Category: Sermons

Maundy Thursday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum and signals the beginning of the intensity of the Passion in all its fullness. The readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah at Matins and Vespers today provide a graphic complement to the continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke and anticipate the Solemn Reproaches on Good Friday.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow … [for] the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.” Lamentations begins with the sense of desolation and loneliness that our sins occasion. “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;” we hear in the evening lesson, “he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” And yet in the desolations of Holy Week, what is remembered and called to mind is that “the steadfast love of the Lord never faileth, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”

With Luke’s Passion, we have three of the seven last words from the Cross and in the late 17th century ordering of the seven last words by the native Peruvian priest Fr. Alonso Messio de Bedoya, Luke provides the first and last word, bracketing in a way our reflections upon the cross by gathering them into the motion of the Son’s twofold prayer to the Father: The first word is “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” and the last word is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

In one way, Maundy Thursday is a great and complex melange of liturgies and rites, ranging from the King’s touch and the washing of the disciples’ feet to the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the stripping of the Altar, and the Agony of Gethsemane, among others. Yet, in another way, everything focuses on the Last Supper. Redemption and salvation are concentrated for us in the Eucharist as the place where Christ gives himself to us sacramentally on the very night in which he was betrayed.

Passion and Eucharist are simply inseparable. “Jesus Christ take[s] our nature upon him, and suffer[s] death upon the Cross for our redemption,” as the Communion Prayer states. We are gathered into the embrace of the Trinity as the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the second lesson at Matins from John makes clear even as the second lesson this evening points us as well to the examples of sacrifice and service that belong to the drama and the wonder of human redemption.

(more…)

Print this entry

Wednesday in Holy Week 2025:

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

The shadows of the Cross stretch forwards and backwards. The theme of forgiveness in the face of the uncertainties and limitations of our knowing is signalled in the remarkable passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that we read in Holy Week along with the intensity of the readings from John’s Gospel in the Offices. These readings, I am trying to suggest, help to better our understanding of the Passion of Christ. The shadows of the Cross at once adumbrate or shadow forth the events of the Passion and illuminate something of its radical meaning. One of the traditional services for Holy Wednesday is Tenebrae, a Latin word which means shadows or darkness. Tenebrae is a ‘psalm office’ that anticipates the Sacrum Triduum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday that bring us to the Vigil and Celebration of Easter.

On this day we have two intriguing Old Testament lessons, one from Numbers at Matins, and one from Leviticus at Vespers. Those are two rather forbidding books and yet the passages read this day speak directly to the meaning of the Passion. Jesus, very early in John’s Gospel, tells Nicodemus about the heavenly things of spiritual life and new birth in terms of his ascending and descending from heaven. “No one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” He goes on to explain this: “as Moses 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.”

This is a commentary on a scene from the Exodus recorded in Numbers about the murmuring of the people of Israel against Moses and God. As a consequence, they are visited by fiery serpents “so that many people of Israel died.” Moses intercedes to the Lord that he “take away the serpents from us.” The Lord directs him to “make a fiery serpent” out of bronze and to set it on a pole, “and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”

John has this passage in mind and it complements the whole pageant of the seven last words of the crucified encapsulated in the first word. Think about it. The people of Israel behold the image of their own sin made visible to them and thus are healed. We behold Jesus crucified in all of the events of the Passion and in so doing behold our sins made visible in the one who overthrows our sins and wickedness. John Donne notes that there is a great difference between the creeping serpent, alluding to the story of the Fall of the serpent in the garden, and the crucified serpent, meaning Christ, “the serpent of salvation,” the serpent raised up as in Numbers. It is really all about the direction of our thinking. The creeping serpent looks downward to the dust but we are meant to look upward at once to the bronze serpent on a pole and even more to Christ crucified on the Cross. “They [we] shall look on him whom we have pierced,” as we will hear at the very end of the Passion According to St. John on Good Friday. But already that idea is anticipated; indeed, adumbrated or shadowed forth.

(more…)

Print this entry

Tuesday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Two of the four so-called Servant Songs from Isaiah are read on this day, the one as the first lesson at Morning Prayer and the other as the lesson at Mass. The First Servant Song emphasizes the idea of covenant, the covenant between God and us. Israel is the suffering servant who is given “as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” and in whom is enlightenment and freedom from the darkness of the various prisons of our lives. As covenant, it signals the divine commitment and will for our good.

The lesson at Mass is the Third Servant Song and points to the idea of bearing with suffering and shame that is inflicted upon him, something which the Fourth Servant Song read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday highlighted ever so graphically in the image of the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,” who “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” and, even more, whom we see “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted, wounded for our transgressions”. All these passages help to illuminate our understanding of the Passion of Christ.

But the Continuation of Mark’s Passion along with the First Lesson at Evening Prayer from Wisdom points us to the ugliest and the most vicious of the deadly sins, envy. Pilate “knew that the chief priests had delivered [Jesus] for envy.” Wisdom, too, reflects brilliantly on the destructive evil of envy. It is a hatred of the good, a hatred of what we know to be the good in another but refuse to acknowledge. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man for he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions.” But as Wisdom so clearly indicates “they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them.” We contradict the truth of our own being as created for “incorruption and made in the image of God’s own eternity.” How? “Through the devil’s envy death hath entered the world.” It is at once a resentment at what we know in some sense as being the good and the true and our rejection or refusal of exactly what we know. In short, we both know and do not know what we do.

This emphasis in the readings on envy is instructive and helps us to grasp Paul’s point that “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do,” an image of the human condition in our fallenness. Envy is its most vicious and destructive form, an active denial of a good which is glimpsed and known in another.

(more…)

Print this entry

Monday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Forgiveness as love in repentance is the signal note of Monday in Holy Week. We read the beginning of the Passion According to St. Mark today and its continuation tomorrow. The beginning of his Passion is framed by the outpouring of ointment of spikenard through the breaking open of an alabaster box and the outpouring of the tears of Peter. If that were not enough, this beginning of the Passion is embraced and enfolded into the meaning of the Office Lessons from Hosea 13 & 14 and from John 14.

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its dominant theme, as the Revised Standard Version introduction to Hosea states, is “divine compassion and the love that will not let Israel go”. It proclaims “the gospel of redeeming love.” Hosea enacts the theme of the love that is forgiveness and restoration in spite of our false loves in idolatry and lust, in betrayal and foolishness. The 14th Chapter of John’s Gospel belongs to the farewell discourse of Jesus so-called which is really a discourse on the meaning of his Passion in terms of our abiding in the love of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is at the heart of divine love. The unnamed woman who breaks the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and pours the oil on the head of Jesus acts out of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus makes known to us what is otherwise not known to us about her action. It is an act of forgiveness in love that is directly connected to his Passion and Death. Jesus makes this clear to those who were indignant about the waste of the ointment. “She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He makes known what her action means which otherwise would not be known to us; an instance of our not knowing what she is doing.

Peter, at the end of Mark’s beginning of the Passion, hearing the cock crow for the second time, recalls what Jesus had said to him and thus his own betrayal of himself. It is a poignant awakening to his own not knowing the true meaning of what he has done. “Before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice.” In recalling these words of Jesus, “he thought thereon and wept.” Such are the tears of repentance. The tears of sorrow and contrition flow out of our hearts of betrayal and deceit when our hearts are convicted by the greater love of Christ.

The beginning of Mark’s account of the Passion is profoundly and strangely moving and contains all of the actions of our sin and folly but only to bring things to mind in us that, as the body of Christ, like the alabaster box of ointment is broken open, so too our hearts in repentance might be broken open and our tears flow forth in recognition of the love which suffers and dies for us. “Take with you words and return unto the Lord.” That return is love in forgiveness and forgiveness in love. “I have told you before it takes place,” Jesus says, “so that when it does take place you may believe.” That is to come to know what we did not fully know about what we do in all of the forms of our betrayal of God, our sins turning us away from God who turns to us in the forgiveness which is his love and who turns us to himself in love.

Such is the power of Christ’s first word from the Cross as underlying the motions of the Passion.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 14th, 2025

Print this entry

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. It is the beginning of one long liturgy which ends with Easter. In one sense we begin with joy and end in joy, yet there is a great difference. For between that beginning and ending is the spectacle of all our betrayals concentrated for us in the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and fullness as proclaimed in the reading of all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). But what kind of spectacle? One in which we are both actors and those who acted upon but in both senses through all of our disarray and disorder and in all of our folly and sin.

We cannot come to the greater joy of Easter without beholding ourselves as participants in the Passion of Christ, at once as those who cry “Hosanna” and those who then cry “Crucify”. And yet we are also those who going through the rigour of Holy Week may learn what the Centurion learned in contemplating the full meaning of sin and evil; as the end of the Passion According to St. Matthew puts it: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The point of Holy Week is that we are more than spectators, more than those who merely look on and then pass by, indifferent to what we behold and indifferent to everything else. We are the spectacle, meaning that we are what we behold. And only so can we be in Christ. It means beholding all that belongs to the contradictions in all our souls . We are in this story and in every way.

We go from joy and gladness to sadness and sorrow and then from sadness and sorrow to joy and gladness but with a greater intensity of both. While the beginning and ending of Holy Week seem to be the same they are not. There is a profound difference from the Hosannas with which we greet Jesus coming as King to Jerusalem and the cries of Alleluia at Easter. The difference lies in the spectacle of human sin and wickedness which this week unfolds in all of its dramatic intensity. “Your sorrow shall be turned to joy,” Jesus says. Only through the spectacle of sin and sorrow can we come to the joy and gladness of Easter.

(more…)

Print this entry

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”

Passion is an ambiguous word, richly suggestive and evocative. We often think of ‘Passion’ in terms of our appetites or desires, our feelings and emotions, sexual and physical. We associate Passion with a deep and emotional attachment to some object of our longing. Yet the word seems inescapably bound up with the things of the body. How can this have anything to do with the things of the spirit? Because in the Christian understanding, the things of the spirit are altogether bound up with the things of the body. Christian spirituality is not a flight from the body or from the world. It is altogether about the redemption of the whole of our humanity and of the entire order of creation. Anything less than that sense of the whole is spurious and false, an incomplete kind of spirituality; in short, pseudo-religion, and as such, de-humanizing.

Passion Sunday marks the beginning of deep Lent, a two-week period of intense concentration upon the Passion of Christ. The whole of the Christian religion is concentrated into the scope of these two weeks and, within these two weeks, into Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday and ending with Easter, and, within Holy Week, into the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of Maundy Thursday through to Easter Eve, and, within the Triduum Sacrum, concentrated upon the Passion of Christ which we call Good Friday, without which we can make no sense of Easter and the joy of the Resurrection. There is a remarkable intensity to Passiontide. It concerns our participation in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What do we mean by the Passion of Christ? We mean his willingness to suffer for us. Passion signifies “being acted upon”; hence, suffering. It is inescapably part and parcel of the human condition, part and parcel of the finite reality of our lives. It requires a body, though suffering is by no means restricted to the body. There is an intense interplay between body and soul in human experience; sufferings that are at once physical and mental; anguish of the soul and body. The interplay between them belongs to the understanding of what it means to be human and it is no less so with regards to the reality of suffering which seems so destructive of human personality, of the human community, and of human life.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”

He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.

The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.

These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.

(more…)

Print this entry