Christ Church

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells his disciples and us. And he tells them and us exactly what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem.

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all thigs that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and the third day he shall rise again.

He speaks of terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts and words and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short; Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order.

Christ speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” It complements Paul’s phrase about how we “see in a glass darkly”. We understand so little. These things were hid from them and, in a way, they are hid from us. We can’t understand except through the journey of Lent.

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde;
To me, who took eyes that I might you finde:
Was ever grief like mine?
(George Herbert, The Sacrifice, 1633)

So the poet, George Herbert, drawing upon the words of Isaiah and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, confronts us with the mystery of Lent, the mystery of human redemption. Christ “took eyes”, became man that he might find you and me, even in our blindness, so that we might see and be changed by what we see.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.

To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.

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“For without me me ye can do nothing”

There is something rather terrifying about the feast of St. Matthias. He is the apostle chosen by lot to go “into the place of the traitor Judas,” as the Collect puts it. The Lesson from Acts is no less clear: one is chosen “that he may take his place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell.” That one is Matthias, now numbered with the eleven, making the eleven twelve.

We know virtually nothing about Matthias. Which is fine. It is more than enough to contemplate the idea that he has been chosen to take the place of the betrayer of Jesus. Yet it must seem an uncomfortable thought. Betrayals are difficult but necessary things to behold. To take the place of the traitor, it seems to me, must mean contemplating the betrayals in our own hearts. For it has to be said that we are all the traitors of Christ. We are all like Judas.

Such is the deep and grim reality of sin. Matthias is chosen to take his place. Not to be another traitor but in the face of human treachery and deceit to be a man of faith, steadfast and sure. “There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” Shakespeare’s King Duncan, in the play MacBeth, says about the first Thane of Cawdor who was a traitor to the King. “He was one,” the King says, “upon whom I built an absolute trust.” At just that moment, MacBeth appears, MacBeth whom the King had just appointed the Thane of Cawdor in the place of the traitor. MacBeth would prove to be the far greater traitor. And unlike the first Thane of Cawdor who confessed and repented, it will not be said of MacBeth, as it was said of him, that “nothing became his life like his leaving it,” meaning a kind of nobility achieved through repentance and confession.

No. Matthias stands in the place of the traitor Judas but not as another traitor but one who knows the treachery of human hearts and the need for heavenly grace. And that, it seems to me, is the point of the Gospel reading that accompanies the lesson from Acts. Jesus says, “for without me ye can do nothing.”

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