Category: Sermons

Christ Crucified: Good Friday Meditations 2020
Fr David Curry

Introduction:  “We preach Christ crucified.” (1 Corinthians 1.23)

Paul’s words go to the heart of the Christian religion. Like it or not, the Christian Faith is  religio crucis, the religion of the cross. What does that mean? It means that the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of love. We easily forget this and even reject it. The great English mystery writer, P.D. James, in her rather unusual novel, The Children of Men, acutely observes that the contemporary churches at the end of the last century had “moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism” which leads in turn to the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” To some, if not many, “the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Yet the Cross for all of its disturbing qualities is the essential symbol of the Christian religion. It sets Christianity apart from other world religions and yet, more importantly, connects with them in terms of  the realities of the human experience. This is especially true with respect to suffering. The Cross symbolizes redemptive suffering. It is crucial to how we think about suffering and to the forms of our engagement with other world religions including the culture and religion of secular atheism. The Cross speaks to our present distresses, to our fears and worries about all the forms of suffering in our global world, not the least of which are our current concerns about Covid-19.

Preaching Christ crucified has always been central to Christian witness and practice. The traditions of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter belong to a deep and profound reflection upon the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which the Christian Faith is represented artistically and aesthetically. It may surprise you to know that the practice of preaching or meditating upon the Seven Last Words of Christ, something deeply embedded in the modern Protestant and Catholic imaginary since the eighteenth century, was actually a service devised in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, just after the devastations of the terrible earthquakes of 1678 and 1687. The devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn in Europe.

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross complement the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, though not in any systematic sense. The words from the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Both the Our Father and the Cross are essential to the Christian understanding. Simone Weil, the 20th century passionate philosopher of attention and an activist devoted to the poor and the suffering, says that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” The theologian Anthony Boers observes the intimate connection between the Our Father and the Seven Last Words of Christ. Both “ably condense and collapse into one set of short passages the essentials of our faith.”

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“Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit”

“A new commandment, I give unto you, that you love one another,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. That new commandment is the novum mandatum in Latin; the word mandatum being then Englished to Maundy. Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great and high Holy Days of this Holy Week. We have emphasized that Holy Week is all about our participation in the Passion. Maundy Thursday brings that sense of participation to its highest expression. It is a day of many rituals and liturgies, all of which serve to underline two things: service and sacrifice.

Service to others is about the sacrifice of ourselves for others without which we are nothing and far less than the truth of ourselves. We really only live when we live for God and for one another; each is implicated in the other. To love God means to love one another. To love one another is to love God. It is almost as simple as that. And yet so difficult. Why? Because of sin.

The liturgies of Maundy Thursday are greatly circumscribed and reduced to a nullity this year owing to the Covid-19 outbreak and the fears thereof. All of the liturgies of the Church and especially in Holy Week and most especially on Maundy Thursday involve us with one another and significantly in bodily ways. There is, for instance, the service of the washing of the feet, recalling Jesus in the Upper Room bending down and washing the feet of the disciples. It recalls the Passion Sunday Gospel about Christ coming “not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.” The ministers of the Church are called to serve.

That idea of service is sacrificial and as such sacramental which is why on Maundy Thursday we recall that “on this night,” the very night in which he was betrayed, Jesus provides us with the means of his being with us. Such is the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, to use some of the names for this essential and defining liturgy of the Church. It is grounded in the Passion. “He took bread … he took the cup. Do this…. Drink this in remembrance of me.”We are apt to take someone’s last words rather seriously. Here are some of the last words and deeds of Christ and they are all about service and sacrifice, all about providing for us on the very eve of his going from us into the valley of the shadow of death, our death.

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Our Parish Holy Week 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 Matins of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday on the preceding evenings. The word means shadows or darkness. It 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 the understanding of the Psalm in the context of the Passion. In other words, the Psalm is seen in the light of the Passion through the antiphon even as the Passion is further illumined by the Psalm. There is a kind of to and fro in this, a kind of back and forth between the images of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament.

Holy Week is unsettling and disturbing; everything is out of whack, 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 it is about us. We are bent out of shape, as it were, turned in upon ourselves and away from God, incurvatus in se. But it is that 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 and find ourselves in it, finding in the darkness something of the light of Christ.

Fr. David Curry
Tenebrae, Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak

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“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”

The lesson from Hebrews complements the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. We pray “Our Father” to “forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Forgiveness is a dominant feature of Luke’s Gospel whose Passion account we read on the Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week. Luke gives us the first and the last word of the Crucified. They are both words of the Son to the Father; the first word is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Allied with Luke’s emphasis upon the theme of forgiveness is the idea of sacrifice and healing, the idea of the giving of oneself for the good of others. That theme is critical to the idea of atonement, our being made at one with God. That implies our separation and the overcoming of that separation. The lesson from Hebrews provides us with the deep theology of redemption, at once reaching back to the Old Testament story from Numbers about the bronze serpent being raised up for sinful Israel to see and in seeing healed, and in the idea of sacrifice which requires the shedding of blood.

What is the story of the bronze serpent about? It is about human sin and disobedience. In this case, Israel’s constant complaining against God results in the punishment of serpents which destroy them. They repent and beseech Moses to intercede to God. He does and is told to make a bronze serpent and to hold it up before the people. It makes their sin visible to them at the same time as healing them. Jesus picks up on this image in John’s Gospel. “As Jesus lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Such is salvation, our being healed and made whole.

But only through the brokenness and agony of Christ. Luke, of all the evangelists, gives us the most moving picture of Christ in his care for us. Christ in the agony of Gethsemane prays “as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It anticipates the blood of his passion. What does the shedding of blood mean? Simply the giving of life for the good of others. That is the insight of Hebrews. It sees the former sacrifices as having  their fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice, in the shedding of his blood. It is imaged for us here in terms of his commitment to the will of the Father. “Not my will but thine be done.” We have no life apart from God.

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“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in my love”

John’s Gospel, we have said, provides a strong underlying foundation for the movement of the pageant of the Passion throughout Holy Week. Today’s readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel are especially powerful. We are presented with the last of the so-called seven “I am” sayings of Jesus, metaphors that identify Christ with the God revealed to Moses in the burning bush and that envision the forms of our participation in the divine life. “I am,” Jesus says, “the bread of life,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” “the Resurrection and the life,” “the door of the sheep,” “the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep,” “the light of the world,” and here, “the true vine.” Powerful images that belong entirely to our life with Christ. “Our whole life says Our Father,” Origen notes, because of the Word and Son of the Father who bids us pray, “Our Father.” We are drawn into an intimacy of the relation of the Father and the Son. “I have called you friends for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.”

And yet, in the Continuation of the Passion, the one word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew give us is Christ’s cry of dereliction, of desolation. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is not, it seems, a cry to the Father. It is as if the intimacy of that relation is utterly hidden in the agony of the Passion. But it is a prayer, a prayer to God. A quote from the beginning of Psalm 22, it underscores for us as no other word does the full meaning of the desolation of sin. Sin is about our separation from God. Christ voices that sense of alienation and its devastating desolation in this word, what will come to be known as the fourth word of Christ from the Cross.

The readings from John’s Gospel highlight the organic nature of Christ’s relation to us. That is the power of the seventh “I am” saying. It is about God living in us, about the life of  Christ in us without which we have no life. But this chapter is also about the dynamic of the Son’s life with the Father. We place Christ’s word of desolation in the love of the Son for the Father. “He who hates me, hates my Father also,” Jesus tells us. We are to feel something of the radical nature of sin in this word, in the suffering of Christ for us in this word. He suffers in this word the radical nature of our sin. And all because, as Isaiah tells us, the suffering servant did not turn back but embraces “the shame and the spitting” out of confidence that “the Lord God will help me” even when he feels to the fullest possible extent the alienation of sin.

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“I knew you in the wilderness; in the land of drought”

Holy Week is the week of our betrayals of God and of one another. To contemplate such betrayals is the good of this week. Why? Because it is only possible through the love of Christ. We immerse ourselves in all four of the accounts of the Passion starting with Matthew’s Passion on Palm Sunday followed by the Passion according to Mark today and tomorrow, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and ending with John’s Passion on Good Friday. This is one of the remarkable features of our Anglican Prayer Book tradition.

But the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer also contribute profoundly to our meditation and understanding of the Passion of Christ in all of its scriptural fullness. The Gospel of John is read at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout Holy Week until Holy Saturday. It functions like a basso continuo, an underlying bass line which grounds and holds together all of the chaos of Holy Week, the chaos of human sin and evil. What we contemplate is the dynamic between sin and love. Such is the agony of Holy Week, wonderfully encapsulated in George Herbert’s poem, The Agonie. Who would know Sinne, the poem asks, and answers “let him repair Unto Mount Olivet” to the garden of Christ’s agonie, to see “a man … wrung with pains” and all “bloudie be,” a reference to Christ’s tears coming down like great drops of blood on the one hand and an anticipation of the actual blood outpoured on the Cross, on the other hand. Herbert gives us a very powerful image of sin. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” Such is the ugly intensity of the Passion.

But we are to know Love in and through Christ’s Passion and to know that love intimately and sacramentally, that is to say in terms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, he in us and we in him. His sufferings freely bearing our sufferings and showing us his love. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, /Which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine.” Such is the beauty of the Passion.

Hosea is the great Love prophet of the Old Testament whose words in the 13th and 14th chapter contribute to our reflection upon the Passion. “I knew you in the wilderness,” God says (Hosea 13.5). Holy Week is about our going into the wilderness of sin and suffering. It is from Hosea that Paul takes the famous words that have become part of the funeral liturgy, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Hosea bids us “take with you words and return to the Lord thy God,” words which are echoed by Luke in last evening’s second lesson about hanging on the words of Christ.

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“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.”

Our cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to “let him be crucified.” And so it begins, and ends, on Palm Sunday. It begins with the exultant note of rejoicing but ends with the grim spectacle of Christ’s death on the Cross. Yet that ending also marks a beginning. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ. For only then can we say that “truly, this was the Son of God” (Mt.27.54). Already something comes to birth, to light, out of the darkness of Christ’s suffering and death.

The global pandemic has made the world a rather fearful place. That is, perhaps, the greatest danger of the Covid-19 crisis; the fearfulness that brings out the worst kinds of despair and anxiety as we contemplate the growing numbers of fatalities globally. Churches are closed and media headlines suggest that preachers wonder, ‘where is God in all of this?’

Where is God? Right where He always is, right in the midst of the struggles and sufferings of our wounded and bent humanity. Never more so than in Holy Week and in the drama of the Passion of Palm Sunday. The question is not, ‘where is God in all of this?’ The question is where are we in our thinking and our caring about the ethical and about one another? The whole point of Holy Week is to confront us with the contradictions that belong to human sin and wickedness without which we cannot be awakened to the truth of our humanity in God. Such are the deep lessons of the Passion. We are to be where he is. As Rowan Williams puts it in his lovely book Being Christian, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering” That is where we are.

“There were they in fear where no fear was,” the Psalmist says (Ps. 53.6). In a way, such words speak to our current state of isolation. For as cooped up in our homes we are, it seems, largely insulated from contagion but not from the fears of our minds and hearts about others in our families and communities, fears about those in the front lines of health care, fears about deaths in Nursing Homes, fears about ourselves and a growing fear, suspicion, even hatred of others, precisely because of our isolation. No doubt, too, there are fears about the necessities of life, fears about other kinds of illnesses that belong to the human condition quite apart from the coronavirus. Our fear is very much a fear of the other, a fear of bodies, a fear of nature. At the heart of our fears is uncertainty. Yet the Passion of Christ is all about God’s willingness to subject himself to the bodily realities of human suffering. God wills to suffer. That is the striking paradox and meaning of Holy Week.

Such is the radical truth of the Incarnation, recalled for us in the Annunciation of Mary which fell in Passiontide this year. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God being with us and so with human suffering. Her Annunciation marks his conception in her womb. Only so can God suffer for us and with us. In the body. And why? To bring us to the truth of ourselves in his will for us. To do so through suffering.

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