Category: Sermons

“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

Not again! Surely we have had enough of this text from Zechariah! But yes, and perhaps most appropriately so on The Octave Day of Easter. Why? Because it belongs to the teaching, the doctrine of the Resurrection. Because it shows the inescapable and necessary connection between the Passion and the Resurrection. As we have noted, no Passion, no Resurrection; and, even more paradoxically, perhaps, no Resurrection, no Passion.

The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday ends with Zechariah’s text, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced.” Now that text carries us into the Resurrection in the ways in which the idea and concept of the Resurrection comes to birth in the disciples and in us. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews,” John tells us, “came Jesus into the midst.”

“The same day at evening.” What is that day? It is Easter. Holy Week began with Palm Sunday which marks the beginning of one long liturgy that ends with the Resurrection at Easter, and yet imaginatively and liturgically, Easter extends into the Octave and into Eastertide. Sorrow and joy are intermingled, each shaping our understanding of the other. There is something quite compelling about such a way of thinking.

Where are we? Behind closed doors, John says, and in that same Upper Room where Jesus had gathered with the disciples “on the night in which he was betrayed” and where he gave himself in bread and wine as body and blood anticipating his Passion and Resurrection and providing for us to be joined with him in Holy Communion. What happens behind closed doors is quite powerful and wonderful. The disciples were huddled in fear. All their hopes, it seems, had been shattered by virtue of Christ’s crucifixion and now they are in fear of persecution because of their association with him. Our minds, too, are like tombs, behind closed doors. We are dead in ourselves.

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“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

This text from Zechariah concluded the reading of the Passion in Holy Week in John’s account of the Passion read on Good Friday. And yet, this text also provides us with a way to think the mystery of the Resurrection. We see that wonderfully today in the second story of the Resurrection that Luke tells.

Yesterday on Easter Monday we had the amazing story of Christ and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus; the point is that the disciples’ hearts “burn[ed] within [them]” as Jesus talked with them on the way and opened the Scriptures for their understanding about the logic of his Passion and Resurrection. In other words, they are pierced, as it were, by what they have learned in the encounter with Christ who provides an interpretation through things said and done. “He was known of them,” specifically “in the breaking of the bread.”

Here Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples. That alone is an intriguing concept. In the Christian story, God is in our midst in Jesus Christ as the Crucified and as the Risen Lord. As an image it captures the central dynamic of the Incarnation. In the Gospel reading for Easter Tuesday Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples who are shocked with joy and disbelief. Their confusion and uncertainty becomes the setting for learning about the Resurrection from the Risen Lord. Beyond the empty tomb of Easter Morn, beyond the report of Mary Magdalene and the other women, beyond the words of an angel, beyond the report of the other disciples, there is the whole matter of Christ making himself known to us in the truth of his Resurrection.

We cannot know this ‘scientifically’ in any kind of empirical sense; paradoxically, though, the Resurrection is one of the strongest concepts that makes science possible. Why? Because it affirms the intelligibility of the material world. We cannot know the Resurrection of Christ experientially only spiritually and imaginatively, intellectually, we might say. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” as the old spiritual puts it; the point of the rhetorical question is that we are there not literally but symbolically and really in terms of our sins being the cause of his being pierced. But ask the question about the Resurrection. Were you there when he rose from the dead? And the answer is both yes and no. How do we know the Resurrection? Through the power of these accounts that show us how the idea of the Resurrection takes hold of human minds and changes human lives.

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“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

Zechariah’s text carried us through the intensity of our meditations upon the Passion of Christ in Holy Week. His word is literally the last word of The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday. But as we saw on Easter Day, his text also carries us into the understanding of the mystery of the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and learn above all else the love of God for our wounded and broken humanity restored to love and by love in Christ Crucified.

To learn the Resurrection is to be pierced as well. It means to have our hearts and minds moved by what we see and hear. It means to contemplate the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection for they are inseparable. No Passion, no Resurrection; and paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion. We can only make sense of the Resurrection through the Passion of Christ. This is what the Gospels show us both in Holy Week and in the pageant of the Resurrection which is before us in the Octave and through Eastertide. We are meant to be pierced into love and understanding by what is given to be seen and felt in the accounts of the Resurrection. Those accounts show us the ways in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to be known and believed.

On Easter Monday we have the Peter’s address about the Resurrection from Acts and the powerful Gospel story from St. Luke about the Road to Emmaus. Peter’s testimony bears witness to the bodily reality of the events of the Resurrection. Jesus “whom they slew, and hanged on a tree: him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” The word after is most telling. Christian witness is always about the Resurrection and that in turn is unthinkable without the Passion and the deeper meaning of the forgiveness of sins with which Peter ends his sermon in Acts. The Resurrection is proclaimed as made known to chosen witnesses “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” A pretty powerful statement and one which is rendered even more powerful by Luke’s Road to Emmaus story. In both, the idea of looking upon him whom we have pierced is a critical part of the learning.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What? We look upon Christ who is pierced? That sounds like Good Friday. Is this not Easter? It is. Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! Perhaps our text should be what we see above our heads on the Chancel Arch. “I am He that liveth and was dead and behold I am alive for evermore,” words from The Book of the Revelation of St. John Divine (1.18) that speak directly to the themes of death and resurrection. Yet we can only read such words because of our “look[ing] upon him whom [we] have pierced.” Only through the Passion of Christ can we make sense of the Resurrection. For this is no spring time carnival, some playtime in the park to amuse ourselves. No. Easter celebrates the radical new life of the Resurrection. It is about new life and new birth, even as this morning we have seen the new life and new birth in the baptism of Liam Patrick Gregory Paradis.

Baptism is itself a new creation. Every baptism is about the Resurrection in us as a community of faith and in those who are baptized. The only question is whether we will live out what is proclaimed and given here this morning. It is the question for our age. We have so domesticated divinity that we find ourselves bereft and empty of any real understanding of God. As a consequence we are lost to ourselves. It is the current dilemma of our culture both within and without the Christian Church. We betray the very truth that gives us life.

The good news is that this is part of the old news which the Gospel of Christ has overcome and so is there for us to reclaim. The great good news is that we are not simply left to the barren realities of our human claims to excellence or goodness, to the specious claims about moral and cultural relativism, to the impoverished ideologies of our humanism which reveal only our inhumanity. If we want to know what it means to be human, the reality is that it cannot be found in the laboratories of science or social constructs and conventions; it cannot be found in the economic, social and political programmes to which we so desperately cling. There is a profound unease in our culture and world but there is as well as profound reluctance to face our problems. Why? Because it means two things which we would rather not face: God and ourselves.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

We can only watch and wait. That is the nature of our looking upon him whom they pierced. It is actually in some real sense the meaning of our Christian lives. We watch and wait upon God. We “look upon him whom we have pierced,” looking for the redemption of our souls and our world, looking for what is accomplished in the events of the Passion.

What we look for we also celebrate. All of our looking upon Christ crucified this Holy Week is only possible through the fruit of his passion in the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and “behold, it is I, handle and see, a spirit hath not flesh and blood as ye see that I have.” Christ is risen! Alleluia, Alleluia! The Resurrection makes possible the Passion even as the Passion helps us to understand the true joy of Easter. No Passion, no Resurrection but paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion!

The events of Holy Week concentrate our attention on Christ crucified but only through the optic of the Resurrection which gives those events meaning and significance. Tonight we have watched and waited for the great and grand act of Resurrection. And what is that except God making something new and wonderful out of the nothingness of our sins and folly?

At Easter and throughout Eastertide we shall look on him whom we have pierced and contemplate in his wounds the very nature of divine love, the love which restores and redeems, the love that makes us lovely. Without that we are nothing. The Resurrection is about the something more of God’s love seen on the Cross but is more than the Cross. That is the point. Easter is about a new and greater creation, about redemption, about a reality that is more than the mundane experiences of our everyday lives. We live for God and with God because of his Passion and Resurrection.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What is there to see on Holy Saturday? Christ is dead and buried. Nothing to see here, nothing to look upon except the closed tomb. We gather in the presence of the absence of Christ crucified.

But there is another sense to our looking upon him whom we have pierced. It is about our reflection upon the meaning of his crucifixion. The lessons for this day remind us about two things; the bodily reality of Christ’s death and burial, and the creedal concept of the descent into Hell. Both speak to the Passion as the radical meaning of divine love. Both speak to the meaning of redemption. God wills to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation.

Holy Saturday would have us look upon things which cannot be seen but only understood. If there is any image at all, it is one which belongs to Eastern Orthodoxy in an icon for this day, the icon which depicts Christ raising Adam and Eve from the grave, capturing the idea offered to us in Zechariah and the Epistles of Peter about Christ preaching to the souls in prison. God’s love seeks to redeem and restore the whole of our sinful humanity.

I love the idea of Christ’s descent into hell and to his preaching to the souls imprisoned there. Why? Because it says so much about the nature of our humanity, that we are rational souls with bodies and that both matter and they matter in terms of our relation to God.

Holy Saturday celebrates the peace between God and man, between God and his creation. It is paradise regained and yet this is but an interlude before the greater business of our looking upon Christ crucified and contemplating the mystery of human redemption. The greater business is the fruit of Christ’s passion in the radical new life which flows out of his reconciling love. For that we can only await in the peaceful quiet of this day, keeping vigil at the tomb in solidarity with Christ and his death for us, and then, this evening waiting and looking in expectancy for what God and God alone makes out of the realities of human sin and death.

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2015

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What else is there for us to do but to look on him whom we have pierced? It is simply the business of this day, the day which is called profoundly Good Friday. Somehow it is all our good to contemplate Christ crucified.

The intensity of the Passion reaches its crescendo in the services of Good Friday in such things as the meditations upon The Seven Last Words of the Cross and in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The spectacle of the Christ crucified is fully before us and if Holy Week means anything at all it is about finding our place in the events of the Passion, finding our humanity in all of its disarray in the crowd at Calvary. That is itself something profoundly spiritual. To see something about ourselves through the witness of the Scriptures in the figures who are part of the terrible pageant of the Passion. How can we do that?

It requires the capacity to be convicted about sin. Not a happy topic, perhaps, and certainly one which we do everything to ignore, mostly by ignoring Church where the Scriptures are proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. Our communities are filled with those who pass by with utter indifference, unaware of what happens here. No doubt, that is partly our fault in not making it clearer as to what the Church is really all about. It isn’t community service and communal socializing except in so far as such things make visible the love of God and our communion with Him which is the ground and basis of all our labours and life with one another.

The good news of Good Friday is that we look upon ourselves and are convicted of sin. Why is that good news? Because you can only do that if you know love. Only the love of God makes it possible to know the human situation. And to talk about love is equally meaningless without acknowledging sin. In a way, we really only know love through sin.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

Maundy Thursday is a day of richness, complexity and confusion. The Continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke is complemented by the events of the Last Supper in the Upper Room with the institution of the Holy Eucharist and by the images of service captured in Christ’s washing the feet of his disciples. Something of the meaning of the Passion is already signified in the powerful scene when Jesus gathers with his disciples in the Upper Room. In Luke’s account as we heard yesterday, Christ celebrates the Passover with his disciples. The symbolism becomes clear; He is himself the sacrifice as Paul will proclaim. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5.6).

Everything about the Passion comes down to the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday without which there can be no Easter. It begins with Christ in the Upper Room with the disciples and in this amazing moment when he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration, a celebration of Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian domination, a remembrance that what defines Israel as the people of God is God’s liberating action. As Paul tells us, having learned this from the other disciples in the early Christian Community because he was not there himself nor were we at the original event, Jesus says “take eat, this is my body” and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood”. These are astounding claims. We are to eat and drink “in remembrance of me,” he says. Given in anticipation of his Passion – body broken and blood outpoured – it becomes the ordained means of our participation in his Passion and in its redemptive truth and power. What is transacted in the Upper Room already signals what is transacted upon the Cross and provides for us the means of our participation in its deeper meaning. What is that?

Simply our participation in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The true meaning of Communion is Eucharist or thanksgiving. We are gathered into the Son’s love for the Father which is the true meaning of his death on the Cross. That event is ultimately about the prayer of the Son to the Father having taken into himself all that belongs to the truth and untruth of our humanity. Our sins are our untruth; the capacity for love, though not the actuality of love because of sin’s disarray, is the truth of our humanity. We are made for love and so love restores us to love and to the fellowship of love.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

The Passion According to St. Luke is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week even as we begin to enter into the intensity of the Passion with Tenebrae and the liturgy of Maundy Thursday. His account of the Passion is intensified and in turn intensifies our understanding of the Scriptures read in the Offices. Today, the readings from Numbers 21.4-9 and from Leviticus 16.2-14 together with the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel reflect powerfully upon our holy week text from Zechariah, “they shall look on him whom they pierced.”

The Leviticus lesson at Evening Prayer details the theme of atonement and the idea of the scapegoat, the one upon whom the burden of sins is placed and who is sent into the wilderness, and the goat, too which is sacrificed as “a sin offering for the people” and whose blood is brought into the mercy seat of the holy place. Powerful, primitive and certainly disturbing images but in The Epistle from Hebrews the theme of atonement is further developed. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” but rather than repeated sacrifices, Christ is said not to have “entered into holy places made with hands … but into heaven itself” and signifies the fulfillment of the logic of atonement in himself. “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” Once again the theme of our looking upon Christ is presented to us.

It is a point of emphasis in Hebrews. “Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our Faith,” referencing at once his passion, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” but also suggesting our looking upon him in his second coming at the end of time. In the Passion we look upon him in relation to our sins as well as his love; only so can there be the looking for him “the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” The moments of looking are connected; in some sense they are a notional difference, a difference in the nature of our looking. In terms of Zechariah’s text we “look upon him whom [we] have pierced” to be convicted of sin and convinced about love. This kind of double looking is also signaled in the reading from Numbers in a powerful image which John will apply to Christ.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

The Continuation of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark is complemented by the lesson from Isaiah 50. 5-9. It is one of the four “Suffering Servant Songs” as they are called. An image in Isaiah about the suffering of Israel, a suffering which is seen to have a significance and a purpose, something redemptive, we might say, for the nations of the world, the intimacy and the character of the images of suffering have also been seen by Christians from the earliest times as ways of understanding the Passion of Christ.

Mark’s account of the Passion and this lesson in turn amplify our understanding of the lessons at the Offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer from Isaiah 42. 1-9, the first of the Suffering Servant Songs, from Wisdom 2.1, 12-end about the betrayal of the righteous man by our human wickedness in “reasoning unsoundly” and acting wickedly, and the readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. That chapter presents us with one of the greatest of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus where he says “I am the vine … ye are the branches … abide in me.” It signals the meaning of our life in Christ in and through his Passion. “Remember the word that I said to you,” Jesus says to us about service and about persecution. Even more, he commands us to “love one another” even in the face of the world’s hatred. Most tellingly, Jesus tells us that we his friends and that it belongs to friendship that we lay down our lives for one another. Sacrifice informs service and only so can we abide in love and discover joy. Strong words that help us in our “look[ing] upon him whom [we] have pierced.”

The continuation of the Passion focuses on the scene of Christ before Pilate, a further betrayal of justice as Pilate gives into the mentality of the mob and “delivers Jesus to be crucified.” But before his crucifixion we confront the equally hideous spectacle of Christ’s bring mocked and vilified. There is no end to human spite and viciousness, it seems, but how are we to understand it? Perhaps through the understanding of human evil that Wisdom identifies. It is about our hatred of the good, a mistake in reason to be sure since no one truly loves what is evil, it is always what we mistake to be somehow good, and yet Wisdom suggests to us a feature of our fallen humanity, namely, how willful we can be in our refusals of all that is right and true and good. We betray the very way in which we are made in the image of God. As Wisdom wonderfully notes “God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of his own eternity.” Envy is named here as one of the greatest forms of our betrayal of the image of God in us. “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world.”

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