Good Friday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

The first word from the Cross has provided the scriptural matrix through which we have pondered the Passion of Christ in Holy Week in all of its remarkable intensity. It brings us literally to the crux of the matter, to the Cross and Christ’s Passion and Death in all of its unvarnished power and truth. Once again, we attend to the lessons at the Offices which contribute to our understanding of the mystery of human redemption.

On Good Friday, the Old Testament readings at Matins and Vespers are from Genesis with the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, the promised son, and the third of the four Servant Songs from Isaiah. These readings in turn are complemented and deepened by the continuation of the readings from John’s Gospel whose Passion account is the main focus on Good Friday along with the rich theological tour de force of Hebrews about the meaning and extent of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. But our Holy Week text concentrates our thinking on the struggle to understand something of “the mystery of the man of sin,” as Hooker puts it, without which we cannot begin to comprehend the mystery of redemption and salvation. Ultimately it concerns nothing less than the deepening sense of being known and embraced in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity individually and collectively in Christ.

That we know not what we do convicts us of the limitations of our finite human knowing, on the one hand, and of human pretension and folly in our fallenness, on the other hand. But even more, it signals the greater truth upon which our knowing and doing properly and truly depends; the divine knowing which is the intellectual principle without which we are nothing. The wonder and mystery of Good Friday is that it concentrates the underlying theme of God’s will and reason as bringing good out of our evil. The paradox for us is that we can only begin to grasp that through the contemplation of ourselves in our sinfulness – that is at least one part of the great good of this day called Good Friday. To do so, however, is to begin to contemplate the surpassing power of God’s truth and goodness, to see in the spectacle of Christ crucified, as Donne puts it, “this beauteous form” which alone can assure or comfort our pitiable souls, our souls in need of pity. That would mean our awareness of the need for the divine mercy and pity that Good Friday so powerfully presents. We confront ourselves in Christ’s Passion only to discover the love of God about which we have such an incomplete sense of its all-encompassing power.

(more…)

Print this entry

Maundy Thursday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum and signals the beginning of the intensity of the Passion in all its fullness. The readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah at Matins and Vespers today provide a graphic complement to the continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke and anticipate the Solemn Reproaches on Good Friday.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow … [for] the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.” Lamentations begins with the sense of desolation and loneliness that our sins occasion. “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;” we hear in the evening lesson, “he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” And yet in the desolations of Holy Week, what is remembered and called to mind is that “the steadfast love of the Lord never faileth, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”

With Luke’s Passion, we have three of the seven last words from the Cross and in the late 17th century ordering of the seven last words by the native Peruvian priest Fr. Alonso Messio de Bedoya, Luke provides the first and last word, bracketing in a way our reflections upon the cross by gathering them into the motion of the Son’s twofold prayer to the Father: The first word is “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” and the last word is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

In one way, Maundy Thursday is a great and complex melange of liturgies and rites, ranging from the King’s touch and the washing of the disciples’ feet to the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the stripping of the Altar, and the Agony of Gethsemane, among others. Yet, in another way, everything focuses on the Last Supper. Redemption and salvation are concentrated for us in the Eucharist as the place where Christ gives himself to us sacramentally on the very night in which he was betrayed.

Passion and Eucharist are simply inseparable. “Jesus Christ take[s] our nature upon him, and suffer[s] death upon the Cross for our redemption,” as the Communion Prayer states. We are gathered into the embrace of the Trinity as the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the second lesson at Matins from John makes clear even as the second lesson this evening points us as well to the examples of sacrifice and service that belong to the drama and the wonder of human redemption.

(more…)

Print this entry

Wednesday in Holy Week 2025:

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

The shadows of the Cross stretch forwards and backwards. The theme of forgiveness in the face of the uncertainties and limitations of our knowing is signalled in the remarkable passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that we read in Holy Week along with the intensity of the readings from John’s Gospel in the Offices. These readings, I am trying to suggest, help to better our understanding of the Passion of Christ. The shadows of the Cross at once adumbrate or shadow forth the events of the Passion and illuminate something of its radical meaning. One of the traditional services for Holy Wednesday is Tenebrae, a Latin word which means shadows or darkness. Tenebrae is a ‘psalm office’ that anticipates the Sacrum Triduum, the three Holy Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday that bring us to the Vigil and Celebration of Easter.

On this day we have two intriguing Old Testament lessons, one from Numbers at Matins, and one from Leviticus at Vespers. Those are two rather forbidding books and yet the passages read this day speak directly to the meaning of the Passion. Jesus, very early in John’s Gospel, tells Nicodemus about the heavenly things of spiritual life and new birth in terms of his ascending and descending from heaven. “No one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” He goes on to explain this: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

This is a commentary on a scene from the Exodus recorded in Numbers about the murmuring of the people of Israel against Moses and God. As a consequence, they are visited by fiery serpents “so that many people of Israel died.” Moses intercedes to the Lord that he “take away the serpents from us.” The Lord directs him to “make a fiery serpent” out of bronze and to set it on a pole, “and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”

John has this passage in mind and it complements the whole pageant of the seven last words of the crucified encapsulated in the first word. Think about it. The people of Israel behold the image of their own sin made visible to them and thus are healed. We behold Jesus crucified in all of the events of the Passion and in so doing behold our sins made visible in the one who overthrows our sins and wickedness. John Donne notes that there is a great difference between the creeping serpent, alluding to the story of the Fall of the serpent in the garden, and the crucified serpent, meaning Christ, “the serpent of salvation,” the serpent raised up as in Numbers. It is really all about the direction of our thinking. The creeping serpent looks downward to the dust but we are meant to look upward at once to the bronze serpent on a pole and even more to Christ crucified on the Cross. “They [we] shall look on him whom we have pierced,” as we will hear at the very end of the Passion According to St. John on Good Friday. But already that idea is anticipated; indeed, adumbrated or shadowed forth.

(more…)

Print this entry

Tuesday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Two of the four so-called Servant Songs from Isaiah are read on this day, the one as the first lesson at Morning Prayer and the other as the lesson at Mass. The First Servant Song emphasizes the idea of covenant, the covenant between God and us. Israel is the suffering servant who is given “as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” and in whom is enlightenment and freedom from the darkness of the various prisons of our lives. As covenant, it signals the divine commitment and will for our good.

The lesson at Mass is the Third Servant Song and points to the idea of bearing with suffering and shame that is inflicted upon him, something which the Fourth Servant Song read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday highlighted ever so graphically in the image of the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,” who “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” and, even more, whom we see “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted, wounded for our transgressions”. All these passages help to illuminate our understanding of the Passion of Christ.

But the Continuation of Mark’s Passion along with the First Lesson at Evening Prayer from Wisdom points us to the ugliest and the most vicious of the deadly sins, envy. Pilate “knew that the chief priests had delivered [Jesus] for envy.” Wisdom, too, reflects brilliantly on the destructive evil of envy. It is a hatred of the good, a hatred of what we know to be the good in another but refuse to acknowledge. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man for he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions.” But as Wisdom so clearly indicates “they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them.” We contradict the truth of our own being as created for “incorruption and made in the image of God’s own eternity.” How? “Through the devil’s envy death hath entered the world.” It is at once a resentment at what we know in some sense as being the good and the true and our rejection or refusal of exactly what we know. In short, we both know and do not know what we do.

This emphasis in the readings on envy is instructive and helps us to grasp Paul’s point that “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do,” an image of the human condition in our fallenness. Envy is its most vicious and destructive form, an active denial of a good which is glimpsed and known in another.

(more…)

Print this entry

Monday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Forgiveness as love in repentance is the signal note of Monday in Holy Week. We read the beginning of the Passion According to St. Mark today and its continuation tomorrow. The beginning of his Passion is framed by the outpouring of ointment of spikenard through the breaking open of an alabaster box and the outpouring of the tears of Peter. If that were not enough, this beginning of the Passion is embraced and enfolded into the meaning of the Office Lessons from Hosea 13 & 14 and from John 14.

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its dominant theme, as the Revised Standard Version introduction to Hosea states, is “divine compassion and the love that will not let Israel go”. It proclaims “the gospel of redeeming love.” Hosea enacts the theme of the love that is forgiveness and restoration in spite of our false loves in idolatry and lust, in betrayal and foolishness. The 14th Chapter of John’s Gospel belongs to the farewell discourse of Jesus so-called which is really a discourse on the meaning of his Passion in terms of our abiding in the love of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is at the heart of divine love. The unnamed woman who breaks the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and pours the oil on the head of Jesus acts out of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus makes known to us what is otherwise not known to us about her action. It is an act of forgiveness in love that is directly connected to his Passion and Death. Jesus makes this clear to those who were indignant about the waste of the ointment. “She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He makes known what her action means which otherwise would not be known to us; an instance of our not knowing what she is doing.

Peter, at the end of Mark’s beginning of the Passion, hearing the cock crow for the second time, recalls what Jesus had said to him and thus his own betrayal of himself. It is a poignant awakening to his own not knowing the true meaning of what he has done. “Before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice.” In recalling these words of Jesus, “he thought thereon and wept.” Such are the tears of repentance. The tears of sorrow and contrition flow out of our hearts of betrayal and deceit when our hearts are convicted by the greater love of Christ.

The beginning of Mark’s account of the Passion is profoundly and strangely moving and contains all of the actions of our sin and folly but only to bring things to mind in us that, as the body of Christ, like the alabaster box of ointment is broken open, so too our hearts in repentance might be broken open and our tears flow forth in recognition of the love which suffers and dies for us. “Take with you words and return unto the Lord.” That return is love in forgiveness and forgiveness in love. “I have told you before it takes place,” Jesus says, “so that when it does take place you may believe.” That is to come to know what we did not fully know about what we do in all of the forms of our betrayal of God, our sins turning us away from God who turns to us in the forgiveness which is his love and who turns us to himself in love.

Such is the power of Christ’s first word from the Cross as underlying the motions of the Passion.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 14th, 2025

Print this entry