Christ Church

Easter Vigil: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”

The quiet silence of Holy Saturday morning gives place to the Alleluias of great rejoicing on the Eve of Easter. “This is the night, wherein heaven and earth are joined, and mankind partaketh with the Godhead,” as the Paschal Praeconium sings. We rejoice in the making known of what is hidden in the Passion, simply the life and love of God who renews and restores our broken and sinful humanity. We rejoice in the felix culpa, the blessed fault of the original sin of Adam and Eve which belongs to all the sins of our humanity and yet a blessing because it does not cancel God’s deeper will and purpose for our humanity, namely, our being partakers of his divinity. It does not mean the loss of our humanity but rather its true being as found in the all-embracing love of God who alone makes something not just out of nothing but out of the nothing of our sin and evil.

The signal note is one of joy and praise at God’s restoring the dignity of our humanity to its purpose as found in his will. Redemption is just that, our being brought back to the truth of our being. That story of human redemption is recalled in the Easter Proclamation and in the Old Testament lessons, psalms and canticles that bring us to the renewal of our baptismal vows, to our identity in Christ through his Death and Resurrection, the very story which has been re-presented to us in the symphony of the Passion that culminates in the Resurrection of Christ.

Our little country vigil, as I like to style it, highlights some of the essential features of the ancient Easter Vigil: the blessing of the Paschal candle marking the transition from the darkness of sin and death to the light and life of Christ, the singing of the Paschal Praeconium, the prophecies or lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures that belong to the Easter Mystery, the renewal of our baptismal vows as the annual rebirth of our souls in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection, and the lauds of Easter Morning. Tomorrow we will participate in the sacrament of the Altar which is always a recollection and re-presentation of Holy Week and Easter.

(more…)

Print this entry

Holy Saturday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The quiet and silence of Holy Saturday is in marked contrast to the noise and confusion of the Passion of Christ on the previous days of Holy Week, especially Good Friday. We have had our way in the folly of sin and evil, thinking that we could kill God. All the forces of sin and evil have spent their force. All is done.

Not just by us, but in Christ. What remains is what belongs to the special quality of Holy Saturday. That is the further and deeper contemplation of sin and love which has been our Holy Week theme. What belongs to this morning is a profound awakening to the credal doctrine of The Descent into Hell as the final chord in the Symphony of the Passion. We have done all that sin and evil can do but God is not done. Already we have seen that eternal life flows out of the side of Christ crucified and dead.

The fullest sense of that life is seen in the lessons for Holy Saturday morning that highlights the universality and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice. It is for all. His suffering gathers into itself all the forms of human suffering, past, present, and future. His death gathers all our deaths into himself. Holy Saturday recalls the peace of Paradise but in another register. It is the peace, not as the world gives, but only as God gives, a peace that comes out of all our discord and disarray, out of all our evil and what it means in terms of suffering and death. Death is our way yet God makes life out of death, out of our folly and pretense of thinking that we can control and remake the very world of which we are a part, the folly of presuming that we are God.

Holy Saturday bids us wait at the tomb of Christ and contemplate the fury and rage of ourselves and its consequences. All is done and we are left empty. All our rage and spite is past and gone but can’t simply be ignored or forgotten. But 1 Peter recalling Zechariah – yet again, for John ended his account of the Passion with Zechariah’s words about our looking upon him whom we pierced – indicates something more that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It is universal so much so that Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison, in Sheol or Hades or Hell understood not as the image of punishment but as an image of the place of the dead. He preaches to them in order to bring them to himself.

(more…)

Print this entry

Good Friday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon’s prophetic words to Mary follow immediately upon his prophecy about Jesus. “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” It speaks to the meaning of Good Friday not just for “many in Israel” but also for the Gentiles, as the Nunc Dimittis makes clear. Christ is “a light to lighten the Gentiles,/and the glory of thy people Israel.” Holy Week has presented us with the spectacle of all human sin and cruelty as visited upon Jesus Christ. It is a week in which “the thoughts of many hearts” are brought to light, and if we have hearts to feel what we see and hear, our souls are surely doubly pierced: in grief and sorrow for our sins, and in joy and gladness for the love of God in Christ. But only because he is pierced by us and for us on the Cross. The question is whether we will be pierced inwardly by what we behold and see. If so, then this day will rightly be “Good” Friday for us individually and collectively.

We behold Christ crucified and we hear the last words of Christ on the Cross. In the devotional tradition of The Seven Last Words of Christ Crucified as developed in Lima, Peru, in the 17th century by an indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, and transported from there to Europe and then back again to the Americas, the last words begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the bond of their mutual and eternal love in the Spirit, words found in Luke’s account of the Passion. Tonight in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, we hear and participate in The Passion according to St. John.

John provides three of Christ’s last words just as Luke gives us three words of Christ. Matthew and Mark give us the same one word, Christ’s cry of dereliction. In Bedoya’s ordering, Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh word; John, the third, fifth and sixth word, Matthew and Mark, the fourth word. Tonight we hear the last word of Christ in John’s account: “It is finished.” It is the only word from the Cross without reference to anyone personally, without a personal pronoun, as it were. It is a kind of objective summary or conclusion. The Greek makes it clear that it signals the sense of accomplishment, an end or purpose achieved; a telos.

(more…)

Print this entry

Maundy Thursday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

There is a remarkable complexity to Maundy Thursday. There is, of course, The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Luke which provides three of the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” is the first word. The second is Christ’s word to the one who was crucified with him who said, “Jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom.” Jesus responded, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.”

Luke’s third word becomes the seventh word in the devotional tradition of the Last Words of the Crucified developed by the indigenous Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in Lima in the late 17th century. From there the practice travelled to Europe ultimately shaping the liturgical and musical devotions for both Protestant and Catholic Churches. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” With Luke, the words of the Crucified begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father in the Spirit of their eternal love.

There are as well other devotional and symbolic events on this day such as the washing of the feet, the giving of the Royal Maundy, the King’s coin, to the poor, the stripping of the Altar, and the watching at the Altar of Repose with Christ in Gethsemane. But most crucially, perhaps, Maundy Thursday recalls the Institution of the Holy Eucharist on the night, this very night, in which Christ is betrayed.

All these events highlight two themes: service and sacrifice in humility and love. Dramatic and moving, the liturgies of Maundy Thursday draw us into the vast and spacious mysteries of sin and love, as George Herbert suggested. They reveal to us our hearts of sin and they pierce our souls in sorrow and in love. They convict our consciences and move us to acts of compassion and service to others. All as grounded in the Passion and in the forms of our participation in the Passion of Christ. The three last words in Luke’s Passion contribute to our growing into the mystery of Christ.

(more…)

Print this entry

Holy Wednesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week recalls and completes the Epistle reading for Passion Sunday from Hebrews 9. It centers our attention on Christ’s Passion as the “forgiveness of sins” through “the shedding of his blood” in the sacrifice of himself.. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,” and “now, once for all, at the end of time, he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” It offers a way of understanding theologically just what it means to say that “Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant, [and] that by means of death” so that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” This theological understanding is complemented by the Passion according to St. Luke, read today and tomorrow.

Luke, in Dante’s famous phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This, wonderfully illustrated in The Beginning of the Passion According to St. Luke. Luke, helps us to feel something of the meaning of Christ’s Passion psychologically, emotionally, and personally, and what it means for us. In other words, Luke gives us a sense of the inner struggles, turmoil and dynamic of the Passion in Christ himself in the movement towards the Cross.

Luke shows what is at work in the forces of evil that seek to kill Jesus especially with respect to the intentions of the chief priests and scribes and the role of Judas in Christ’s betrayal. Satan, Luke tells us, “entered into Judas” who conspires with the chief priests and captains to betray Jesus unto them. Satan is the tempter, the devil, who as a created being is good but exists in denial of his own being. He is, as Augustine nicely puts it, “an evil good”. He shows us the radical nature of evil as the contradiction and negation of the good upon which it utterly depends, the evil to which we concede so easily.

(more…)

Print this entry