Category: Sermons

“All the people hung upon his words”

This is the night of watching and waiting upon the truth and power of God’s love, a love which is greater than the darkness of human sin and death. We watch and wait, once again, by hanging upon the words of Scripture. We watch and wait in expectancy for God’s great creative action, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The point is very simple. Christ dies but love lives and triumphs over death. All of the Scripture readings at the Vigil underscore this essential insight and truth. We are reminded that the goodness of God is and must always be greater than every form of evil. The Resurrection is Creation renewed by being recalled to the truth of God in love and forgiveness.

The divine desire to be reconciled with his sinful creation means the redemption of all sinners. It requires that we hang upon his words, listening to the great Paschal Praeconium, the Easter Proclamation, listening to the Prophecies of Scripture that speak of God’s triumph over sin and evil, and then renewing our baptismal vows by which God has reconciled himself to each of us in his love for us. Then there is the simple joy of rejoicing in Christ’s redemption of our humanity with Lauds, the praises of Easter morning, the resurrection alive in us.

How? By hanging upon the words of Scripture that testify to the Resurrection. Dr. Johnson once said that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. Well, our hanging upon his words concentrates our minds even more wonderfully upon the reality of divine love. It makes us alive, restored and renewed in love. Such is the wonder and the power of the Vigil. Our hanging upon his words opens us out to the Risen Christ.

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil 2023

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Christ no longer hangs upon the Cross. It might seem then that we no longer hang upon his words. He is dead and buried.

Holy Saturday is the day of the greatest peace and the deepest silence. It recalls the Jewish Sabbath, to God’s “resting” on the seventh day after the labours of creation. On Holy Saturday, Christ rests in the tomb. Everything is at peace since all that stands between God and man has been overcome on the Cross. We have heard Jesus’ last words from John, “it is finished,” and from Luke, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” There is, it seems, only peace and silence. It reminds us of paradise. And yet, Holy Saturday is more than paradise and more than the Sabbath rest of God.

The Scripture readings speak of an activity that underlies all of the peace and silence of this day. We gather at the tomb of Jesus in the aftermath of the cruel events of the Passion and yet the Scripture readings speak of something else. “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us in a passage that echoes the first lesson at Matins from Zechariah. “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image of Sheol or Hades, of Hell.

The psalms, too, speak of Hell. “Thou wilt not leave my soul to hell;/neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption” (Ps. 16.11). “Thou, Lord, hast brought up my soul from hell:/ thou hast kept my life from them that go down to the pit” (Ps. 30.3). There is the sense that something is happening despite the quiet and the silence of this day. What is it? It is the Descent into Hell, as the Creed puts it. What does it mean?

Holy Saturday shows us something of the greater meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It shows us the fullest possible extent of God’s will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. And while all seems quiet and in silence, Christ descends into Hell to preach unto the spirits in prison. The redemption of our humanity means the gathering up of the spirits of all who have gone before us but again only by hanging upon his words. Our humanity finds its redemption only in hanging upon the words of Christ.

God’s Sabbath rest is about God’s delight in his creation. The Sabbath rest of Holy Saturday is the gathering of the whole of sinful creation to the living word of Christ so that we can take delight in God. Such is the radical meaning of the reconciling love of God for us, the love that returns us to “the bishop and shepherd of our souls,” as t 1 Peter tells us. It recalls the story of Noah, itself an Old Testament image of God restoring by the flood and Noah and the Ark the mess that human sin creates. Peter sees this as a figure of baptism which restores us in our minds to God.

We wait at the tomb given for the body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea. His action is an act of love and love is already active in ways beyond our imagining. Christ lies in the tomb but the tomb can never fully contain him. He cannot be spirited away by human cunning and deceit. He is always and totally defined by doing his Father’s will. God seeks the reconciliation of the whole of our sinful creation. In every way, we are gathered to God by hanging upon his words.

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, Matins & Ante-Communion 2023

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Never more so and never with more intensity of attention than on Good Friday. We hang upon the words of the crucified whom we behold pierced and dying on the Cross. We look and listen. There is literally nothing else for us to do and yet it is the defining challenge for us.

Guarda e ascolta, Dante the poet has Mathilda, the handmaid to Beatrice, say to him in the earthly paradise of the Purgatorio, itself one of the greatest images of the spiritual pilgrimage in which we are made “pure and prepared to leap up to the skies,” to the Paradise of God, the celestial paradise. “Look and listen,” she bids the pilgrim Dante. Look and listen to what? To the symbolic pageant of Word and Sacrament. At its center is a gryphon, a mythical creature at once wholly eagle and wholly lion, thus symbolic of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ.

Good Friday brings us to the Cross. In Dante’s great vision all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and all the books of the Christian New Testament converge and unite in Christ. All the words of the scriptures are the words of Christ and all those words converge in the figure of the crucified. We look upon him and listen to him who looks upon us and speaks to us. Sin and love meet in the crucified. Look and listen.

Our holy week pageant brings us to the Passion according to St. John and so to the completion and contemplation of the seven last words of Christ. Matthew and Mark have given us the one word of dereliction and desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, the word which derives from Psalm 22. Luke as we saw on Maundy Thursday gives us three words from the Cross; the first, second and seventh word. John gives us the third, fifth and sixth words of Christ. In the seven last words of Christ there is a kind of gathering up of the fullness of revelation, a concentration of Word and Sacrament.

Looking upon the crucified means listening to the words of the crucified. We are, as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, meant to look upon the piercèd Christ whom we have pierced in our sins and follies and be pierced in our hearts and souls; in short to be moved to contrition for our sins by the spectacle of love. The Good Friday devotions on the crucified Christ has been a part of our looking and listening, an essential feature of the life of the Church from the earliest times. “My Eros is Crucified,” as Ignatius of Antioch put it, to take but one example along with a host of Patristic, Medieval and Reformed homilies on the Passion of Christ, all following the idea as Paul states, that “we preach Christ crucified.”

In some places, and this has been a large part of my own experience, that meant a three hour service structured around the preaching on the seven last words of Christ, a serious and significant devotional practice which seems to have fallen into abeyance. The history of that practice is intriguing and surprising. It was actually developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in the late seventeenth century and in Peru following a series of earthquakes, especially in Lima.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

Luke gives us three of the seven last words from the Cross. In some sense they shape the drama of salvation with a certain kind of intensity and poignancy. They are words which reveal us to ourselves as sinners at the same time as they reveal the deep love of God. That dialectic of sin and love is the drama of Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum.

We are meant to hang upon the words of Christ in the intimacy of the Last Supper as we heard last night at Tenebrae. One of the important features of Maundy Thursday is that it connects powerfully and essentially the Passion and the Eucharist, the celebration of the Christian Passover, if you will. In both we confront the spectacle of our betrayals of ourselves and God. As Christopher Lasch puts it, “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” Nothing could be more self-critical than Holy Week. “The nature of religion,” he notes, is “to console, but, first of all, to challenge and confront.” We have forgotten this in what has become for our culture and our churches ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ and now ‘the tyranny of the therapeutic’, as if our self-esteem were the highest good.

Holy Week and Maundy Thursday challenges that sense of the self in a way that is profoundly counter-culture. It is not about ourselves as the victims but as the victimizers because of sin and evil. We confront our betrayals of Christ and thus of ourselves in the scene at the Last Supper which Maundy Thursday reminds us about by way of the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians (as well as the Evensong second lesson from John 13). It is the betrayal of the fellowship of friends. We cannot celebrate the Eucharist without recalling our betrayals of that fellowship. “In the same night that he was betrayed,” the eucharistic prayer says; that same night is this night. Every Eucharist places us in the upper room where Christ carries himself in his hands and gives himself to us who are his betrayers.

This kind of self-criticism belongs to the good of the Passion. It is through confronting the limitations of our humanity in all the forms of our fallenness and sin that we learn the greater love of God for our humanity. It is all about confronting ourselves and being challenged by the words of Christ. That and that alone is our comfort. Our good intentions are not enough whether it is in the garden of Gethsemane or in the high priest’s house of the temple precincts. We may want to watch with him in companionship but are too weak. We may want to bear witness to him but betray him like Peter. We confront ourselves in these scenes in the hopes that the look of Christ upon us as upon Peter may move us to contrition and sorrow.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? Whose words? Those questions take on a certain poignancy of meaning in the service of Tenebrae. The Latin for darkness or shadows the ancient services of Tenebrae were anticipatory of the three great holy days, the Triduum Sacrum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The service of Mattins was sung solemnly the evening before each of those days. This reminds us that Holy Week is not simply a linear sequence of events but a cluster or crowd of events that belong to the credal understanding of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, events that are all interrelated doctrinally and which inform each other. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be understood independently and in separation from each other.

Tenebrae in the modern practice anticipates the Mattins of Maundy Thursday but includes a number of psalms and canticles that point us to the Resurrection. It is essentially a psalm office. The Psalter is the Hymn and Prayer Book of the Jews and of Christians. Thus many of the words we are meant to hang upon in an attentive and serious way are the words of the psalms. That is intriguing and poignant because the psalms present us with a number of different voices: the voices of our humanity in its distresses and fears, its disorder and violence; the voice of God in judgment and compassion; and the voice of Christ both as suffering victim in his humanity and as seeking our good. The psalter, as Calvin observes, presents us with an anatomy of the soul. We are meant to learn things about ourselves in relation to the truth of God. We are, yet again, learning the great lessons of sin and love in their interrelation.

Thus Tenebrae draws us dramatically into the Passion through the power of the psalms and the canticles, scripture songs which comment on the things of the Passion and human redemption. We are meant to find ourselves, our own souls, in these psalm prayers and hymns at the same time as we are meant to find ourselves in the deep embrace of God’s love for us and for our good.

The psalms of Tenebrae complement the first Mattins lesson for Maundy Thursday from The Lamentations of Jeremiah understood as the voice of Christ addressing us from the Cross revealing to us our rejections of God’s Word and truth made visible in the crucified. Thus it is Christ speaking directly to us about our evil and our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Powerful words and images that reveal Christ as bearing our sins in his own body, words that convict us.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? The Nicene Creed says that “he suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures, the Creed does not mean the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament but the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament. Luke’s text however is about the words of Christ. Holy Week sets before us the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and complexity. Yet the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures help us greatly in grasping the radical nature of his Passion, Death and Resurrection. They provide the ground for the credal witness to Christ crucified.

Thus on Tuesday in Holy Week at Matins we read the first servant song of Isaiah, a passage which is understood in reference to Christ in the Christian understanding and to Israel in the Jewish understanding. Christ unites both, we might say. He accomplishes or fulfills what belongs to the vocation of Israel as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” even as Simeon identifies the child Christ in exactly the same language based upon exactly the same passage. And the redemptive nature of Christ’s work is also signaled here: opening the eyes of the blind, bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon and from the prison those who sit in darkness. These are the pilgrimage themes of illumination and purgation, of liberation from the prison of ourselves.

The reading from Wisdom tonight complements the first servant song from Isaiah and highlights the theme of Christ as the victim, the righteous one whose very being excites the wrath and envy of those who seek his destruction. For wherever the good is sought there too is the devil hard at work but always as a negative force, always as negating the goodness of being but as such reasoning blindly and foolishly. These texts throw light on the continuation of Jesus’s farewell discourse in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel.

Even more they complement and deepen our understanding of the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark which is a pretty full picture of human evil and the miscarriage of justice, of human cruelty and abuse and mockery which culminates in the crucifixion and the word, the one word of the crucified in both Matthew and Mark. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” We are meant to hang on that word of the one who hangs on the Cross and feels to the fullest possible extent the reality of sin and evil, feeling it more that we can imagine because of his greater goodness. We are meant to feel his sense of utter abandonment and alienation which is nothing less than what we have visited upon him in our abandonment and alienation from God.

What, then, is the good for us in the face of this awful spectacle of suffering and evil, of sin par excellence in several different registers? Simply this. The one word that comes out of the Centurion in seeing the crucified Christ. We are to hang upon the words of Christ that we might be able to say with the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to profess what we proclaim in the Creed about the crucified Christ who “suffered and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead.” But only if we hang upon his word of desolation and know ourselves as its cause and truth.

“All the people hung on his words”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2023

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

The readings at Morning and Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week complement in wonderful ways the Eucharistic readings. We hang upon the words of Hosea, the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. He bids us tonight to “take with you words and return to the Lord,” having reminded us this morning of God’s words to us in our disobedience and folly.

I am the Lord your God
From the land of Egypt;
You know no God but me,
And beside me there is no saviour.
It was I who knew you in the
Wilderness,
In the land of drought.

But in our prosperity, he says, we forget God. It is from Hosea that we have the lines from 1 Corinthians 15 used in the Burial Office about “Death being swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But God does not forget us. In the awareness of our sins we learn the love of God. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them.” These passages contribute to the beginning of Christ’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel (ch. 14) which is really about preparing the disciples for his passion & death, his resurrection and ascension; in short, the radical meaning of Christ’s going to the Father and about our learning the love of each for the other. The Passion teaches us the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” through our being gathered into his love for the Father. That is the underlying principle of the Passion.

These office readings inform our understanding of “the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark” framed by the broken alabaster box of ointment of spikenard poured out upon Christ’s head – a sign of love in repentance – and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. The focus is on Christ in our midst bearing the faults and follies of our betrayals whether explicitly like Judas and Peter or through our weakness in not being able to watch even one hour with him in Gethsemane. The alabaster box that is broken open prepares us for the breaking of his heart and body on the Cross. This beginning of the Passion convicts us of the limitations and the outright betrayals of our love of God and one another but only to move us to contrition and tears of sorrow. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.”

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 3rd, 2023

Print this entry

“All the people hung upon his words”

It is the challenge of Holy Week and of our lives in faith. We are to hang upon the words of the one who hangs upon the cross for the salvation of the world. The Passion of Christ is all our interest. The Passion of Christ crucified is the fullest attestation of the Incarnation. He suffers for us in what he has from us in body and soul. Redemption is not a flight from the world or the body as if it were evil. It is the redemption of the world and of our humanity.

We confront ourselves in all of the contradictions that belong to sin and evil. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long liturgy that culminates in the Resurrection. It marks the beginning of the intensity of the Passion through the reading of all four accounts of the Passion. We are meant to hang upon every word; in short, to listen attentively and to find ourselves in the madness of crowds. Like the exodus journey of the ancient Hebrews, we are meant to learn from the greater exodus of the Son to the Father. The Passion teaches us “two vast, spacious things,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, namely, sin and love. Both go together. The paradox of the Passion is the paradox of the Christian faith. It is only through sin that we know love. “God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5.8). Only so can we learn what it means to be human, to know even as we are known in the all-embracing love of God for us. But only if we hang upon the words of Christ who hangs upon the cross in love for us and for our redemption.

Palm Sunday highlights the deep meaning of the Passion by revealing to us the contradictions of our humanity. We who cry out “Hosanna to the Son of David” in exaltation and praise then turn about and cry “crucify.” “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified.” We are in this story. It is a powerful and necessary indictment of our humanity, of each of us in the folly of ourselves. For in one way or another we all have an incomplete and false understanding of ourselves whether in overstating our faults or our virtues. On the one hand, we are too much with ourselves, and on the other hand, quite mistaken about ourselves. We see but “in a glass darkly.”

To be aware of this is the beginning of our learning. It is, to put it another way, to know that we do not know, even about ourselves. But that is a beginning. That is to know something which impels the greater journey of learning through the greater wilderness of Christ’s Passion. The greater wilderness is the wilderness of human sin in all of its wildness and violence, its confusion and disarray. Holy Week confronts us with the fullest and most compelling picture of our disorder and disarray. For only so can we learn the greater good of God’s love for us.

(more…)

Print this entry

“The Son of man came … to give his life a ransom for many”

The Lenten Sunday Gospels may be seen to anticipate and to prepare us for the intensity of the Passion in Holy Week. For then we read through all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion, a remarkable feature of the eucharistic lectionary in the classical Books of Common Prayer. It begins on Palm Sunday with Matthew’s account of the Passion.

The Temptations of Christ on the First Sunday prepare us for the reading of the Passion from Mark’s Gospel, beginning on Monday in Holy Week, which is framed by the breaking of the alabaster box of ointment by which Christ is anointed and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. It includes Christ’s further temptation in Gethsemane and the betrayal of both Judas and Peter who succumb to the forms of human weakness and temptation, we might say. On the Second Sunday in Lent, the Gospel story of the Canaanite Woman, a testing of the disciples and a testing of her faith in perseverance, anticipates in some sense the continuation of the Passion from Mark in Christ’s cry of dereliction in the depth of the Passion, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me,” but which nonetheless leads to the faith profession of the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” As the woman said, “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”

The Gospel for the Third Sunday of Christ’s casting out a devil only to be accused of being demonic himself anticipates the beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke on Holy Wednesday with all of its intensity not only in the picture of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane but also in his remark to Peter about the temptations of Satan in Peter’s betrayal and, even more, his look of compassion that brings Peter to the tears in repentance in recalling Christ’s words to him. A powerful story powerfully told. The story of the miraculous feeding in the wilderness last Sunday, set in the context of the Passover, anticipates the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum on Maundy Thursday which explicitly connects the last supper to the Passion of Christ. The continuation of Luke’s Passion presents us with three of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross, especially the last word: “Father into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” He who carries himself in his own hands in the institution of the eucharist commends himself and our humanity into the hands of the Father.

Today’s readings on Passion Sunday anticipate Good Friday with its emphasis on the theology of the atonement. Throughout Holy Week in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read the Passion according to St. John in all of its fullness. The Sunday evening Office readings in Lent immerse us in the Passion according to St. Mark and St. Luke (Year I and Year II respectively). In every way, Lent and Holy Week concentrate our attention on the Passion of Christ and the nature and meaning of our participation in that Passion. It is about human redemption understood in terms of the theology of the atonement, our being made at one with God. But that doesn’t mean that God becomes less or other than God or that we become less or other than human.

(more…)

Print this entry