Christ Church

“All the people hung upon his words”

Christ no longer hangs upon the Cross. It might seem then that we no longer hang upon his words. He is dead and buried. That would seem to be the meaning of this day. And yet there is something more, something quite wonderful and powerful about Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is the day of the greatest peace and the deepest silence. It recalls us to the Jewish Sabbath, to God’s resting on the seventh day after the labours of creation, as if God needed a rest! On Holy Saturday, Christ rests in the tomb. And everything seems at peace since all that stands between God and man has been overcome on the Cross of Good Friday. We have heard Jesus’ last words, “it is finished,” and “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” There is, it seems, only peace and silence. It may remind us of paradise. And yet, there is something else that makes Holy Saturday more than paradise restored and makes it more than the Sabbath rest of God.

The Scripture readings speak of an activity that underlies all of the peace and silence of this day. We gather at the tomb of Jesus. It is the aftermath of the cruel events of the Passion and yet the Scripture readings speak of something else. “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” Peter tells us in a passage that echoes the first lesson at Matins from Zechariah, a passage, too, that signals the prophetic basis for Christ’s Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem as a king “humble and riding on an ass and on a colt the foal of an ass.”  “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” an image of Sheol or Hades, of Hell, Zechariah proclaims.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Nowhere does this text have greater application than on this day we call Good Friday. It is all the business of this day for us to hang not just upon the words of the Passion of Christ but, more specifically, upon the very words of Christ on the Cross. We hang upon the words of the one who hangs there for us and for our salvation. What we see and hear from Christ crucified is altogether for our good, our joy and our salvation.

There can be no Easter joy without the Passion. Christ’s words on the Cross reveal the ultimate triumph of love over sin and death. The seven last words of Christ on the Cross are taken from the four evangelists in their accounts of the Passion. Traditionally the last words of Christ begin and end with an address to the Father: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Everything, we might say, is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Spirit. Christ is the Word and Son of the Father; the uttered being of the Father who has come to do the will of him who sent him, to redeem our wayward humanity by calling us home to God. There is the forgiveness of sins; there is the final movement of the Son’s love towards the Father. We are embraced in this divine love.

The old spiritual has it exactly right: he’s got the whole world in his hands. Such is the nature of redemption. God seeks our good. “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Love trumps all and triumphs over all our sins and follies. This is what makes this day Good Friday.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

This is Luke’s word to us, too. And on this day especially, it is our challenge to hang upon the words of him who hangs upon the Cross for us and for our salvation. Only so can this day be in any sense Good Friday.

“He borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” Athanasius famously observes. He borrowed, too, a tomb, it seems, which becomes the womb of new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.

Luke gives us three of the seven words of Christ from the Cross. In the traditional understanding, the words of the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father from St. Luke: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” and, as we just heard, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, as Luke tells us, “having said this, he breathed his last.” Christ dies. Then, and only then, are we left with the intriguing picture of “all the multitudes” having “assembled to see the sight” and “return[ing] home beating their breasts.” The sight of Christ crucified and the words of the Crucified are meant to affect us, indeed, to convict us and move us to acts of contrition and confession, even “beating our breasts.”

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“All the people hung upon his words”

Holy Week reaches a crescendo of intensity in the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of the Passion: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Out of that disturbing and passionate intensity comes the radical reality of new life, the life of the Resurrection. We cannot think the one without the other. And we cannot think about either without hanging upon the words of Christ, especially in the pageant of his Passion.

The words par excellence, perhaps, that the Christian Church hangs upon, and certainly most frequently, are the words of the institution of Holy Communion, the words of Christ in the Upper Room on the night that he was betrayed, this night, this very night. “Take eat, this is my Body which is given for you”; “Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant.” These words so familiar to us from the service of Holy Communion are at the heart of the Passion and derive from the accounts of the Passion and from Paul. They are the words of Christ to the disciples on the eve of his Passion; words which signify so much of the Passion and its deeper meaning and which signal the form of our continuing and constant participation in his Passion and Resurrection.

The Church has hung on these words because they define the being of the Church as the body of Christ. They express the meaning of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the Christ whose sacrifice is the radical overcoming of sin and death, the Christ who gathers us into his eternal thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, the phrase defines the meaning of this day, Maundy Thursday. Maundy derives from the Latin, mandatum, which means commandment. The Passion is about the love of God for us, the love which commands us to love as he has loved, and provides for us the means of our living in his love. Only so can his love begin to be realised in our lives.

Sin and love are the great lessons of Holy Week, to be sure, but it is through the sacramental life of the Church that we constantly participate in the life of God, in his constant triumph over sin and death, and in the constant reality of his love in itself and for us.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

It isn’t really a very pretty picture. There is very little good that can be said about our humanity in The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark. We are forced to contemplate the hideous realities of human sin in a variety of forms ranging from the miscarriage of justice by Pilate, giving into the machinations of the chief priests who manipulate the crowd, to the mockery of Christ by the soldiers in the Praetorium and, then, to the cruelty of his Crucifixion, reviled at once by those who looked on and even by the two thieves who were crucified with him. Perhaps, Simon the Cyrenian might serve as the only counter to this negative picture of ourselves but even he has to be compelled to bear Christ’s cross to the place of crucifixion. This stands in stark contrast to Christ’s freely willing our redemption.

In this picture of Christ we behold the spectacle of the ultimate good and righteous man whose very goodness is the occasion of our rage and spite as the lesson from Wisdom suggests. Yet, as Isaiah indicates in the Matins’ lesson, “this is my servant, my chosen … in whom my soul delights,” the one who “bring[s] forth justice to the nations,” the one who is “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” the one who “open[s] the eyes of the blind” and “brings out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison.”

Here in the continuation of Mark’s Passion, we see the meaning of another one of the servant songs from Isaiah, the meaning of Christ as the one who wills to bear all of the injustices of our sinfulness, the one who gives his “back to the smiters” and who “hid not [his] face from shame and spitting.” We hang upon the words of Scripture which present the unvarnished picture of human cruelty and meanness, on the one hand, and the picture of the suffering Christ, on the other hand. Nowhere is that image of the suffering of Christ more disturbingly presented to us than in the horrifying cry of dereliction. “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?”

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