Category: Sermons

What mean ye by this service?

Holy Week is about our participation in the Passion of Christ. In the spectacles of human evil, particularly of envy and the betrayals of justice, we learn about the goodness of God and about redemptive suffering. That counters our easy default to a kind of gnosticism, to acquiescing in a dualist view of reality. The deeper lesson of the Passion has to do with God making something good out of our evil, an evil which is always predicated upon the assumption of the goodness of existence and of human will and reason.

The problem lies with the way in which our will and our reason, our knowing, are compromised, twisted, and perverted. We think we see clearly when we don’t see at all. We think we know what it is that is right to do without a glimmer of an awareness of the limits of our knowing and without any sense of the destructive power of our will. In a way, the Passion of Christ intends to confront us with these realities that belong to the human condition in its fallenness. Our loves are in disarray. To learn this is our good.

Thus we need to learn about the true vocation of our humanity wonderfully signaled in the Morning Prayer lesson from Isaiah, the first of the so-called suffering servant songs and one in which the vocation of Israel and thus our human vocation is concentrated in a single figure. For Christians, this is Christ, the one in whom and whom alone that vocation can be realised. The corollary of that claim is that only in Christ can we embrace the vocation to be “a covenant to the peoples,” “a light to lighten the nations,” “to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon” and “the darkness” of ignorance and folly; in short, “to establish justice.” As the second lesson from the 15th chapter of John shows us that is only possible through our incorporation into the life of Christ. “I am the vine; ye are the branches” … “abide in me” … “abide in my love,” Jesus tells us.  Powerful words which signal something positive.

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What mean ye by this Service?

“An alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” broken opened and the tears of Peter flowing forth frame The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark: the one an anointing signifying Christ’s burial in an act of love-in-forgiveness by the unnamed woman; the other, tears of sorrow and contrition after having recalled the words of Christ and his betrayal of himself and Christ. Powerful moments that illumine the intensity of the Passion and our part in it.

The Passion is further illumined by the readings from Hosea and John at Mattins and Vespers, lessons which are all about the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Old Testament while John’s Gospel underlies the whole of Holy Week in the Offices. It complements and informs and the other accounts of the Passion.

Hosea’s powerful words are about the possibilities of a return to the God from whom we have turned away. “Take with you words and return to the Lord your God.” Return how? By heartfelt repentance in the acknowledgement of our follies and sins. This morning’s lesson describes well the problem of worshipping the works of our hands rather than God, the author of our very being and of the whole of creation. The people of Israel keep on sinning by making images before which they sacrifice and worship. “Men kiss calves,” is Hosea derisive and dismissive comment. He is harkening back to the Exodus when the people of Israel made molten calves, imagining that the creatures who pulled their wagons were their deliverers rather than the God who revealed himself to Moses and gave the Law. We are so easily drawn to what is immediate and present. A molten calf is just a dead cow,  not even good for the barbecue.

Hosea reminds us that God is God and that Israel has known no other God. “It was I who fed you in the wilderness,” God says, before observing in a very telling phrase that “when I fed them, they were satisfied; they were satisfied, and their heart was proud; therefore they forgot me.” How then will we remember? How will we return to God? God says that he will become like a lion, like a leopard, like a mother bear, not to defend Israel, but to destroy Israel! We have to be unmade in order to be made anew. Such strong language awakens us to the wonder and truth that there can be no help for us except from God. It is from Hosea that Paul gets the wonderful phrase “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” seeing in the phrase a rhetorical question that points to God as the one and only source of healing and grace, to the God who heals and loves.“I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely.” The idols are the follies of our own making. “O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you.” As Hosea remarks,“those who are wise understand these things.”

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“What mean ye by this service?”

The lessons at Morning Prayer for Palm Sunday provide the larger context for the readings at the Holy Communion. The first lesson is Exodus 11 which is the story of the event of the Passover itself after which we have in the next chapter the institution of that remembrance which is our Holy Week text or mantra, “What mean ye by this service?” The second lesson is the chapter which immediately precedes the Passion account of St. Matthew, the first of the four accounts of the Passion read in their entirety in Holy Week. We immerse ourselves in the Passion in all of its intensity.

What about this evening’s readings? The lesson from Isaiah is the last of the four so-called servant songs and is the most intense in its expression about the idea of substitutionary suffering. The suffering of Israel for the sake of others is further intensified in the Christian understanding by the sufferings of Christ. Christ is “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted by grief.” “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows … he was wounded for our transgressions … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Is. 53. 3-7), … “he makes himself an offering for sin” (Is. 53.10). The imagery concentrates the theme of the Passion as being the sufferings of Christ for us and in the face of our wickedness and indifference.

This evening’s second lesson provides St. Luke’s account of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, complementing the Palm Gospel at Mass from Matthew. He adds as a kind of postscript to the cleansing of the temple the theme of animosity towards Christ by “the chief priests and scribes and the prominent men of the people” who “sought to destroy him.” Yet, as Luke marvellously puts it, “they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words.”

Holy Week is about our hanging upon the words of Christ, learning a great good even in and through the spectacles of sin and violence, in and through the miscarriages of justice and the betrayals of trust and goodness. We are in these events at one with “the chief priests and scribes and prominent men of the people” whose self-interest and pride and presumption are indeed challenged and threatened by the words and presence of Christ and at one, too, with “all the people” that “hung upon his words.” The latter suggests a spirit of longing and learning that is the counter to all our illusions of power and control. In hanging upon his words in the pageant of Holy Week, we journey with Christ in his passover for us. The meaning of the services of Holy Week is our participation in the sacrifice of Christ. Such is our freedom and our good.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, EP, 2019

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“What mean ye by this service?”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week of the intensity of Christ’s Passion. In it we confront all of the contradictions in our souls and in our lives. We confront our betrayals of the good, our betrayals of God. This awakens us to the radical nature of that goodness. We are given to see ourselves and to find ourselves in the events that belong to this holy week. It is the week of the Passion of Christ, the week of the Passover which undergoes a radical change of meaning through the sacrifice of Christ. In the Christian understanding, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”.

The connection to the Passover story is undeniable. The question that belongs to the Jewish celebration of the Passover becomes our question. “What mean ye by this service?” (Ex. 12.26). The question reverberates throughout the whole of Holy Week.

Holy Week is one continuous liturgy, one continuous service. It is marked by different degrees of intensity and expression but in essence we enter into the Passion of Christ as modelled upon the ancient Passover celebration that defines Israel. It is about God’s deliverance and thus signals the redemption of our humanity. It is about the liberation of the Hebrews from the yoke and tyranny of Pharaoh. How? By God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews, their lintels daubed with the blood of a lamb, the passover lamb, and thus sparing them the plague of the first-born. A sign that signifies and effects what it signifies, we might say. The rituals are the sacramental ways in which God’s defining acts of deliverance are recalled and re-lived, re-presented for the Jewish people. They, in turn, shape the central act of Christian worship in recollecting the words and actions of Christ in the week of his Passion and the way in which those words and deeds are remembered and reenacted by us. We enter into the Passion of Christ sacramentally. Only so can we feel the thought, feel the Passion which we are required to contemplate and think always but throughout Holy Week especially.

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For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant

Passiontide. We enter into deep Lent. Already the focus is increasingly on the Cross, upon the Passion of Christ. His Passion is about his willing sacrifice for us, his willingness to be acted upon by our evil. But what does that really mean? “We see through a glass darkly”, Paul reminded us on the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, even as the Gospel story about “go[ing] up to Jerusalem” was about Jesus telling us what was going to happen, telling us about the things of his passion, death, and resurrection. The point, at once disturbing and true to human experience, is that “they” – we – “understood none of these things”. The hope of the Quinquagesima Gospel was that like the blind man crying out from the wayside we might want to know, to see and to understand. But this meant that we obviously don’t see fully or clearly. Thus the Cross is veiled, especially in Passiontide, there before us but in the increasing awareness of its mystery, in the awareness of “the dullness of our blinded sight.”

Lent is about that journey of the soul with God into what God wants for us. But God’s goodness cannot be comprehended and grasped even partially without an awareness of our faults and failings, our sinfulness and wickedness which contribute to our brokenness.“The sacrifices of God”, the psalmist tells us, “are a broken spirit, / a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51.17).  This is powerful wisdom, a deep theological truth, and one which shapes our journey into the Passion of Christ.

On Passion Sunday, the Epistle and Gospel bid us reflect on the meaning of human redemption in Christ’s sacrifice. The theme is atonement. What will it take to restore us to oneness with God? It has everything to do with Christ as the Mediator between God and man because he is both God and man. His mediation is about his death, his “giv[ing] his life a ransom for many”. What does this mean? That is our struggle. The struggle to understand what redemption means belongs to our real good in God’s love and mercy. It begins by learning our lack, our incompleteness, our brokenness.

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons. We think we know what is best for us and for one another but as Jesus says we “know not what [we] ask”. This is Jesus’ verdict on our desires. We do not really know what is good for us. Our reason is clouded over and our will disordered. Such are the effects and the reality of sin. We can however engage with the struggle to learn what God wills to provide for us through the sacrifice of Christ and our participation in that sacrifice; in short, “to strive to strive” towards such things. Such is Passiontide and especially Holy Week. Everything is concentrated on the way of the cross; at once the way of our betrayals of divine love and the triumph of that love for us and in us.

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“And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down”

Jesus identifies himself as the bread of life in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is one of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel which point to his essential divinity at the same time as providing a host of metaphors that concern our humanity in terms of our dwelling and abiding in him. Such is the whole matter of thinking sacramentally. “I am the door”, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the good shepherd”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the vine” and “I am the bread of life”. They are all really sacramental in scope and application. They speak to the forms of our incorporation in Christ. But the most ostensibly and obviously sacramental is when Jesus says he is “the bread of life”.

The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent is John’s account of Jesus’ feeding the multitude in the wilderness. It comes from the sixth chapter where Jesus says he is the “bread of life” and belongs to its sacramental intensity. It belongs, in other words, to what Christ is teaching us about himself and his relation to us. First, he is saying something profound about himself in relation to God who reveals himself as “I am who I am” in and through the burning bush, itself a sacramental image about the invisible made known through the visible, and without the destruction of the natural. The bush burns but is not destroyed. Secondly, he is saying something profound about us in our relation to him. In other words, his relation to the Father in the Communion of the Trinity is the ground of his relation to us through these metaphors of incorporation; in short, metaphors about our life in Christ.

Articles XXV through XXXI of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion deal with the matter of the sacraments in a reformed understanding and in the context of the intense debates about the sacraments at the time of the reformation. Article XXVIII deals explicitly with the Lord’s Supper. It is crucial to keep in mind Article XXV which treats of the sacraments in general and makes the important point that they are “effectual signs of grace”; in other words, they effect what they signify. What is critical for the Anglican reformers is preserving the essential nature of the sacraments as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. What that means is the necessity of preserving the sign in relation to the thing signified and that requires maintaining the integrity of the natural in relation to the supernatural. This is the key point which shapes the Anglican Reformed understanding of the sacraments. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.

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“What are they among so many?”

This morning’s Gospel complements our Lenten Programme, ‘Thinking Sacramentally’. Taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, sometimes known as ‘the Bread of Life discourse’, it is profoundly sacramental. The whole chapter is about the idea of the sacramental, the idea of the invisible being made known through the visible. And perhaps nowhere in the Scriptures is the harmony of sign and the thing signified made more apparent than in that chapter as a whole.

This Gospel has exercised a strong hold on the liturgical and sacramental imaginary of the Church. It is read today in the midst of the journey of Lent as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of justifying grace. From Advent to Trinity Sunday in the eucharistic lectionary we are essentially journeying with Christ in his work of the redemption of our humanity. Something of the nature of that journey is wonderfully concentrated here for us. We live, it seems, and live abundantly from the crumbs that are gathered up from the picnic feast with Jesus in the wilderness. There is an echo here to the Gospel reading for The Second Sunday in Lent about ourselves as like “the little dogs who eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”.

This Gospel has also been read for many centuries on the last Sunday of the Trinity Season, on what we have later come to call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There it is read as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of sanctifying grace, as a kind of gathering up of the fragments of grace in the course of our spiritual journey from Trinity Sunday through to Advent Sunday which is all about sanctification. What Christ has done for us is to be lived in us. Such is sanctifying grace.

The two are interrelated. Sanctifying grace always recalls us to the justifying grace of Christ just as justifying grace always requires our taking a hold of it in our lives in sanctification. The interrelation of these two forms is our incorporation in Christ, the meaning of our life in Christ. It is profoundly and necessarily sacramental. It has everything to do with the relationship between God and man in Jesus Christ and the ways in which we participate in his divinity and his humanity through the grand pageants of creation and redemption and the great pageants of justification and sanctification. They are concentrated for us in this Gospel reading.

“O God, who didst wonderfully create and yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our human nature, Mercifully grant that by the mystery of this water and this wine we may be made partakers of his divinity who didst humble himself to share our humanity”. It is a prayer that you may have heard me say quietly and privately at the time of the preparation of the elements at the altar. It captures the nature of sacramental thinking, the idea of our being with God through God’s being with us, through the interplay of creation and redemption, and the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Today’s readings teach us is that our life in Christ happens through the harmony of Word and Sacrament, through the things of the world being made the instruments of grace and salvation.

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Behold the handmaid of the Lord;  be it unto me according to thy word.

This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.

“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.

With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.

What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.

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“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

I like to think of today’s Gospel as the gospel of despair and one which speaks rather directly to the forms of darkness, death, and despair in the contemporary culture of nihilism. But how can that be good news? Because the nihilisms. the sense of empty nothingness, cynicism, discontent, and despair which pervades our culture and day are named, on the one hand, and overcome, on the other hand. The first is easy to see; the second has become somewhat obscured in the Gospel though it is signaled in the Epistle, “Ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light”. What do I mean by somewhat obscured in the gospel?

The last words that you heard in this morning’s gospel were “and the last state of that man is worse than the first”. This follows after an account of the folly and vanity of evil as being like a house divided against itself, the soul in self-contradiction. We hear of the finger-grace of Christ by which the devils are cast out of our souls. But if we do not attend to that strong teaching then we find ourselves not with God in Christ but against God in Christ and discover that we are in the obscene company of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself”. Evil begets evil when we ignore and deny the goodness of God. As such “the last state of that man is worse than the first”. But that is not actually the real end of the reading. It goes on to say: “And it came to pass as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lift up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck. But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Unfortunately, since 1962 in Canada, the last two verses which provide the necessary counter and overcoming of despair have been left out.

Yet they provide a much more fitting conclusion to the encounter and scene and reveal more fully the counter to our despair which arises from the idolatry of our own autonomy. Thinking ourselves to be light we can only discover our own darkness. Paradoxically, to know the darkness of our hearts presupposes the greater light of God’s goodness. To name the darkness is already to be more than the darkness; the darkness is made manifest by the light.

The contradictions of our culture are great, the forms of folly and despair undeniable. In presupposing our own self-sufficiency we can only discover our failings and our sins. That is actually the good news because only then are we open to hear precisely what God seeks for us. The “devices and desires of our own hearts” can only lead to despair. If we think, as we do, that we are entitled to certain things, if we think that we are owed pleasure and security, as we do, and if we think that we deserve certain things, as we do, then we deceive ourselves. We presume too much. Here in this gospel we confront an image of our self-deception. We call God’s goodness in Christ evil. He casts out devils and we accuse him of being a devil. The contradiction is obvious as Jesus shows. Evil is nothing, a privation of all that exists and is good and true, yet we grant to it a substantiality, a quality of ‘thingness’, which it does not and cannot have. The evil lies in us.

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