Christ Church

“Thou art the man”

It is an ugly scene. The continuation of the Passion according to Mark sets before us the scene of Jesus being hauled before Pilate who then hands Jesus over to be crucified. He has acquiesced to the mob, to the madness of crowds. “Why what evil hath he done?”, he even asks while giving in to their will. “They hated me without a cause,” as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 35.19; 69.4) which John in turn references (Jn. 15.25).

The continuation of the Passion in Mark portrays us as the persecutors of Christ in its different modalities: the religious leaders of the Jews, the Roman authorities, like Pilate, the callous violence and mockery of the soldiers. Even in leading him out to be crucified, they have to “compel one Simon a Cyrenian” “to bear his cross.” There is no good to be found in ourselves. “Thou art the man.” We confront the forms of human evil in the figure of the crucified.

He is crucified with two thieves. “They that passed by railed on him” mocking and insulting him. Words of evil intent. Such is the viciousness of the madness of crowds; we are united only in our evil. We are meant to see ourselves in that crowd. But how can anything good come out of this?

Only by contemplating the one and only word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew alone provide. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It captures our attention. What is he saying? To whom is he calling? Elijah? We don’t even get that right. It is a prayer from the Psalms, Psalm 22, a prayer to God out of the depths of human sin and misery. It is Israel’s prayer out of the experiences of suffering and hardship, a prayer which gathers into itself the whole range of human sin and suffering in the feeling of abandonment, of desolation and aloneness. Yet as a prayer it looks to God; not as Father, a name which takes on a specific meaning of identity in the Christian faith, but simply as God. In this word, we confront ourselves in the radical meaning of sin which is nothing less than our alienation from God. “Thou art the man.” This is us in our sins.

But in confronting ourselves in our sinfulness made visible in the crucified Christ, we confront the truth of God which our sins attempt in vain to deny. Christ dies on the cross, crying out with a loud voice, and giving up the spirit, Mark tells us. Yet that is the moment when the Centurion seeing all of this says “Truly this man was the Son of God.” This is the good of the Passion in all of its violence and evil. To see the goodness of God in Christ precisely through the madness of crowds.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2022

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“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s words to David seek to convict his conscience about his sins. So, too, the accounts of the Passion present a compelling picture of our humanity in all of its sin and disarray, in all of the confusions of our incomplete loves. At the center is Jesus in his encounter with us. The Passion according to St. Mark begins with the encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman “in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, and as he sat at meat,” as Mark tellingly notes. It begins with Jesus in the company of the afflicted; in short, with us in our afflictions. As Isaiah puts it in the lesson, “in all their affliction he was afflicted.”

The unnamed woman – identified by John as Mary of Bethany and later in the commentary tradition as Mary Magdalene – breaks open an “alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and pours its contents on his head. She anoints him. Why? Is she acknowledging him as the Messiah, the anointed one of God? Her action excites indignation, anger and division as if she has done something wrong. Jesus responds “let her alone; why trouble ye her? She hath wrought a good work on me: for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good. But me ye have not always. She hath done what she could; she is come to aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He names his death, his embrace of the realities of human sin. Yet he acknowledges the good in her action even as he convicts our consciences about our neglect of the sufferings of one another. Her act belongs to one of the acts of corporal mercy with respect to the burying of the dead. Her act, too, is an act of sacrifice, an act of love towards Jesus.

“The poor you have with you always” does not mean our neglect of them. Jesus is challenging us about whether we make any effort to do good towards those in need. There is no illusion that we can solve all the problems of inequality and poverty and suffering in our world but there is no mistaking the idea of an obligation to do whatever we can. This goes to the logic of Christ as “the mediator of the new covenant” and so to the meaning of his passion as the ultimate reconciliation and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity. It means encountering ourselves in our dealings with one another. No sooner does Jesus say that what “she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her,” then Judas Iscariot goes to the chief priests to betray him unto them.

What unfolds is Mark’s account of the supper in the Upper Room where Jesus says to his disciples that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me.” It excites a questioning on the part of each. “Is it I? Is it I?” It is the point of the accounts of the Passion to excite in us self-examination about the ways in which we have betrayed the truth and goodness of God in one way or another. Jesus takes bread and takes the cup; he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover. It signals the sacramental ways in which we participate in his Passion. “This is my body.” “This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many.”

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“Truly this was the Son of God”

“The dogma is the drama,” the novelist and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wisely noted. Nowhere is that idea more concentrated than in the liturgy of Palm Sunday. It begins the one long liturgy of Holy Week which culminates in Easter. It is the drama of salvation but only if we learn what the liturgy of Palm Sunday and Holy Week teaches us in and through its intensity.

We are not the victims in this story apart from the being the victims of ourselves in our judgements and vilification of others. In a strange way, there is a kind of reversal of the “scapegoat mechanism”. For the scapegoat of all our discontents, our hatred, and our fear of others is transformed, first, by Isaiah in the Servant Songs, and, then, in the Gospels  into the Lamb of God. “Behold, the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospels read at the end of the Trinity Season and in Advent, and so in the intensity of the Passion in the Good Friday sentences (BCP, p.173). But in him we confront ourselves not as victims but as persecutors. Palm Sunday and Holy Week confront us with ourselves in the disarray, the chaos and the evil of human sin which wreaks such havoc in our world and day.

As the sociologist, philosopher and literary critic, René Girard, observes, major social and political crises, such as the Black Death in the 14th century (not unlike the Covid-19 pandemic), result in the dissolution of all cultural distinctions, the things which belong to our individuality within a community of order. The resulting confusion and fear leads to fixing blame for this confusion and break-down of order and life; hence, the scapegoat figure, someone or some group who stands out as different in some way or another becomes the target of our discontent, our fear, and our hatred. Thus in mythology and history, scapegoat stories are really persecution narratives.

This is inverted in the biblical understanding, especially in the Gospels. We confront ourselves as the persecutors in a radical internalizing of sin. The spectacle of Holy Week which begins with the drama of Palm Sunday is the spectacle of our humanity in all of the forms of its disarray, on the one hand, and the figure of Christ, on the other hand, in whose presence we are revealed to ourselves. Paradoxically, in the sense of a profound yet dialectical truth, that is the mercy, the good, if you will, of the Passion.

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