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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

We can only watch and wait. That is the nature of our looking upon him whom they pierced. It is actually in some real sense the meaning of our Christian lives. We watch and wait upon God. We “look upon him whom we have pierced,” looking for the redemption of our souls and our world, looking for what is accomplished in the events of the Passion.

What we look for we also celebrate. All of our looking upon Christ crucified this Holy Week is only possible through the fruit of his passion in the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and “behold, it is I, handle and see, a spirit hath not flesh and blood as ye see that I have.” Christ is risen! Alleluia, Alleluia! The Resurrection makes possible the Passion even as the Passion helps us to understand the true joy of Easter. No Passion, no Resurrection but paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion!

The events of Holy Week concentrate our attention on Christ crucified but only through the optic of the Resurrection which gives those events meaning and significance. Tonight we have watched and waited for the great and grand act of Resurrection. And what is that except God making something new and wonderful out of the nothingness of our sins and folly?

At Easter and throughout Eastertide we shall look on him whom we have pierced and contemplate in his wounds the very nature of divine love, the love which restores and redeems, the love that makes us lovely. Without that we are nothing. The Resurrection is about the something more of God’s love seen on the Cross but is more than the Cross. That is the point. Easter is about a new and greater creation, about redemption, about a reality that is more than the mundane experiences of our everyday lives. We live for God and with God because of his Passion and Resurrection.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What is there to see on Holy Saturday? Christ is dead and buried. Nothing to see here, nothing to look upon except the closed tomb. We gather in the presence of the absence of Christ crucified.

But there is another sense to our looking upon him whom we have pierced. It is about our reflection upon the meaning of his crucifixion. The lessons for this day remind us about two things; the bodily reality of Christ’s death and burial, and the creedal concept of the descent into Hell. Both speak to the Passion as the radical meaning of divine love. Both speak to the meaning of redemption. God wills to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation.

Holy Saturday would have us look upon things which cannot be seen but only understood. If there is any image at all, it is one which belongs to Eastern Orthodoxy in an icon for this day, the icon which depicts Christ raising Adam and Eve from the grave, capturing the idea offered to us in Zechariah and the Epistles of Peter about Christ preaching to the souls in prison. God’s love seeks to redeem and restore the whole of our sinful humanity.

I love the idea of Christ’s descent into hell and to his preaching to the souls imprisoned there. Why? Because it says so much about the nature of our humanity, that we are rational souls with bodies and that both matter and they matter in terms of our relation to God.

Holy Saturday celebrates the peace between God and man, between God and his creation. It is paradise regained and yet this is but an interlude before the greater business of our looking upon Christ crucified and contemplating the mystery of human redemption. The greater business is the fruit of Christ’s passion in the radical new life which flows out of his reconciling love. For that we can only await in the peaceful quiet of this day, keeping vigil at the tomb in solidarity with Christ and his death for us, and then, this evening waiting and looking in expectancy for what God and God alone makes out of the realities of human sin and death.

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2015

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

What else is there for us to do but to look on him whom we have pierced? It is simply the business of this day, the day which is called profoundly Good Friday. Somehow it is all our good to contemplate Christ crucified.

The intensity of the Passion reaches its crescendo in the services of Good Friday in such things as the meditations upon The Seven Last Words of the Cross and in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The spectacle of the Christ crucified is fully before us and if Holy Week means anything at all it is about finding our place in the events of the Passion, finding our humanity in all of its disarray in the crowd at Calvary. That is itself something profoundly spiritual. To see something about ourselves through the witness of the Scriptures in the figures who are part of the terrible pageant of the Passion. How can we do that?

It requires the capacity to be convicted about sin. Not a happy topic, perhaps, and certainly one which we do everything to ignore, mostly by ignoring Church where the Scriptures are proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. Our communities are filled with those who pass by with utter indifference, unaware of what happens here. No doubt, that is partly our fault in not making it clearer as to what the Church is really all about. It isn’t community service and communal socializing except in so far as such things make visible the love of God and our communion with Him which is the ground and basis of all our labours and life with one another.

The good news of Good Friday is that we look upon ourselves and are convicted of sin. Why is that good news? Because you can only do that if you know love. Only the love of God makes it possible to know the human situation. And to talk about love is equally meaningless without acknowledging sin. In a way, we really only know love through sin.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

Maundy Thursday is a day of richness, complexity and confusion. The Continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke is complemented by the events of the Last Supper in the Upper Room with the institution of the Holy Eucharist and by the images of service captured in Christ’s washing the feet of his disciples. Something of the meaning of the Passion is already signified in the powerful scene when Jesus gathers with his disciples in the Upper Room. In Luke’s account as we heard yesterday, Christ celebrates the Passover with his disciples. The symbolism becomes clear; He is himself the sacrifice as Paul will proclaim. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5.6).

Everything about the Passion comes down to the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday without which there can be no Easter. It begins with Christ in the Upper Room with the disciples and in this amazing moment when he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration, a celebration of Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian domination, a remembrance that what defines Israel as the people of God is God’s liberating action. As Paul tells us, having learned this from the other disciples in the early Christian Community because he was not there himself nor were we at the original event, Jesus says “take eat, this is my body” and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood”. These are astounding claims. We are to eat and drink “in remembrance of me,” he says. Given in anticipation of his Passion – body broken and blood outpoured – it becomes the ordained means of our participation in his Passion and in its redemptive truth and power. What is transacted in the Upper Room already signals what is transacted upon the Cross and provides for us the means of our participation in its deeper meaning. What is that?

Simply our participation in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The true meaning of Communion is Eucharist or thanksgiving. We are gathered into the Son’s love for the Father which is the true meaning of his death on the Cross. That event is ultimately about the prayer of the Son to the Father having taken into himself all that belongs to the truth and untruth of our humanity. Our sins are our untruth; the capacity for love, though not the actuality of love because of sin’s disarray, is the truth of our humanity. We are made for love and so love restores us to love and to the fellowship of love.

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“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

The Passion According to St. Luke is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week even as we begin to enter into the intensity of the Passion with Tenebrae and the liturgy of Maundy Thursday. His account of the Passion is intensified and in turn intensifies our understanding of the Scriptures read in the Offices. Today, the readings from Numbers 21.4-9 and from Leviticus 16.2-14 together with the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel reflect powerfully upon our holy week text from Zechariah, “they shall look on him whom they pierced.”

The Leviticus lesson at Evening Prayer details the theme of atonement and the idea of the scapegoat, the one upon whom the burden of sins is placed and who is sent into the wilderness, and the goat, too which is sacrificed as “a sin offering for the people” and whose blood is brought into the mercy seat of the holy place. Powerful, primitive and certainly disturbing images but in The Epistle from Hebrews the theme of atonement is further developed. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” but rather than repeated sacrifices, Christ is said not to have “entered into holy places made with hands … but into heaven itself” and signifies the fulfillment of the logic of atonement in himself. “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” Once again the theme of our looking upon Christ is presented to us.

It is a point of emphasis in Hebrews. “Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our Faith,” referencing at once his passion, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” but also suggesting our looking upon him in his second coming at the end of time. In the Passion we look upon him in relation to our sins as well as his love; only so can there be the looking for him “the second time apart from sin unto salvation.” The moments of looking are connected; in some sense they are a notional difference, a difference in the nature of our looking. In terms of Zechariah’s text we “look upon him whom [we] have pierced” to be convicted of sin and convinced about love. This kind of double looking is also signaled in the reading from Numbers in a powerful image which John will apply to Christ.

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