Category: Sermons

“What mean ye by this service?”

We gather at the grave of Christ in silence. It is the quietest of times, the most peaceful day of the year in a way. All is done. “It is finished.” To be sure. All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man is accomplished on the Cross. Today marks the peace of Paradise, as it were.

And yet the readings for Holy Saturday suggest something more that belongs to the radical nature of Christ’s sacrifice, to the radical nature of God’s desire to be reconciled with our humanity and world. Holy Saturday marks the creedal mystery of the Descent into Hell. What does that mean? It means the fullest possible extent of God’s desire to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity.

Drawing upon imagery from Zechariah, our readings from 1st Peter this morning point to the idea of Christ going and preaching to the spirits in prison, in the darkness of Sheol. The work of human redemption extends far beyond our assurances about ourselves, far beyond the narrow limits of our world-view. The great icons of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy envision for us something of the great mystery of this day. Christ is depicted as drawing Adam and Eve and a train of others out of the grave, out of the pit of darkness. Such is reconciliation writ large, we might say.

At the very least, our gathering at the grave of Christ allows for the possibilities of something more. Of hope. Ultimately the reconciling grace of Christ for the whole of the world, for the whole of our humanity – such after all is its universal scope without which it is nothing – moves us to watch and wait expectantly.  It will lead us to the vigil of Easter and to the radical outcome of that reconciling love in the Resurrection. Already in John’s Gospel we are made aware of that idea and the plans taken by the Chief Priests and the Pharisees who petition Pilate for a watch and a stone. Such is the fearfulness of our humanity in the limitations of our imagination and our reason. Such too is our folly in thinking that we can ultimately contain and restrict the will and actions of God. Already in the quiet mystery of Holy Saturday, Christ, the Word and Son of the Father, shows us that his reconciling sacrifice on the Cross is always something active and alive, and something, too, which speaks to the whole of our humanity. There is, we might say, the constant doing of what is done.

We watch and wait at the borrowed tomb of Christ, the tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea. We watch and wait upon the Christ who “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius), our death. That changes everything.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2019
Matins & Ante-Communion

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“What mean ye by this service?”

You may be forgiven for wondering, ‘which service?’ For Maundy Thursday is really a great jumble of services, a collection of rituals. There is the rite of the washing of the feet; there is the rite of the royal mandatum, a gift of money to the poor; there is the Judas Cup ceremony at Durham Cathedral; there is the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the Upper Room with his disciples “on the night,” this very night, “in which he was betrayed”; there is the stripping of the altar; there is the watch in remembrance of Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” “What mean ye by these services?”we have to ask.

And yet the connecting thread of meaning is clear. It has altogether to do with the power of the concept of sacrifice, a concept so much misunderstood that it now belongs less to its profound religious and spiritual sensibilities and more to the pathologies of the therapeutic culture. Sacrifice here is not about calling attention to oneself, about victimhood; it is entirely about the giving of oneself for the sake of others. Such is love. Such is true agency. Such is true love. Love is not love if it is not sacrificial love. It is entirely about putting oneself freely and utterly on the line, not counting the cost. It is love without calculation. It is simply love.

“What mean ye by this service?” This is our text throughout Holy Week. It concentrates for us the purpose of our rather intense and demanding Holy Week observances. Nothing could be more counter-culture. The places are few and far between that undertake such a demanding regime. And yet, it really all begins with Maundy Thursday, the day of the new commandment, novum mandatum. Maundy is simply the englishing of the Latin word, mandatum, which means commandment. A new commandment. That is the unifying theme. The new commandment is “that you love one another as I have loved you.” That is our vocation and challenge: that our loves should be nothing less and nothing more than God’s love moving in us. That new commandment is simply service as sacrifice. And that is what unites the diverse services of this holy day.

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What mean ye by this service?

Tenebrae means darkness or shadows. It underscores an important feature of our Holy Week observances. They are not about a linear sequence of events. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ in all four accounts of the Passion along with the kinds of scriptural commentary that passages from the Old Testament and the New Testament provide. It is really all a kind of circling around the meaning of the Passion in and through the complex of perspectives that are part of its fundamental and doctrinal unity. Thus the ancient Medieval services of Tenebrae are anticipatory of the events of the Triduum Sacrum. The services of Tenebrae anticipate the Mattin services of each following day: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Tenebrae, then, is a kind of shadowing forth of what we already know but know only in the shadows and the darkness of our minds. We know the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection but only partially, only ”in a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13..13), as it were. Thus Tenebrae reminds us of what the veiled cross signifies, namely, the limitations and incompleteness of our understanding. And yet, Tenebrae is about the passion of our quest to know and to understand more fully the radical meaning of Christ’s passion as the pageant of divine love.

Tenebrae anticipates. We participate in the intensity of the Passion by anticipation. Tonight we read the Matins and Lauds of Maundy Thursday. Our modern Tenebrae services are usually restricted to the Wednesday of Holy Week. But it all belongs to the meaning of the services of this week. We anticipate the Triduum Sacrum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. We do so by our attention to the psalm offices of Matins and Lauds and to the readings which illumine and belong to the deepening of our understanding about Christ’s Passion.

We can only do this in the light of the Resurrection. That is, after all, how all of the accounts of the Passion and by extension the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament have come down to us along with the Creeds that encapsulate the essentials of the Christian faith. We immerse ourselves in the challenge of trying to understand the radical nature of God’s love for us revealed in Christ’s sacrifice.

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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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