeper meaning of the Passion according to Mark. Christ is lifted up before our eyes on the Cross. We hear his agonizing word of desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” only to realize that he voices the desolating, despairing and contradictory nature of sin itself. It is made visible and audible in him. All of the forms of human injustice and the betrayal of all that is good and holy are concentrated in the figure of the Crucified and in his death. Nothing much good can be said of us in the events of Mark’s account of the Passion. But a great good comes out of this spectacle precisely in terms of what is lifted up before us. It is found in the words of the Centurion who beholding these things grasps its deeper meaning and purpose. “Truly this man was the Son of God,” he says. We behold Christ crucified bearing the wounds and marks of human sin, having been made sin for us, embodying all of the sufferings of our wounded and broken humanity, and yet we behold God. Sin and love are lifted up before us in the spectacle of the Passion.

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Monday in Holy Week sets before us the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark. It begins with the story of an unnamed woman who breaks open “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and anoints the head of Jesus. It is a touching act of compassion and devotion; an act of worship and an acknowledgement of Jesus. But this reading ends with the threefold denial of Christ by Peter and his tears of contrition when he recalls what Christ had said to him that “before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept.” An outpouring of ointment, an outpouring of tears. And all because of how Christ draws us to himself.

The compassionate act of the woman anointing the head of Jesus excites the indignation of some within themselves who “murmured against her.” But Jesus highlights the meaning of her action: “she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” She anticipates the meaning of Christ’s Passion in his death for us. Her act is an act of love and is recognised as such by Jesus. The breaking of the box anticipates the breaking open of the body of Christ and the outpouring of his blood for us. Peter, in confronting his own weakness and his betrayal of Jesus, is moved to tears.

“Take with you words, and return to the Lord,” Hosea says. He is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Hosea are read as the first lessons at Matins and Vespers respectively on this day. Hosea’s words convict us of having forgotten the Lord our God who “knew us in the wilderness” who cared for us and from whom we have turned away towards idols of our own making. But God turns us back to himself. “Take with you words and return to the Lord … Say no more, ‘Our God’ to the work of our hands” for “I will heal their faithlessness,” God says, “I will love them freely for my anger has turned from them.” Hosea concludes, “Whoever is wise let him understand these things.” It is a kind of commentary in advance on what Jesus says in the second lesson at Vespers from John 14 about loving Jesus by keeping his commandments and finding ourselves in him, embraced in the love of the Trinity. “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him.”

The woman is drawn to him in love; Peter who follows Christ albeit a far off denies him three times only to convict himself through recalling what Jesus had said. His tears are the tears of contrition; the tears of sorrow at having betrayed what he most loves. What flows out both from the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and from the tears of Peter belong to our being drawn more fully to Christ. There is no hiding the failings and weakness of our humanity in its disarray and confusion.

Christ is lifted up before us in the reading of these Scriptures so that he may draw us to himself. Our hearts are convicted and convinced of his love for us, a love that moves us in spite of ourselves and draws us to him.

“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, 2024

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“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life,” John tells us in the 3rd Chapter of his Gospel (vs. 14). This text is further elaborated upon and intensified in another statement by Jesus voiced in the first person much later in his Gospel: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (Jn. 12.32). Together they provide a critical matrix of interpretation for the pageant of the Passion in Holy Week.

As a fragment from Heraclitus reminds us, “the way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning, I think, that the way to the principle and the way from it are really all about the principle itself in its self-motion and in its movements in us, a kind of exitus and reditus, a going forth and a return. That pertains to the challenge of Holy Week, too. It is all about our looking upon the pageant of the Passion in all of its intensity and meaning, in all of the ups and downs that it presents. It is really all about a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around the essential mystery of the Passion in all of its moments. We immerse ourselves this week in all four of the Passion accounts in the Gospels. That is quite powerful and highlights an important feature of our Common Prayer tradition that honours the centrality of the Scriptures understood in terms of credal doctrine.

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long and continuous liturgy that culminates with Easter. We begin in joy and end in joy; the joy of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the joy of his Easter resurrection. But that beginning and ending are not equal for us: the joy of the resurrection is greater. Why? Because in Christ we go “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23.4), “through the vale of misery” (Ps. 84.6), the parade of the miseries of our humanity in all of its twisted forms, yet finding in that parade a greater good, even a blessing. Such are “the pilgrim ways” in our hearts, going “through the vale of misery” but using it “for a well,” finding in it blessings.

The point is the drama of the dogma of our salvation in which we participate through the liturgy. We are in this story. The Passion of Christ is about what he freely wills to suffer for us and for our good, thus the passions of our souls are equally on display in the spectacle of the Passion; in short, the lifting up of the Son of man and our being drawn to Christ as Saviour. The story of our humanity is recapitulated and completed in Christ’s Passion. The sorrows and joys that belong to human life find their radical truth and meaning in what Christ undergoes for us and with us in his Passion. “His whole life”, as John Donne remarks “was a continual passion”, “a continuous cross,” as Andrewes notes.

Holy Week is the further concentration of his whole life and of ours. What we contemplate in his Passion are the different and various forms of our twisted selves, our incomplete and partial loves that result in one way or another in our being less than who we are in God. “We are,” as Rowan Williams says in a recurring phrase, “because God is. And we are what we are because God is what God is”. Holy Week is the pageant of the redemption of who and what we are in God.

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“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?

And so it begins. We enter into deep Lent, into Passiontide, which is nothing less than our participation in the Passion of Christ which enfolds us into the life of the Trinity. We enter into the radical mystery of God’s love which turns the world on its head. It is profoundly counter-culture, the counter to the culture of fear and resentment that seeks power and dominion at all costs and at the expense of the deeper truth of God and of our humanity in God. The paradox of Passiontide is set before us in today’s readings and on a Sunday which also marks the commemoration of St. Patrick. The conjunction is, I think, wonderfully providential.

Christ is “an High Priest of good things to come,” Hebrews states, but only in the paradox of being victim and sacrifice, for “by his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Priest and victim. The Gospel reading from Matthew emphasizes the same paradox: not power but sacrifice. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” This is a complete inversion of the power structures of the world and a complete counter to the victimhood culture of our day. Christ is priest and victim. God provides himself the lamb for the sacrifice that redeems us to eternal life; our life in God.

The medieval historian Jacques Delarun captures this in a book entitled “To govern is to Serve.” It chronicles some remarkable experiments in the ordering of monastic communities among a number of twelfth and thirteenth century orders influenced by the personalities of St. Dominic and St. Francis. They were attempts to embody the radical equality of Christ as the shepherd of the sheep who cares for one and for all equally; omnes et singulatim, all together and each one individually. To enter into the Passion is to learn the sacrificial nature of the divine life, the self-giving life of God as Trinity.

The mother of Zebedee’s children comes with her sons to Jesus seeking preferment and privilege for them, that they “may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” His gentle yet firm reply to her speaks to our humanity in its ignorance and presumption. “Ye know not what ye ask.” It is a striking indictment of our fallen humanity and anticipates his first word from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The privileges we seek for ourselves are invariably at the expense of others and negate our common humanity by treating some as better and greater than others. Jesus then addresses her sons. His questions point explicitly to his Passion and stand in complete contrast to the presumption in their quest and to that of the ten disciples as well. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”, he asks. The questions point to our sacramental participation in Christ’s own sacrifice through baptism and communion.

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“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves”

Paradise and wilderness are the complementary images that belong to the pilgrimage of Lent as the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Today’s Gospel wonderfully encapsulates the soul’s journey as imaged in other cultures, religions, and philosophies in one way or another, such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s ascent from the Cave (and the descent back into the Cave!), Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, and of course, Dante’s great poetic and theological master-piece, The Divine Comedy, to name but a few. Yet the story which informs this Gospel most completely is the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

We so easily forget that the Christian faith largely arises out of the Fathers reading of the Hebrew Scriptures first and foremost. That has shaped profoundly the doctrinal, devotional, and liturgical reading of the Scriptures as a whole in the life of the Church, and often expressed in the hymns of the Church. This Gospel story is essentially a recapitulation and intensification of the themes of the Exodus, the paradigmatic journey par excellence of the pilgrimage of our souls. This mid-Lent Sunday highlights the images of paradise and wilderness. For the pilgrimage journey to God cannot be accomplished simply by us on our own strength and merits. With this Sunday we begin, paradoxically, to enter into the deeper meaning of the Lenten pilgrimage: it can only happen through the provisions of God’s Providence for us in the way of our journeying. This Sunday sets before us ‘a taste of paradise’ in the wilderness of human experience. God provides out of our lack or little. Ultimately, God provides himself as Holy Week and Good Friday show us.

John’s Gospel begins with an emphasis upon God’s all-knowing and all-embracing will in contrast to our human limitations. Jesus in the wilderness sees a great multitude and asks Philip “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat.” John immediately adds parenthetically that this is to prove or test Philip “for he himself knew what he would do.” This already alludes to the Exodus in which Israel was put to the test while also presuming to put God to the test. Philip’s response is about our human limitations and inadequacy to solve the problems of the world through economic means. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may have enough.” It is a telling critique that extends to our modern world. The expansion of production in part through the techniques of industrialization and the false infinity of consumer desire haven’t and can’t solve the problems of the world to which they themselves contribute. The problems of our world and ourselves are fundamentally spiritual, not merely material.

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“Christ shall give thee light”

Quite the readings, it may seem. They are rather challenging and not a little disconcerting, and yet most appropriate to the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Why? Because we have to confront the darkness of our souls and know the potentiality and reality of evil. Only the light of Christ can help us to “walk in love,” “to be giving of thanks,” to “walk as the children of light,” “proving what is acceptable unto the Lord,” and thus “reprov[ing] the unfruitful works of darkness,” learning in our journey that “all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light,” to gather Paul’s remarkable words into a kind of summary. But meaning what exactly? That Christ makes known to us the nature of evil in making known and accomplishing the things that belong to the absolute goodness of God.

And what is the evil? The tempter, Satan, the deceiver, is at once the principle of what opposes God and is us in our betrayals of Christ. In this story, it is us in calling Christ’s good, his act of healing, evil, on the one hand, and demanding further signs, on the other hand. Christ’s response highlights these contradictions. Lent, especially in Holy Week, is the pageant of our betrayals of the love of God, but God, and God alone, makes light out of darkness, good out of our evil. Today’s readings are a sober and honest assessment of the human condition in self-presumption and pretension. It is a powerful indictment of human pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and one which arises from the illusions of the self.

The Gospel speaks profoundly to our current dilemmas of a polarized and divided world which witnesses to a deep loss of self and the crisis of meaning. It may be as the neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist along with John Vervaeke suggest, the problem of the dominance of left brain thinking which results in the loss of any sense of wholeness. We are as T.S. Eliot says, “the walking dead.” There lies in this the false assumption of our own abilities to solve all our problems through technique and praxis forgetting that such things cannot create heaven on earth but more often than not, hell.

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