Christ Church

What mean ye by this service?

Holy Week is about our participation in the Passion of Christ. In the spectacles of human evil, particularly of envy and the betrayals of justice, we learn about the goodness of God and about redemptive suffering. That counters our easy default to a kind of gnosticism, to acquiescing in a dualist view of reality. The deeper lesson of the Passion has to do with God making something good out of our evil, an evil which is always predicated upon the assumption of the goodness of existence and of human will and reason.

The problem lies with the way in which our will and our reason, our knowing, are compromised, twisted, and perverted. We think we see clearly when we don’t see at all. We think we know what it is that is right to do without a glimmer of an awareness of the limits of our knowing and without any sense of the destructive power of our will. In a way, the Passion of Christ intends to confront us with these realities that belong to the human condition in its fallenness. Our loves are in disarray. To learn this is our good.

Thus we need to learn about the true vocation of our humanity wonderfully signaled in the Morning Prayer lesson from Isaiah, the first of the so-called suffering servant songs and one in which the vocation of Israel and thus our human vocation is concentrated in a single figure. For Christians, this is Christ, the one in whom and whom alone that vocation can be realised. The corollary of that claim is that only in Christ can we embrace the vocation to be “a covenant to the peoples,” “a light to lighten the nations,” “to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon” and “the darkness” of ignorance and folly; in short, “to establish justice.” As the second lesson from the 15th chapter of John shows us that is only possible through our incorporation into the life of Christ. “I am the vine; ye are the branches” … “abide in me” … “abide in my love,” Jesus tells us.  Powerful words which signal something positive.

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What mean ye by this Service?

“An alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” broken opened and the tears of Peter flowing forth frame The Beginning of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark: the one an anointing signifying Christ’s burial in an act of love-in-forgiveness by the unnamed woman; the other, tears of sorrow and contrition after having recalled the words of Christ and his betrayal of himself and Christ. Powerful moments that illumine the intensity of the Passion and our part in it.

The Passion is further illumined by the readings from Hosea and John at Mattins and Vespers, lessons which are all about the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Old Testament while John’s Gospel underlies the whole of Holy Week in the Offices. It complements and informs and the other accounts of the Passion.

Hosea’s powerful words are about the possibilities of a return to the God from whom we have turned away. “Take with you words and return to the Lord your God.” Return how? By heartfelt repentance in the acknowledgement of our follies and sins. This morning’s lesson describes well the problem of worshipping the works of our hands rather than God, the author of our very being and of the whole of creation. The people of Israel keep on sinning by making images before which they sacrifice and worship. “Men kiss calves,” is Hosea derisive and dismissive comment. He is harkening back to the Exodus when the people of Israel made molten calves, imagining that the creatures who pulled their wagons were their deliverers rather than the God who revealed himself to Moses and gave the Law. We are so easily drawn to what is immediate and present. A molten calf is just a dead cow,  not even good for the barbecue.

Hosea reminds us that God is God and that Israel has known no other God. “It was I who fed you in the wilderness,” God says, before observing in a very telling phrase that “when I fed them, they were satisfied; they were satisfied, and their heart was proud; therefore they forgot me.” How then will we remember? How will we return to God? God says that he will become like a lion, like a leopard, like a mother bear, not to defend Israel, but to destroy Israel! We have to be unmade in order to be made anew. Such strong language awakens us to the wonder and truth that there can be no help for us except from God. It is from Hosea that Paul gets the wonderful phrase “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” seeing in the phrase a rhetorical question that points to God as the one and only source of healing and grace, to the God who heals and loves.“I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely.” The idols are the follies of our own making. “O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you.” As Hosea remarks,“those who are wise understand these things.”

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“What mean ye by this service?”

The lessons at Morning Prayer for Palm Sunday provide the larger context for the readings at the Holy Communion. The first lesson is Exodus 11 which is the story of the event of the Passover itself after which we have in the next chapter the institution of that remembrance which is our Holy Week text or mantra, “What mean ye by this service?” The second lesson is the chapter which immediately precedes the Passion account of St. Matthew, the first of the four accounts of the Passion read in their entirety in Holy Week. We immerse ourselves in the Passion in all of its intensity.

What about this evening’s readings? The lesson from Isaiah is the last of the four so-called servant songs and is the most intense in its expression about the idea of substitutionary suffering. The suffering of Israel for the sake of others is further intensified in the Christian understanding by the sufferings of Christ. Christ is “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted by grief.” “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows … he was wounded for our transgressions … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Is. 53. 3-7), … “he makes himself an offering for sin” (Is. 53.10). The imagery concentrates the theme of the Passion as being the sufferings of Christ for us and in the face of our wickedness and indifference.

This evening’s second lesson provides St. Luke’s account of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, complementing the Palm Gospel at Mass from Matthew. He adds as a kind of postscript to the cleansing of the temple the theme of animosity towards Christ by “the chief priests and scribes and the prominent men of the people” who “sought to destroy him.” Yet, as Luke marvellously puts it, “they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words.”

Holy Week is about our hanging upon the words of Christ, learning a great good even in and through the spectacles of sin and violence, in and through the miscarriages of justice and the betrayals of trust and goodness. We are in these events at one with “the chief priests and scribes and prominent men of the people” whose self-interest and pride and presumption are indeed challenged and threatened by the words and presence of Christ and at one, too, with “all the people” that “hung upon his words.” The latter suggests a spirit of longing and learning that is the counter to all our illusions of power and control. In hanging upon his words in the pageant of Holy Week, we journey with Christ in his passover for us. The meaning of the services of Holy Week is our participation in the sacrifice of Christ. Such is our freedom and our good.

“What mean ye by this service?”

Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, EP, 2019

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“What mean ye by this service?”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week of the intensity of Christ’s Passion. In it we confront all of the contradictions in our souls and in our lives. We confront our betrayals of the good, our betrayals of God. This awakens us to the radical nature of that goodness. We are given to see ourselves and to find ourselves in the events that belong to this holy week. It is the week of the Passion of Christ, the week of the Passover which undergoes a radical change of meaning through the sacrifice of Christ. In the Christian understanding, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”.

The connection to the Passover story is undeniable. The question that belongs to the Jewish celebration of the Passover becomes our question. “What mean ye by this service?” (Ex. 12.26). The question reverberates throughout the whole of Holy Week.

Holy Week is one continuous liturgy, one continuous service. It is marked by different degrees of intensity and expression but in essence we enter into the Passion of Christ as modelled upon the ancient Passover celebration that defines Israel. It is about God’s deliverance and thus signals the redemption of our humanity. It is about the liberation of the Hebrews from the yoke and tyranny of Pharaoh. How? By God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews, their lintels daubed with the blood of a lamb, the passover lamb, and thus sparing them the plague of the first-born. A sign that signifies and effects what it signifies, we might say. The rituals are the sacramental ways in which God’s defining acts of deliverance are recalled and re-lived, re-presented for the Jewish people. They, in turn, shape the central act of Christian worship in recollecting the words and actions of Christ in the week of his Passion and the way in which those words and deeds are remembered and reenacted by us. We enter into the Passion of Christ sacramentally. Only so can we feel the thought, feel the Passion which we are required to contemplate and think always but throughout Holy Week especially.

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