Category: Sermons

Holy Saturday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The quiet and silence of Holy Saturday is in marked contrast to the noise and confusion of the Passion of Christ on the previous days of Holy Week, especially Good Friday. We have had our way in the folly of sin and evil, thinking that we could kill God. All the forces of sin and evil have spent their force. All is done.

Not just by us, but in Christ. What remains is what belongs to the special quality of Holy Saturday. That is the further and deeper contemplation of sin and love which has been our Holy Week theme. What belongs to this morning is a profound awakening to the credal doctrine of The Descent into Hell as the final chord in the Symphony of the Passion. We have done all that sin and evil can do but God is not done. Already we have seen that eternal life flows out of the side of Christ crucified and dead.

The fullest sense of that life is seen in the lessons for Holy Saturday morning that highlights the universality and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice. It is for all. His suffering gathers into itself all the forms of human suffering, past, present, and future. His death gathers all our deaths into himself. Holy Saturday recalls the peace of Paradise but in another register. It is the peace, not as the world gives, but only as God gives, a peace that comes out of all our discord and disarray, out of all our evil and what it means in terms of suffering and death. Death is our way yet God makes life out of death, out of our folly and pretense of thinking that we can control and remake the very world of which we are a part, the folly of presuming that we are God.

Holy Saturday bids us wait at the tomb of Christ and contemplate the fury and rage of ourselves and its consequences. All is done and we are left empty. All our rage and spite is past and gone but can’t simply be ignored or forgotten. But 1 Peter recalling Zechariah – yet again, for John ended his account of the Passion with Zechariah’s words about our looking upon him whom we pierced – indicates something more that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It is universal so much so that Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison, in Sheol or Hades or Hell understood not as the image of punishment but as an image of the place of the dead. He preaches to them in order to bring them to himself.

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Good Friday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon’s prophetic words to Mary follow immediately upon his prophecy about Jesus. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” It speaks to the meaning of Good Friday not just for “many in Israel” but also for the Gentiles, as the Nunc Dimittis makes clear. Christ is “a light to lighten the Gentiles,/and the glory of thy people Israel.” Holy Week has presented us with the spectacle of all human sin and cruelty as visited upon Jesus Christ. It is a week in which “the thoughts of many hearts” are brought to light, and if we have hearts to feel what we see and hear, our souls are surely doubly pierced: in grief and sorrow for our sins, and in joy and gladness for the love of God in Christ. But only because he is pierced by us and for us on the Cross. The question is whether we will be pierced inwardly by what we behold and see. If so, then this day will rightly be “Good” Friday for us individually and collectively.

We behold Christ crucified and we hear the last words of Christ on the Cross. In the devotional tradition of The Seven Last Words of Christ Crucified as developed in Lima, Peru, in the 17th century by an indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, and transported from there to Europe and then back again to the Americas, the last words begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the bond of their mutual and eternal love in the Spirit, words found in Luke’s account of the Passion. Tonight in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, we hear and participate in The Passion according to St. John.

John provides three of Christ’s last words just as Luke gives us three words of Christ. Matthew and Mark give us the same one word, Christ’s cry of dereliction. In Bedoya’s ordering, Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh word; John, the third, fifth and sixth word, Matthew and Mark, the fourth word. Tonight we hear the last word of Christ in John’s account: “It is finished.” It is the only word from the Cross without reference to anyone personally, without a personal pronoun, as it were. It is a kind of objective summary or conclusion. The Greek makes it clear that it signals the sense of accomplishment, an end or purpose achieved; a telos.

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Maundy Thursday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

There is a remarkable complexity to Maundy Thursday. There is, of course, The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Luke which provides three of the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” is the first word. The second is Christ’s word to the one who was crucified with him who said, “Jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom.” Jesus responded, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.”

Luke’s third word becomes the seventh word in the devotional tradition of the Last Words of the Crucified developed by the indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in Lima in the late 17th century. From there the practice travelled to Europe ultimately shaping the liturgical and musical devotions for both Protestant and Catholic Churches. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” With Luke, the words of the Crucified begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the Spirit of their eternal love.

There are as well other devotional and symbolic events on this day such as the washing of the feet, the giving of the Royal Maundy, the King’s coin, to the poor, the stripping of the Altar, and the watching at the Altar of Repose with Christ in Gethsemane. But most crucially, perhaps, Maundy Thursday recalls the Institution of the Holy Eucharist on the night, this very night, in which Christ is betrayed.

All these events highlight two themes: service and sacrifice in humility and love. Dramatic and moving, the liturgies of Maundy Thursday draw us into the vast and spacious mysteries of sin and love, as George Herbert suggested. They reveal to us our hearts of sin and they pierce our souls in sorrow and in love. They convict our consciences and move us to acts of compassion and service to others. All as grounded in the Passion and in the forms of our participation in the Passion of Christ. The three last words in Luke’s Passion contribute to our growing into the mystery of Christ.

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Holy Wednesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week recalls and completes the Epistle reading for Passion Sunday from Hebrews 9. It centers our attention on Christ’s Passion as the “forgiveness of sins” through “the shedding of his blood” in the sacrifice of himself.. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,” and “now, once for all, at the end of time, he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” It offers a way of understanding theologically just what it means to say that “Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant, [and] that by means of death” so that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” This theological understanding is complemented by the Passion according to St. Luke, read today and tomorrow.

Luke, in Dante’s famous phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This, wonderfully illustrated in The Beginning of the Passion According to St. Luke. Luke, helps us to feel something of the meaning of Christ’s Passion psychologically, emotionally, and personally, and what it means for us. In other words, Luke gives us a sense of the inner struggles, turmoil and dynamic of the Passion in Christ himself in the movement towards the Cross.

Luke shows what is at work in the forces of evil that seek to kill Jesus especially with respect to the intentions of the chief priests and scribes and the role of Judas in Christ’s betrayal. Satan, Luke tells us, “entered into Judas” who conspires with the chief priests and captains to betray Jesus unto them. Satan is the tempter, the devil, who as a created being is good but exists in denial of his own being. He is, as Augustine nicely puts it, “an evil good”. He shows us the radical nature of evil as the contradiction and negation of the good upon which it utterly depends, the evil to which we concede so easily.

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Holy Tuesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The lesson read at Communion on Tuesday in Holy Week is the third of the four so-called Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah. It is the only one read in the eucharistic readings this week. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the fourth of the Servant Songs was read (Isaiah 52.13- 53.end). In today’s office of Morning Prayer, the first of Servant Songs, Isaiah, 42. 1-9, was read. The third song will be read again at Evening Prayer on Good Friday. In the Christian understanding, the suffering servant is both Israel collectively speaking and the unity of all human suffering concentrated in the person of Christ. The songs belong to the revealing of “the thoughts of many hearts” and thus to our being pierced in our souls.

The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark depicts the trial of Christ at the hands of Pilate who gives in to the wishes of the people who seek his crucifixion. We hear again the cries of “crucify” even though Pilate knows that the chief priests of Israel “have moved the people” against Jesus. He has him scourged or beaten and delivered to be crucified. It is a betrayal of human justice in the name of convenience and complicity with the mob, a betrayal of truth and human compassion. Such is the madness of crowds.

What follows are the indignities of being mocked by the Roman soldiers before being led out to be crucified. Simon, a Cyrenian, is compelled by them “to bear his cross.” Not freely and willingly but under compulsion. He is crucified and cruelly scorned and berated on the Cross by the people, by the chief priests and scribes. Their words of insult mock the idea of “Christ, the King of Israel,” even as the words of his accusation, “The King of the Jews,” are superscribed on the Cross. If all this were not enough to disturb us, “they that were crucified with him reviled him” too. We behold him whom we, in these aspects of our humanity, have betrayed and nailed to the Cross.

All this is what he suffers and suffers silently before Pilate and on the Cross. Mark then tells us that “there was darkness over the whole land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour,” something seen, as it were, that is symbolic of the darkness of men’s hearts. “At the ninth hour,” Mark, like Matthew, gives us Christ’s cry of dereliction. It is the only word from the Cross in their accounts of the Passion. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, interpreted as “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These words from Psalm 22 cry out simply to God and not, as in Luke, to God as Father.

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“And a sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

And so it begins and ends, in the ending that never ends. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week yet looks to the end or purpose of the journey in Christ’s Resurrection but only through the Cross and Passion of Christ. It is really a week-long liturgy. We greet Christ as he enters Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna”. But our cries of rejoicing quickly turn to shouts of “Let him be crucified”. Yet the shouts of violence give place to sorrow and sadness. Are we to be left simply in the sorrows of our hearts? Or does sorrow or contrition lead to the possibilities of repentance? Holy Week takes us from the cries of rejoicing to the sorrows of our hearts but then to the glorious songs of Alleluias. Such is the pageant and wonder of Holy Week, if we have the hearts and minds to think and feel; in short, to be pierced.

It has been my custom to take a Scriptural passage as the matrix for all our Holy Week and Easter meditations. Simeon’s prophecy, which we heard at Candlemas, anticipates the Passion and its meaning. He says to Mary, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;” then to her he says, that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary, as the Annunciation this past week shows, is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As Augustine teaches, she is the symbol of the Church. Her vocation is the vocation of our humanity in its purity and truth: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That means our complete attention to all of the words of the Passion as indicated in Simeon’s prophecy. Only so can we feel the thought of the deep meaning of Christ’s Passion; in an image it means being pierced.

There are, the poet George Herbert says, “two vast spacious things” that we are meant to learn and contemplate, “yet few there are that sound them.” What are they? “Sinne and Love”. The challenge of Holy Week for us is to sound the depths of sin and love in our own hearts as revealed through Christ’s Passion. Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the spectacle of the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. We are bidden to contemplate the dialectical motions, the to-and-fro of our hearts, in going from joy to sorrow and then to glory. Hosanna, Crucify, Alleluia.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s response to the divine will announced to her by the Angel Gabriel is the epitome of the Christian Faith, a firm but emphatic “yes” to God through whom God becomes human. It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ or Christ apart from Mary. She is “the pure source of his pure humanity” (Irenaeus) as ordained from before the foundation of the world; in other words, divinely ordered. She is, in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Council of Ephesus (451), Theotokos, “the Mother of God.” What that means goes to the heart of the understanding of Christ’s Incarnation.

The Annunciation is the moment in time of Christ’s conception. He is made man through “the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, according to his manhood”, his “human nature (κατα την ανθροποτητα),” just as Christ is the eternal Son “begotten of his Father according to his Godhead” (κατα την θεοτητα) (Chalcedonian Definition). She is not the mother of the Godhead, the source of divinity, the maker of God, as it were, for that would negate humanity itself. Mary as Theotokos, literally God-bearer, belongs to the gathering into unity of all of the images about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity understood in their mutual integrity and revealed to us in Christ. Mary is the chosen vessel of his becoming human and incarnate, that is to say, in the flesh, while remaining absolutely and eternally God. The maker of God to us, it could be said, in ways that belong only to poetic licence.

The emphasis on Mary as Virgin and Mother is the witness of Scripture and Creed to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and the Trinity; the two are inseparable. Mary plays an essential role in the economy of salvation and in the life of prayer. Her “yes” to God is the inverse and the overcoming of the sin of Adam and Eve. Ave is, as the Fathers note, the reverse of Eve. But she is not passive or unengaged in the work of human redemption. She “conceived by the Holy Ghost”, as the Apostles’ Creed states, yet, in Luke’s account, the Angel clearly says “thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son,” echoing the lesson from Isaiah. She conceived but without the aid of a man. She did not simply receive like a passive vessel, a mere conduit. She is an active agent in the work of human redemption that looks back to creation itself as spoken into existence by God. What comes from God to her is actively embraced and engaged by her. In her “yes” is the proto-evangelium of Genesis fulfilled, a prophecy of the hope and longing for redemption that “her seed shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” even as he “shall bruise his heel,”a reference to Christ and his Passion. Nor is this some sort of gnostic deception, a matter of her and our being deceived. Her Annunciation is non recipiet et non decipiet sed concipiet, as Andrewes summarizes.

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“He is the Mediator of the new covenant … by means of death”

Venantius Fortunatus’ hymns, Vexilla Regis and Pange Lingua, were originally written for the commemoration of the relics of the true Cross brought to Poitiers in southern France in the 6th century. They have become an integral part of Passion Sunday which marks the beginning of deep Lent or Passiontide. His hymns are a commentary on the Cross and Passion of Christ particularly as expressed in the readings for this Sunday. They contribute to the Paradox of the Passion that is before us.

In Percy Dearmer’s version of Vexilla Regis, “The Royal Banners forward go,/ the Cross shines forth in mystic glow,/ where he, the Life, did death endure,/ and by that death did life procure … Fulfilled is all his words foretold … He reigns and triumphs from the Tree” (Hymn # 128). The Tree, symbolic of the Cross and Christ’s crucifixion, is not shame or ignominy but “proclaims the Prince of Glory now”. Its branches bear “the priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” The Cross is the emblem of salvation, personified in Pange Lingua as the “Faithful Cross … the noblest Tree”, the express “Symbol of the world’s redemption” (Hymn # 129).

The hymns illustrate the meaning of the Passion of Christ. They comment in part on the readings from Hebrews and the Gospel from Matthew today. Hebrews is a theological treatise on the mystery of human redemption concentrated in this passage. Christ is both priest and victim, “the High Priest of good things to come” who “by his own blood entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” By his blood outpoured and his death on the Cross, he is “the Mediator of the new covenant” that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” He is Mediator not because he stands between but because he unites in himself God and Man. Here is theology in its most proper sense as a form of our thinking upon and engaging with the images that belong to the language of Scripture.

The images in Scripture and hymn highlight the paradox of salvation. The focus is on the Cross, yet in the liturgical traditions, the Altar Cross is veiled, present but not fully seen, there but not fully understood. “We see but in a glass darkly” and yet we see something. “The Cross shines forth in mystic glow,” literally, fulget crucis mysterium. Such is “the mystery of the cross,” but what is at issue is the understanding. We sing in Pange Lingua “that engagement of the struggle glorious” that results in the “triumph on the trophy of the cross” which proclaims “how the world’s redeemer was, sacrificed, victorious.” His kingdom is not a worldly kingdom of human making but the redeeming of our humanity through his embrace of human sin and death. His death is ‘the death of death.’ It makes visible the triumph of life over all and every culture of death such as our own. This is the paradox of death becoming the means to eternal life. How? we might ask.

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“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

A figure of the late 4th and mid 5th centuries, Patrick belongs to the story of Celtic Christianity. He is the bearer of the great light of Christ to the Irish, the Apostle and Patron Saint of Ireland, having lit the paschal fire on Tara’s hill to drive away the pagan darkness of the Druids, perhaps just a few years after the death of Augustine (430AD). That light of faith has a powerful and transforming power, then and always, beyond the tales, myths, and legends of shamrocks, shillelaghs and snakes.

Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilisation, juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of Ireland’s conversion to Christianity; the one, beautifully carved and deliberately broken, symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice; the other beautifully engraved and whole, inscribed with the names of the Apostolic Fellowship. The one, dated a century or two before Christ, is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century is known as the Ardagh Chalice and is symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice and our participation in his sacrifice sacramentally. The juxtaposition of cauldron and chalice captures the transformation of a culture.

No celebration of The Feast of St. Patrick can overlook the wonderful hymn attributed to him, the poem known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”(Hymn # 812). The hymn offers a wonderful collection of images dealing with the power and grace of God in relation to us through nature and scripture, through spirituality and theology, and even psychologically, we might say. Yet all these images are contained within the Trinitarian understanding that embraces and frames the entire hymn. It begins and ends with the invocation of the doctrine, the teaching about God as Trinity. The doctrine is at the heart of our devotion and worship of God.

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.

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