Category: Sermons

“It is finished.”

The sixth word of the Crucified in Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya’s ordering of the last words of Christ on the Cross is from St. John’s account of the Passion. John’s last word of Christ is the penultimate word in the sequence of the seven last words. “It is finished,” Jesus says, “and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” It is a profound and moving moment.

“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us in the Epistle for today while the Gospel speaks about the Comforter, “the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father,” who “shall testify of me,” Jesus says, even as we also are to bear witness in the face of hostility and persecution. What kind of ending is this?

“It is finished” signals the completion and ending of all that belongs to human redemption in terms of the overcoming of sin and evil through the perfect sacrifice of the Son to the Father. It expresses the meaning of the coming of Christ to “do the will of him who sent him.” What is that will? To redeem the whole of creation. All that goes forth from God returns to God. Such is the radical truth of creation even in the face of negation of God’s will by sin and death. There is no truth apart from the will of God.

Ascension Day marks the ending of the mission of the Incarnate Son in his going forth and his return. It is his homecoming but one which establishes our homeland. Here we have, as Hebrews famously puts it, “no continuing city” (Heb. 13.14). We have our true abiding in God. Christ’s return to the Father is the completion of the work of redemption accomplished in his body. His return is the exaltation of our humanity, as the Fathers’ note, as well as the restoration of the whole of creation to its truth in God. Christ’s Ascension then leads to his Session, to his being seated at the right hand of the Father. This is a powerful image, a way of representing God’s providential rule made manifest in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. They end or culminate, we might say, with the Ascension and the Session.

But the radical meaning of these Scriptural and Credal doctrines so easily escapes us. We forget that it happens in the body of our humanity which Christ assumes from Mary. It means that we in our humanity are given a vision of our place with God in Christ; in short, that as he is so shall we be also. What that means exactly is beyond our conceiving and imagination. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him.” Yet it is enough to say that as he is so shall we be also for it is about our being gathered to God, not God being collapsed into the confused agendas of our day. The Ascension testifies to the truth of creation and its redemption in Christ. As the great Ascension hymns emphasize, the risen and ascended Christ shows the marks of the Cross. They are the marks of divine love, the testimony of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

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“I thirst”

Our Eastertide reflections on the seven last words of Christ in the light of the Resurrection brings us to the fifth word in the Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoy’s ordering of the words of the Crucified on this the fifth Sunday after Easter commonly called Rogation Sunday. The conjunction is suggestive and intriguing.

It is the most physical of all the words of the Crucified, the one word which has an immediate relation to the body and its needs. Thirst is a property of the body in its finitude. Yet the idea of thirst also functions metaphorically in the Scriptures with respect to our relation to God and to one another and to the overarching themes of creation and redemption. This word complements paradoxically the theme of Rogation about the land and our lives as embodied beings. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It is not about a flight from the world or from the body.

This word testifies most strongly to the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ and thus to the dynamic of the interchange between the divine and the human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. Through the physical reality of the body, something profoundly theological and psychological in an older philosophical sense is opened out to us, the counter to the incomplete and partial agendas of the advocacy culture of our day. This thirst which is very much of the body is also very much of the spirit. As such it speaks about ourselves as not only “hearers” but “doers of the word,” about “think[ing] those things that be good” and “perform[ing] the same”. Such ideas have everything to do with our lives in the land where we are placed. And everything to do with the radical meaning of Christ’s overcoming the world. “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” Jesus says, “but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

His thirst on the Cross is far greater than what we can imagine. Why? Because it embraces both the body and the soul in an intensity of suffering, the intensity of the Passion which reveals the greater intensity of divine love. This word gathers into itself a whole host of associations. It speaks to us about what we seek and what God, too, seeks for us. This thirst belongs to what Jesus says in these last verses of chapter sixteen of John’s Gospel. He speaks of the Father’s love for us, and our love of Christ as the one who has “come out from God.” He tells us that “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” No words capture more fully the logic of the Incarnation and the Trinity than these. Everything comes forth from God in creation and returns to God in redemption revealed in the suffering humanity of the Crucified but as grounded in the life of the Trinity.

In this word, “I thirst,” Jesus speaks directly and personally to us both about the radical meaning of his Passion but also about the love of God for our humanity. It clarifies for us a number of scriptural references about water and the land, about our thirst for God and God’s thirst for us. As the Psalmist says, “like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,/ so longeth my soul after thee, O God./ My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God” (Ps. 42). God is the ultimate good and truth that we seek as spiritual creatures. Here imagery from the physical world is used to speak about the deepest yearnings of our souls. We are made for God.

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“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me”

The fourth word of the crucified is the most intense of all the words of the Passion. It is the cry of dereliction, the sense of utter abandonment in being God-forsaken. Taken from the Passion accounts of Mark and Matthew it shows the real depths of sin and evil without which we can make no sense of the Resurrection. It is, I think, powerfully complemented by the classical Gospel for the Fourth Sunday after Easter which grounds human redemption in the mutually indwelling life and work of the Trinity. Here Jesus teaches us about the coming of “the Comforter” whom he names “the Spirit of truth,” the spirit and bond of the Father and the Son. But he does so by naming the depth and meaning of sin.

How are we to understand this disturbing word? Theologically and psychologically, I think, and by pondering its meaning through the readings for this day.

Christ’s Passion and Resurrection teach us about the radical and essential life of God, something which we come to understand and grow into by the Holy Spirit. In Christ’s comings and goings which belong to his humanity we are opened out to the abiding reality of God, the essential life that is greater than human sin and evil, greater than suffering and death. The Comforter, meaning the paraclete, who is called “another paraclete” or advocate along with Jesus himself, brings to light the radical evil that is overcome in the Passion of the Christ.

That radical evil is shown to us in the fourth word. Christ bears in himself the radical evil of our humanity and the world. We have sadly lost sight of this. We have domesticated sin and evil and reduced it to the sociological and psychological agendas and projects of our day which betray the true meaning of social justice for no other reason than we make it a matter of our doing. The deeper meaning of the Passion and the Resurrection has been co-opted to the managerial and therapeutic culture of our postmodern world and to the particular issues of sexism and racism which belong to the endlessly divisive nature of our culture of victimhood. Instead of redemption in its much more universal and radical sense, we have only guilt and blame; in short, division not unity. It is not that there aren’t real social and political problems. The problem is that we refuse to see these things as essentially theological and spiritual problems and thus reduce them to the politics of self-righteousness and sentiment.

In today’s Gospel Jesus is wonderfully clear about sin and evil, the very things which he takes upon himself on the Cross and especially in this word. It expresses the full meaning of sin which is far deeper and far darker than we can possibly realize on our own power and strength. He experiences the full weight of sin, the fullest expression of the distance and separation, and therefore the contradiction of sin and evil itself. He voices the words of Psalm 22 but this is not mere rhetoric. In his crucifixion we see their deeper meaning which we really only begin to come to understand through the constant teaching and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

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“Woman, behold thy Son … and to the disciple, behold thy mother”

The seven last words of Christ on the Cross begin and end with the address of the Son to the Father in the Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Bedoya’s ordering of the words. Everything is gathered into the life of God as Trinity. This, too, is the point of emphasis in the Gospel readings for the third, fourth and fifth Sundays after Easter, all taken from the 16th chapter of John’s Gospel with the repeated refrain, “because I go to the Father,” on the one hand, and the explicit teaching of the Son about the Spirit as the bond of truth and love, on the other hand. In every way we are being opened out to the reality of essential life which is the triumph of love over sin and death.

This is profoundly transformative not in the sense of becoming other than who we are but in discovering the truth of our humanity and our world as grounded in the essential life of God. The resurrection stories show us how we are transformed from sorrow and suffering into joy and gladness. Today’s gospel provides us with a wonderful maternal image of that change. “A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.” The analogy is made explicit. “You now therefore have sorrow” Jesus says to the disciples in anticipation of his Passion, “but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” It is joy known in the face of a world of suffering not in flight from it.

What does this mean for us? A new way of thinking that is the birth of new life in us. There is the possibility as the American writer and theologian Marilynne Robinson beautifully puts it, of “acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as conscious beings,” and thus a way of engaging the world not only in terms of the power and authority of kings and governors but most profoundly in honouring everybody as 1st Peter 2 tells us. The teaching is transformative and transcends the limited agendas of human rights and identity claims which privilege some at the expense of others and divide more than they unite. Instead we discover a way of seeing ourselves and one another in the embrace of divine love, the love which changes everything. Love gives of itself and is never exhausted.

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“Today thou shalt be with me in paradise”

The second word of the crucified Christ is to the penitent thief. It is a rather startling word. Paradise in the midst of the agony of the cross? The idea of the beauty and harmony of creation in the face of the ugly horror of sin and death? But is this not exactly what we have noted about the Passion and the Resurrection, namely, the opening out of eternal life as that which is prior and primary? And is it too much to see in this word something of the radical meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd who gathers us into his loving embrace even on the Cross? And is it possible to see in this second word from St. Luke its connection to the last word also from Luke’s Gospel, “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit?” For the Eastertide refrain, as we shall see, is “because I go to the Father.” Everything is gathered into the love of God which is exactly what we see in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd.

We forget that the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is really a Resurrection image and one which conveys something of the ideas that belong to the Christian imaginary about paradise both biblically in terms of creation in Genesis and in antiquity in terms of Arcadia. They recall us to the ideas of a kind of peace and harmony between our humanity and nature and between our humanity and God. We forget the radical nature of this rather familiar and comfortable image of care though it is right before us. Jesus, who says he is “the good shepherd,” tells us that “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.” In other words, the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God.

As the Epistle reading from 1st Peter reminds us, “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps” and goes on to emphasize the sinless purity of Christ and his sacrifice for us. For “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” “For ye were,” he says “as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” Wonderful images that signify to us the deep love of God for us in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. This passage, too, is the part of the second lesson read at Mattins on Holy Saturday. Thus Christ, as the Collect teaches, is “both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life.” All under the embrace of the Good Shepherd.

The connection between the Passion and the Resurrection in terms of the image of Christ the Good Shepherd can also be seen if we consider what immediately precedes the gospel reading and what immediately follows it; in short, what frames the reading. First, “the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn.10. 10). That abundant life is eternal life found in our being embraced in the arms of the Good Shepherd. Secondly, what follows the reading: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (Jn 10. 17,18). Note too that the image of the Good Shepherd is seen in the context of bad shepherds, either thieves or hirelings, those who seek their own interest and not the good of others.

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“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”

Throughout Holy Week we hung upon the words of Christ in the unity of the Scriptures, most especially, we hung upon the words of the crucified Christ. The tradition of the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ developed, as we noted by the Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya in the late 17th century in Peru, carried over into Europe and then back again to the Americas. It belongs to the Church’s constant attention to the Passion of Christ. That ordering of the words of the crucified as drawn from all four Gospels also carries us into the Resurrection and into the Easter season. For the Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion; if anything, each intensifies our understanding of the other and brings to light the radical concept of eternal life shown in both. The ‘death of death’ of Christ crucified is eternal life. It is Resurrection.

The proper preface for Easter and Eastertide makes the connection between the Passion and the Resurrection quite clear. We praise God for Christ’s “glorious Resurrection” for he is “the very Paschal Lamb which was offered for us,” an explicit reference to the Passion, who “hath taken away the sin of the world,” hence the forgiveness of sins, and “who by his death hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again hath restored to us everlasting life.” Such words explain the theology of the Passion and the Resurrection.

It is radical new life, a new birth. As John in his epistle explains “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” God, he says, “has given to us eternal life” through the Son of God who came “by water and by blood,” referring to Christ’s Passion. Out of the pierced side of the crucified and dead Christ came water and blood which become the symbolic means of our sacramental participation in the radical life of God. “There are,” he says, “three that bear witness, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.” The overcoming of the world is part of the teaching of Eastertide. On the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Rogation Sunday, the Gospel from John ends with the telling phrase that “in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

What is this overcoming? It has nothing at all to do with our idolatry of technology in the illusions of control through the manipulation and destruction of nature and of human life. The overcoming means the breakthrough of the understanding about eternal life as the true and only source of all life and being and of all knowing and understanding. “The witness of God,” John tells us, “is greater than the witness of man.” Lent and Holy Week and Easter and Eastertide are profoundly self-critical of all the forms of human presumption. An essential feature of religion and especially the Christian religion is “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness”. Thus in both the pageant of Lent and Holy Week and now in the Easter pageant, we are not only comforted but challenged. We confront ourselves in our own confusions and the limits of our own knowing. That is the condition of our being reborn, born upward into the things of the spirit. The overcoming is not a flight from the world, nor is it a flight from the body. It is the overcoming of sin whereby we pit the world against God and deny the truth and reality of creation and of ourselves.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his Holy Week and Easter meditations and homilies, based on the scripture text, “All the people hung upon his words”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Hanging upon the Words of the Crucified”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

The Resurrection is not the ending of the story as is commonly said. It is not a happy-clappy ending to an otherwise sordid tale of unspeakable cruelty and ugliness. It is the radical beginning of our life with God in and through and not in flight from the realities of sin and evil, of suffering and death. The Passion is impossible and meaningless without Christ’s Resurrection. Both are interrelated and intertwined; each is impossible without the other. There is joy in our sorrows and sorrow in our joys. Each reveals the essential and radical life of God and our participation in it.

Easter Day proclaims the Resurrection, to be sure, yet at the same time the Gospel shows us the forms of our unknowing and uncertainty, our confusion and perplexity. Mary Magdalene, coming early in the morning before sunrise “when it was yet dark,” finds the stone taken away from the tomb. What she says to Simon Peter and to John is that “they”, whoever “they” might be, “have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” John is countering already the conspiracy theory objection that the Resurrection was really a deceptive ploy, a kind of mind trick. Peter and John then run to confirm Mary’s witness to the empty tomb.

John runs faster than Peter and gets there first but only looks in, “seeing the linen cloths lying.” Peter follows John and goes in directly “seeing the linen cloths” in one place and the burial shroud for his head “in a place by itself.” The details are intriguingly precise. No body, just the evidence of the burying cloths and the empty tomb. Only then does John enter. We are told that “he saw and believed.” But believed what exactly? “For,” as John puts it in his Gospel, speaking it seems about himself as well as Peter and the other disciples, “as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.”

In this sense the Resurrection, like the Passion, is more than merely an episode in the life of Christ. It belongs to the radical idea of God’s engagement with our humanity which does not reduce God simply to us and for us which runs the risk of making God nothing more than the projection of human desires, a metaphor for human interests and concerns, as it were. In so doing, we negate the reality of God in himself and deny the very reality of our life in Christ. This is the point which Paul makes in Colossians about “seek[ing] those things which are above” where Christ is. “When Christ, who is your life, shall be made manifest, then shall you also be made manifest with him in glory.” All of the moments in the life of Christ make manifest what is in him but not yet fully realized in us. That is why the pattern and vocation of Christian life is always about death and resurrection, the constant dying to sin and living to God. It is the constant struggle and challenge of our lives made possible in us only by the grace of Christ through our hanging upon his words.

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