Christ Church

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s fiat, her “be it unto me according to thy word,” has provided the mantra for our Holy Week meditations on the Passion of Christ. Now all is done. All is at peace. Christ lies in the tomb, a borrowed tomb at that. It is finished. Holy Saturday recalls the sabbath rest of God in the Genesis accounts of creation. All we can do, it seems, is rest ourselves in the peace of this moment to ponder the mystery of human redemption.

The trauma and the horror of Good Friday is past and there is that sense of psychological release in us, perhaps, that gives way to a contemplative possibility in us to think about what Christ’s Passion and Death mean. Holy Saturday provides us with that possibility now become our necessity, the necessity of trying to make sense of it all. The word that we wait upon is the word of Christ in the tomb, the word in death. Holy Saturday emphasizes the reality of the death of Christ at the same time as it points to the power of the divine word. The word that defines our contemplation is perhaps, Peter’s word, drawing on Zechariah’s imagery, that “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”

The Epistle from 1st Peter reflects on Christ’s death in terms of the Noahic Covenant which is extended to become a simile for Christian baptism. Wonderful but what is going on here in this extended Scriptural reflection? What is the underlying insight? It is simply this. Holy Saturday reminds us of the radical meaning of human redemption accomplished by Christ’s death on the Cross. It is universal; it is for all. God seeks the reconciliation of the whole of our sinful humanity. This provides a necessary counter and check on our all-too-human judgements about one another as to who is saved and who is not. Not for us to know anything more than the Comfortable Word, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

“Look to Jesus,” Calvin tells us, ”he is worth to me more than a thousand testimonies.” He is our predestination. Human redemption is about the divine love of God’s own truth and righteousness that cannot be contained or constrained to the limits of finite reasoning, to the realm of the temporal, the world of past, present, and future. No. It is all about how time is gathered into eternity and itself is nothing more than the moving image of eternity, to use a famous Platonic image taken up by the metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

But which word? There are seven after all, the seven last words of Christ from the cross, words which define us in relation to God in Christ.

On Good Friday we contemplate Christ crucified. Through the Passion accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we have pondered something of the mystery of the crucifixion that brings us to this moment itself as seen through the eyes of John. All four Gospels contribute to our remembering the Passion.

Such remembering is absolutely central to Christian Faith and Christian life. Why? Because comfort, our consolation and blessedness, is entirely found in the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice and suffering for us. Good Friday means that it is good for us to behold the one whom we have pierced, to draw upon the passage from Zechariah that John himself uses. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” For “they” read “we. “

To what benefit? What good is there for us in looking upon the crucified? To behold ourselves in our sins and wickedness is a great and necessary good. Our sins are the immediate cause of his Passion. But there is something more. The good for us is to behold the love of God in Christ crucified. No symbol, no sign is more powerful, more effective really than this at signifying the divine love for our humanity precisely in the horrifying spectacle of our humanity’s attempt to annihilate God from the horizon of our lives. The deep meaning of Good Friday is that we kill God. God is dead, dead in the crucified Christ, the one who is God and man. He has “borrowed a body that he might borrow a death” (Athanasius); our body, our death. But he is God made man. In Christ, God dies for us.

There can be no greater good, no greater paradox than the overcoming of our deaths by the death of Christ. What does it mean? It is the death of death. On Good Friday we behold death as the consequence and meaning of human sin and wickedness. We behold what our rage and spite accomplishes – death. We see exactly what happens when we are left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We see our nothingness. This and this alone is the great good of Good Friday because only so can we see the greater goodness of God.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

And so it begins. The Triduum Sacrum are the three great holy days of the Passion in which we seek to immerse ourselves or be immersed in the Passion of Christ; in short, to be defined by the word of God. That has meant confronting all of our words of disarray, our words of sin and evil, in the words of Christ, especially the words of Christ crucified. Luke gives us three of those words: Christ’s first word from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do;” Christ’s response to the penitent thief that “today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” and, what is taken as the last word from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” With Luke we have the first and last word of the crucified, a beginning and an ending with a prayer to the Father. Such is the wonderful intimacy of Luke’s Gospel. He is, as Dante understood so well, scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.

Maundy Thursday is a day rich in ceremonial and symbolism. We recall tonight not just The Passion According to St. Luke but the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples and with all of its gentle intensity. “He carried himself in his own hands,” Augustine wonderfully suggests. Christ puts himself into our hands and we are left to our own devices. We betray him and crucify him. But he carries himself in his own hands and provides another way for us to be with him and for him to be with us. He provides the way in which his sacrifice on Calvary will both be remembered and participated in through the sacraments.

Baptism and the Eucharist are the two dominical sacraments. Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flow the sacraments of the Church, as the Fathers often said; water and blood, baptism and communion, respectively. It requires a holy remembering on our part, a sacramentum memoriae that connects the sacrament with its meaning. It is both sign and thing signified. “This is my body … This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” “Go forth and baptise.” These are not maybe’s but must be’s. It is what is required of the Church.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Shadows are a feature of Luke’s account of the Passion and complement the ancient service of Tenebrae on the Wednesday of Holy Week. It is a largely the psalm offices of the Triduum Sacrum sung in anticipation of the three great Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Through the psalms in particular there is a kind of shadowing forth of the events of the Passion and their meaning.

The Psalms are the Prayer Book and Hymn Book of the Church. How to read them? How to pray them? Sometimes as the words of Christ to us; sometimes as our words to God; sometimes as our words of violence and vengeance. Yet the psalms help us to enter more fully into the Passion of Christ. They are super-charged with a feeling intensity and a deep insight into both human character and God. Their intensity is complemented by The Beginning of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, and especially, it seems to me, the scene of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.

Luke looks at things in a more inward way. He provides us with an imaginative feel for what is going on inside the heart of Jesus. With Luke, more than any of the Evangelists, we feel the Passion of Christ. “Being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It is a most compelling and powerful image that suggests something of the mind of the Evangelist, the mind of Luke, who is so powerfully moved by the scene itself. He paints a picture of the agony of Christ.

It is Luke, too, who gives us an even more intense understanding of the Peter’s betrayal of Christ. “The cock crew,” Luke tells us in an economy of expression. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” It is an exquisite moment. What is the look? A look of contempt, of judgement, of despair? No. I think it is the look of loving compassion. “For this is a true saying, and worthy of all to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Peter, remembering the word of the Lord and so confronting his threefold betrayal, himself as a sinner, “went out and wept bitterly.” Just so do we learn how to be defined by the word of God. Sometimes it is through our tears. Discovering something of the deep love of Christ in the shadows of our lives. We see “in a glass darkly” but at least we see. Here is a look that springs from the heart of Christ in his suffering for us.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week, 2018

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Somehow out of the spectacle of violence and cruelty a good and great word emerges. Not from within Israel but from the centurion present at the awful events of the crucifixion itself. Christ, in Isaiah’s words “neither turned away back” but “gave [his] back to the smiters”. He endures the shame and the spitting, the cruel actions that belong in one way or another to all of us. He does so in Isaiah’s vision out of trust “for the Lord God who will help [him].” Not us, it seems.

At this point in The Passion According to St. Mark, we can only behold what human sin and wickedness accomplishes, on the one hand, and what comes out of that spectacle, on the other hand. We go through the gruesome charade of his trial before Pilate and Pilate’s betrayal of his own truth and conscience, being “willing to content the people,” the mob, that is to say, and so releasing the murderer Barabbas and delivering Jesus into our hands of vicious violence. We witness the mocking and the scourging of Christ at the hands of the Roman soldiers in the Praetorium. Thus Jews and Romans have their hand in this outrage but only to make us realize our place with them.

There is no one to help. No one to stop the horror. Even the cross bearer, Simon a Cyrenian, is compelled to carry his cross. And even as crucified, we cannot let him alone, but are in the crowd of the passers-by who mock and deride him along with the chief priests. It is an ugly, ugly scene which reveals the ugliness of ourselves both in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. And that is the point.

Out of the intensity of this scene comes one word from Christ, the great and troubling yet profound word, the cry of dereliction. At once quoting the very first verse of Psalm 22, it is a prayer. Not to the Father, but to God. It is as if the horizons of our lives have narrowed down and there is an eclipse of any personal relationship. In the agony of the crucifixion, he cries out “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the only word from the Cross that is a question. Yet questions belong to our acknowledgement of truth. His word is a prayer to God, a prayer that as a question reveals the utter intensity of the Passion and its truth. This is not play-acting. It is suffering in its truest and deepest form: the sense of utter abandonment and loneliness.

Christ voices what belongs to all of the lonely sufferings of our world and day. But he voices it to God and that makes all the difference. The Centurion senses and knows this, seeing somehow a great good that emerges out of such a great horror. His word becomes our word; “Truly this man was the Son of God.” He gets it. Will we?

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2018

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