Category: Sermons

“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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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

On the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week we read Mark’s account of the Passion. His account is both informed by and informs the lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer – the readings from Hosea 13 and 14 and the beginning of the continuous reading from starting with chapter fourteen of John’s Gospel which will ultimately bring us to his account of the Passion on Good Friday.

In other words, the lessons help our understanding of the different accounts of the Passion even as the Passion illumines the lessons. Think of how Hosea’s words convict us in the betrayals of our hearts. “Men kiss calves,” he says, referring to our easy idolatries, mistaking the works of our hands for God. “I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour. It was I who knew you in the wilderness,” and yet, “when they had fed to the full, and they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.” Such betrayals can only have consequences. “Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction?” words which Paul will re-echo in First Corinthians as belonging to the victory of the Resurrection. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But we have yet to see that. What is before our eyes are the betrayals of our hearts which cut us off from God. “Compassion is hid from my eyes,” Hosea will say of God if only to illustrate the strong sense of sin’s separation from truth and love.

These words give added force to the heart-felt cry of God for Israel to return to the Lord your God. How? “Take with you words,” Hosea has God say, “and return to the Lord.” Why? Because he has an insight into the nature of God, an insight into the nature of the good which is always greater than our evil. “I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely,” and where there was wilderness, there shall be a garden. “They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden.” These are wonderful words which can only shape our sense of looking upon him whom they have pierced. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things,” Hosea concludes. This is precisely the project of the Passion.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

“They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as the Revised Standard version puts it, or, as the King James Version puts it, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” either way, it is an appropriate and powerful text for our Holy Week meditations. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the spectacle of Holy Week, not that we are merely onlookers standing idly by, but in a profound sense the whole of Holy Week is about the character of our looking upon the crucified. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ; our liturgy, literally, our public work or worship, the work of the people, is about the quality of looking upon the Christ whom we have pierced. How? By our sins.

That is one part of the deep message of Holy Week, the deep message of the Passion of Christ and one which is essential to the possibilities of any fruit of the Passion in us, namely, the Resurrection. No Passion, No Resurrection. It is as simple as that. There is a necessary and inescapable connection between the Passion and the Resurrection and it is the business of this week to make that point.

Holy Week starting with the Palm Sunday procession and the Passion Gospel of Palm Sunday is really one long, continuous liturgy that extends into Easter week. We contemplate as the poets of our tradition make so very clear, “two vast, spacious thing,” namely, “sinne and love,” as George Herbert puts it. We behold the spectacle of all our betrayals. It begins with the striking contrast, the utterly opposing moments that are the contradictions in our souls, made audible and visible on Palm Sunday in the cries of “Hosanna” while waving palm branches in the enthusiastic greeting of the coming of the King to his Holy City, Jerusalem, only then to cry out almost in the next breath, “Let him be crucified.” Our branches of Palms are cross-shaped to capture visibly the contradictions and the violence of our hearts. This is us.

We are part of this parade, this charade of human desires in disarray. It may be the tendenz of our age to want to celebrate our selves, to turn every parade into the charade of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me.’ It is so often the nature of many of our contemporary churches to turn religion into a mutual self-admiration society, tinged with not a little of that old Maritime vice of self-righteousness and sentimentality that makes such a mockery of religion, especially, the Christian Religion. Did we not hear last week Jesus’ strong counter to the ambitions of the Mother of Zebedee’s children who wanted power and prestige for her two sons? Did we not hear that domination and power – and what is self-regard and self-esteem if not a kind of assumption of superiority and arrogance? – are not to be named among you? Did we not hear instead about service and sacrifice? Did we not hear about the Son of Man coming “not to be ministered unto but to give his life a ransom for many”?

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“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire:/hearken unto me
for thy truth and righteousness’ sake”

I know. It is what we are all asking God for – less snow! Hear us, O Lord!

We live in a culture dominated by images. At their best, images can be icons of the understanding but they are really only as good as our understanding. One powerful image is the veiled cross. The cross at once present and yet not fully seen captures exactly the understanding that undergirds the pageant of the Passion.

We enter into Passiontide, into deep Lent where everything about the understanding of the Passion of Christ becomes more and more intense and more and more concentrated. As we have seen in our Lenten Programme on “Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ,” the Passion is a central theme throughout the whole year.

“The whole life of Christ was a continuall passion,” John Donne remarks even as Lancelot Andrewes notes that “Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross” This brings out an important feature of the Christian religion, though one which is often ignored or downplayed in the contemporary church. The point is this. The Christian Faith makes no sense apart from the Passion of Christ. It is altogether central. We can make no sense of Christmas without reference to the Passion. The Passion is what makes fully clear the meaning of the Incarnation. As Athanasius puts it, “he borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” in that way having from us what to offer unto God for us.

This inevitably brings into play the theological doctrine of the atonement, a doctrine downplayed if not dismissed altogether. Even the most theologically minded of the philosophical atheists, like Slavoj Žižek, have the greatest difficulty with the idea of the atonement. And he is not alone. How does the Passion restore and make right what was wrong? What is the injustice that becomes justice in the sacrifice of Christ? “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5.21). Hymns, too, are often the conduit of theology, like our first hymn this morning, Venantius Fortunatus’ celebrated Passion Sunday Hymn, Vexilla Regis, from the 6^th century which offers the same teaching. “And there, to cleanse the heart of man,/ From out his side life’s torrent ran … “The priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” Still the questions raise all of our uncertainties, our doubts, and even our contemporary scorn and dismissal of Christianity.

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