Introduction
The Icon: “Seek Ye My Face”
 Watching you in this church today is something of profound significance. Not far from this pulpit hangs the great icon of Our Savior’s face. His eyes look into yours. His still peace looks into your soul. Years ago we placed this icon where his face could scan the faithful who come to worship: you, looking at him and he, looking at you.
We can only glimpse what God is like if we look at Christ. Christ in his manhood and humanity is God. He has what we call the plenitude of Divinity; the Godhead in all its fullness. What you see in Christ is what you get in God. Today Christ presents us in what he says with seven faces, the faces of the Godhead. They are aspects of himself which God wishes us to explore. He wants us to look at him. Do you remember the verse from Psalm 27 (v.9) “Seek ye my face: Thy face Lord will I seek…”?
What we find when we obey his wish to seek his face is that there are many aspects of it. We do this with each other – and what do you find? The face of your friend, your lover, your nearest and dearest, can have a smile one minute, and a scowl of anger the next. It can display hope, and despair. It can shew serenity, and fear. It can reveal truth, and untruth. Contradictory faces. Expressions at enmity with each other.
With God, “there is no change, no shadow of turning”, as St. James’s letter says. (James 1:17) The several faces of God can never be contradictory, the one to the other. Those faces are all aspects of his love for us. The expressions reflect his heart of love for his created world, everything within it. You can never discover a quirk of character in God. Quirks of character are the result of fallen human nature within us: we have a seismic fault which at our very best still leaves us no longer complete. God is complete.
Have you heard of The Picture of Dorian Grey? The notorious Oscar Wilde over 100 years ago wrote a novel you may have read; it’s horrific, and the movie made of it is powerful in portraying the horror it contains. It is the story of a young man whose startlingly handsome looks were captured in a great portrait. By some satanic and evil interference the young man’s selfish and cruel and immoral life-style didn’t register on his face: it was the painting which recorded the coarsening of the features as the years took their toll. We gaze on that face in the portrait to discover the devastation of personality which it depicts. Eventually there is the brutal death of the man. As he lies there, his face now has all the depraved and disgusting ravages pictured in the portrait: the portrait itself reverts to its original startling beauty.
So can change the features of the human face. With the face of Christ our God “there is no change, no shadow of turning”. (James 1:17)
The First Word from the Cross:
“Father, forgive them…”
God’s Forgiving Face
As he prays for the soldiers who have begun to kill him by driving nails through his hands and feet to the wood of the cross, the torture prescribed for criminals in an occupied Roman territory as a warning to others contemplating lawlessness – as he calls out to his Father he is fulfilling a promise: that he would “make all things new”. (Revelation 21:5) He is renewing an ancient Hebrew law which says forgiveness can only be imparted after confession, contrition, and purpose to amend on the part of the offender. His torturers have no idea of what they are doing; they think they are doing nothing wrong, obeying orders, part of the Roman soldiers day’s work. But Christ calls for forgiveness for them even though there is no repentance. This, in his dying hours, is revolutionary: to extend forgiveness to over those who don’t know what they are doing. He has renewed the ancient law, bringing it into the dimension of his kingdom. Forgiveness is no longer conditional. It can be no longer measured. Peter talks of seven times. Christ talks of seventy times seven. Christ means forgiving into infinity. That is not only a new ball game. It is the “new thing”, promised in Scripture: Isaiah records the Lord declaring, “Stop dwelling on past events, and brooding over days gone by. I am about to do something new.” (Isaiah 43:18-19) Christ on his cross does something new and he unfolds an entirely new concept of Divine forgiveness that covers not merely ignorance of wrong-doing but the whole understanding of time. Forgiveness in our book happens after an event necessitating it.
Cast your mind over last night, Maundy Thursday: The Last Supper. Jesus had been reclining around a table with his friends who had been badly-behaved. In the face of their appalling manners, squabbling in front of him at his supper party as to which of them was the most important, Christ strips to the waist, takes a bowl of water and the towel a slave would take, and kneels at the feet of each braggart to wash his feet. He washes the lot. He cleanses the lot. The washing is a dual symbol: his tears at their pride, and his forgiveness of it. He absolves the lot by cleaning their feet.
That includes Judas Iscariot. Judas has his feet washed; Judas has absolution administered to him before he slips out into the night to betray the Christ who loves him and forgives him. So forgiveness from God has an entirely new dimension from what we are in the habit of imagining. The love and forgiveness of God is not bound by the passing of the hours and days as our love and forgiveness are.
This is a very deep mystery. You are gazing into the forgiving face of Christ. He brings into our human history an entirely new dimension. This is the “new thing” he says he will perform. And he has demonstrated it in his dealings with the people he has encountered in his earthly ministry.
Look at the paralysed man on the bed, carried by friends for Christ to heal. Matthew tells us: “When he saw their faith Jesus said to the man, take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” (Matthew 9:2) Envious and critical comment from some scribes who are there only make him point out that he has the authority to forgive. And without the requisite repentance he forgives. It is something entirely new.
As is his encounter with the woman caught in the act, in flagrante delicto, of committing adultery and dragged before him by people who wish him to incriminate himself. He is on them in a flash. He knows what has made them do what they have done. They are out to get him. She is expendable. You will remember that Christ stoops and traces in the dust as he listens to their poison. John who records this says that Jesus writes. What does he write? John uses a special Greek word for writing: katagraphein: which means to write accusingly, or to write an accusation. Could it be that Christ is tracing the names of some loose women, some whores, whom he knows this bunch of randy hypocrites have at times themselves consorted with, and used? Something of the sort must have happened because one by one they slink away – until nobody is left except the terrified girl and Jesus. “ ‘Where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, Sir.’ ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus said. ‘Go; do not sin again.’ ” (John 8:10-11) On being told that no one has condemned her, he tells her something surprising and then something disturbing. He tells her that he is not going to pass judgment on her either. He defers the judgment she has been expecting. He is not being sentimental with his forgiveness. He is not telling her that a little slap and tickle in the barn when your husband’s at the cattle show is of no significance. He is not telling her that if it feels good with another man, go for it. There is nothing for our comfort, our false, foolish, me-generation comfort, in what he says. He is not closing his eyes to a betrayal of a husband. He does not tell her that she has made a mistake, which is what some public and political figures claim to have made when they take somebody to bed who isn’t their wife.
But there is one chilling reminder. It should bring us to our senses. God is not sentimental with his forgiveness. He does not dispense cheap grace. He will not squander his love because he is truth as well as love. His forgiveness, I suspect, is restricted in only one circumstance: the refusal on the part of the person needing it to forgive another wrong done. The uncharted ocean of God’s forgiveness has a shore. That shore is the human will in all its obduracy and stubbornness set not to extend forgiveness of an injury. It places itself in a posture of inability to receive the Divine Love. Humanity’s freedom has been given by God a very long cord; it is long enough to obstruct God’s will and wish, at least as long as life lasts.
Christ in showing the forgiving face of God is fulfilling his own prophecy which St. John records as Christ approached his “hour”, as he calls it. “When I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself” (John 12:31-32) Drawing everyone to himself implies their reconciliation with him. You aren’t drawn to somebody with whom you have nothing to share. He offers forgiveness and his nearness. In the Eucharist he offers forgiveness and the reality of his nearness: in his “fullness undiminished:” as the ancient hymn says. You are looking into the forgiving face of God.
The Second Word from the Cross:
“Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
The Waiting Face of God
This word spoken to the penitent thief is not merely a re-assurance to a desperate soul; it is self-revelatory. It discloses the patient, waiting face of Christ. God waits. There is God’s time and season for doing things. We call that in Greek, Chairos. When God’s wisdom, which is his love, dictates the initiative and he intervenes, he is merely emerging from the realm of the hidden to the recognizable. Our time is what the Greeks call Chronos: we measure ours, we note the passing of it. We forget ourselves often in our dealings with the hidden God whose ways are not our ways nor his thoughts our thoughts (it is God who says that of himself.) So in our impatience we yell “How long, O Lord, how long?” and we beat the bars of our imprisonment and measurable time in our frustration. We shout at God to wake up; as though he is asleep and dead to the world for people like us. Christ comforts the penitent thief who has asked to be remembered when Christ comes into his kingdom. The penitent thief is clear now about the gravity of what he has committed. He is aghast. He has been dragged to the precipice of death and he hangs over it, with no mercy to hope for. As he hangs there he is met by the waiting God hanging at his side. “Today you shall be with me in Paradise.”
God’s “Today.” Christ shews his waiting face. You may remember the story in the Gospels of the feeding of the 5000. Miraculously that vast crowd finds in its hunger that there is food for everybody. Five loaves and two small fish. There is food in such quantities that everybody gets more than enough. Christ directs his friends to do the clean-up, and they fill twelve large basket-containers with the left-overs. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”
God’s love does not permit waste. His love will not countenance a fall-away from his care. It is his will to conserve. In order to do so he allows himself to wait. He constrains himself to our time frame – his creation – and that constraint is an indication of his humility. A soul determined to rebel and wither in a selfish struggle against his love will have its way, but God waits until it is his hour, his “Today”, when the love may make its shrewdest impact. God’s Today is seldom ours. His today can cause us inconvenience and annoyance. His appearance in a stable at Bethlehem was a classic inconvenience to Mary and Joseph in a frantic search for accommodation during a mandatory census-taking by the Roman occupation army. It could not have come at a worse time for the Jewish nation, preoccupied with their humiliation at the hands of the hated invader. But the impact of God’s love when his hour came was enough to change the world. That “today” of God’s began our salvation.
We are not always grateful for God’s todays. Our “todays” are governed by our self-centredness: our needs, our convenience, our feelings, our energies. This is why we so often ruin our relationships with the people we say we love. Our vanity and self-preoccupation give us “expectations” which can be an intolerable burden on the other person. Our expectations are for what will fulfill us, give us satisfaction and a sense of well-being.
But our todays can be disastrous for relationships for the other person. God’s todays are for our salvation, not for our immediate satisfaction, Not to please us, but to rescue us. Rescue us form the isolation our selfishness creates.
The old Adam, original sin, begins very early on in the human existence, when we are soothed by others and make full and total claim upon the willingness of others, the patience of others, the life of others, with our personal “todays”. Original sin is the intrinsic capacity for selfishness, for loneliness, really.
It is life’s earliest sin of all, one we nurture as we imbibe our mother’s milk, this selfishness. It is there, that wretched virus in our bloodstream, almost. Before greed, before hatred, before sloth, long before lust, it appears as the germ of almost everything else which can distract and disfigure the image of God bestowed upon each of us with our humanity. And it is curious how people make allowances for it – not merely in themselves but in others. Other sins don’t get away so easily off our hook. We race to a baby’s wail. The small child has us literally and figuratively by the little finger. We smile at emerging personality traits as they grow tall into characteristics. We do it though, we make allowances for selfishness when we see it in action. We give it other names: if we are slothful and timid when we see displays of it in adolescence or early adulthood we are tempted to say that the youngster “has to find himself” (in other words) for him to be given the license as often as not to exercise wasteful self-will, as well as spend parents’ money and time, rather like the Prodigal Son. In what should be mature adulthood we find excuses: “he has his needs” – which means his sexual use of others isn’t necessarily to be exercised responsibly. We often are guilty of indulging the difficult old, especially when they are rich. Often we have to – sometimes our livelihood depend upon it. We accommodate selfishness: why, even in the arena of public and political affairs a country will seek to justify strategic selfishness under the term “enlightened self-interest”. You and I have heard statesmen say that. Why do we do it? All of us are infected with it.
Christ is trapped by nails and yet the gulf of loneliness separating the criminal from Christ is leaped by words of love and comfort: recognition, rescue, reassurance, restoration, “Today you shall be with me in Paradise”. The murderer finds acceptance in Christ’s alignment with him. You are with me now as we are tortured. You will be with me when this is over. Being with Christ. His companionship through our loneliness and isolation is assured if only, like the murderer, we pierce the mists of our own self-absorption to realize that he is waiting there to be recognized with his “Today”. This is the fearful thing for many people; that they cannot bear the thought of a waiting God, nearby. C. S. Lewis writes about this experience his wife had as a young woman:
“Long ago, before we were married [Helen] was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) ‘at her elbow’ demanding her attention. And of course, not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in – I know how one puts it off – and faced Him. But the message was, ‘I want to give you something’ and instantly she entered into joy.”
(A Grief Observed, Chapter 3)
God is a waiting God. He waits in Christ on the cross itself, with a longing to align himself with you in your situation. He is committed to you with an eternal commitment. Those nails which hold him from bothering you are real enough and their pain is terrible enough, but they are deeply symbolic too, of his humble diffidence with you. He is prepared to wait. He has given you the mechanism to make him wait: your free will. He refrains from embarrassing you by overwhelming you with any energy and strength other than the strength of his love. That is formidable in itself. It is unstoppable. But its force is not so much a smothering as a washing. It is restorative rather than corrective; regenerative rather than restrictive: this love of his.
Remember the story of the Prodigal Son. The father waited. He would look to see if his son was coming back, and he saw him from afar off and ran to meet him.
God waits, but he watches as he waits. He stands ready to give us something: he offers his recognition, his rescue, his reassurance, his restoration. All these he wants to give us. He wants to offer us his “Today”.
The Third Word from the Cross:
“Woman, behold thy Son! Behold thy Mother!”
The Family Face of God
Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus his mother and his best and closest and, perhaps his youngest friend and cousin, St. John. John who had leaned against Jesus during the last supper. John who because of his high priestly family connections had got Peter into the High Priest’s house.
Tradition tells us that John wore the petalon, a gold plate attached to the front of mitres which the priest in those days wore, and Polycrates says that if we read the account of the Passion carefully you will see that John had immediate access to the house, as he was “Known to the High Priest.” His mother was Salome, the sister of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They were related to Elizabeth, who is described as one of the daughters of Aaron. So this was a family gathering in grief, near enough to Jesus to hear what he could say from the cross, and for him to see them there together. This is very important.
There had been tensions in the family; it is quite clear from the Gospels that there was some separation of sorts between Christ’s family members – let us not forget that part of the high priestly alarm at Christ may conceivably have been because he was so close to them by birth through his mother Mary’s connection. There is nothing so tearing in a family as the knowledge that one of them is not prepared to assume the outlook and priorities the others all share. Letting the family down is an occasion of anger and frustration. While he was preaching one day word was brought to him that his mother and brothers were “outside” and wanted to talk to him. “Who is my mother?” he asked. “Who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said,
“Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, my sister, my mother.” (Matthew 12:46-50)
That is only one remark. There are others, equally disturbing. Discipleship, he says, makes strong demands on a family. Excuses for family reasons for delaying to follow him, like enjoying a honeymoon or burying a relative, are not accepted. Matthew records a painful statement: “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a young wife against her mother-in-law.” (Matthew 10:35) We can understand the mother-in-law bit, but we are not conditioned or prepared for the sundering of the closest possible family ties. Then Christ puts the boot in: he uses the word hate for those close family ties when discipleship is required. All family loyalty is based on his total love for God his Father. He requires a passionate desire to be free from any obsession with family ties as essential to discipleship.
St. Francis understood this as a young man and ran away from his respectable and ambitious father’s house without a stitch on and without a penny to his name.
This is serious commitment, and who is capable of it? Mark it is who says that at the outset of his ministry in Galilee – his mission – his closest people around him thought him crazy. There was hostility to the move he planned to make; they were critical of him for making it. It has often since been the case that someone who wishes to give his life to Christ has met disbelief, indifference, ridicule and possibly some degree of hostility from members of the family. I know that is true. I descend from both sides of a thorough-paced decent, non-observant, family – unchurched, with all the reasons and excuses for their indifference to the Church – and with the exception of Anne, my sister whom some of you know, the present generation continues, all the lot of them are complete strangers to the Church and oblivious, for the most part, of the Faith of the Church, so that among my own I always felt I was a speckled egg, a stranger, and still do. I tell Anne that the family must think I come from Mars.
Whatever those difficulties may have been and whatever and whoever may have caused them, his mother and nephew are here together with him now, as close as they could get. John, to comfort Mary in her anguish at her son’s torment and agony. John, just to be with his beloved Jesus – not this time to snuggle against him at dinner – but simply to be with him there. There, among the soldiers playing dice for the coat made and woven without seam by Mary for her son: the garment that could last a lifetime of winters. There, amid that curious and cruel breed of person which will morbidly be drawn to a death scene: take a car trip to the place of a plane crash, crowds around an injured and dying soul to notice the blood. And there was her sister Mary the wife of Cleopas. Finally, but not least, there was Mary Magdelene: no relation – that’s for sure – and not very suitable company, the family would have said. But the family stayed away. You will remember the fact of disbelief on the part of the menfolk in Jesus’s family. The friends stayed away. The people who came to him were the people whose love was as “strong as death.” Young John would have known that phrase from the Song of Solomon (8:6). All different, their loves: a mother’s; and an admiring, hero-worshiping cousin’s; a woman’s whose respect for herself had returned because of his respect and love for her, a clean love from a man; and an Aunt, Salome, whom Jesus had rebuked for her pushy ambition in asking special places for her sons James and John in Heaven. Christ commends to his mother his friend to be to her a son in his place, and her to be to him a mother in a new home. The knowledge of the agony he had brought her, that sword which had been prophesied would pierce her heart, must have been one of the sharpest pains his agony could bear. Her sufferings he took into his own; his eternal commitment to her, his identification of her sufferings with his, brings this remark to his lips.
We are gazing at the family face of God in Christ. It takes our understanding of family into an entirely different light. Our family disputes, our family estrangements, our family prejudices against others, our family selfishnesses, our inordinate family prides look sordid, look trivial, because when we look at Christ’s family face, we see the cost of it all.
You know the phrase: “God gave us our families. Thank God we can choose our own friends.” Christ says, “I call you friends.” He wants you. Whatever the cost.
The Fourth Word from the Cross:
“My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?”
The Vulnerable Face of God
Christ is crying out as he hangs there on the Cross. He has prayed for the soldiers who have tortured him with the nails and raised him on the Cross to taste his agony as they tear him. He has displayed the compassionate, forgiving face of God. He has told the penitent thief, “Today” and he has displayed God’s waiting face. He has commended his beloved Mother to his friend. He has displayed the Family face of God. Now he turns to his Father with “Why?” “Why hast thou forsaken me?” and he displays the vulnerable face of God. Vulnerable has a Latin stem: a wound. The face he shows is woundable – open to receiving a wound.
We have an idea about that wound. Christ is declaring his Godforsakenness. You realize that his words spoken could well be from Psalm 22, The Psalm of Dereliction.
O my God, I cry in the daytime,
but thou hearest not…
But as for me, I am a worm, and no man;
a very scorn of men,
and the outcast of the people.
All they that see me laugh me to scorn;
they shoot out their lips,
and shake their heads, saying,
He trusted in the Lord,
that he would deliver him;
let him deliver him,
if he would have him…
They pierced my hands and my feet:
I may count all my bones:
they stand staring and looking upon me.
They part my garments among them,
and cast lots upon my vesture.
But be not thou far from me O Lord:….
Do you realize that the 22nd Psalm is in part a prophecy? A prophecy fulfilled in the man who hangs upon the Cross, himself the fulfillment of all prophecy? The Psalm of Dereliction is about the man left derelict. Godforsaken. Christ shews his vulnerable face: an outcast of the people, laughed to scorn, derided by the people who tell him that if he is who he says he is, to get off the Cross himself to be delivered.
And pierced through hands and feet he could still “count his bones:” they would not be broken. Watched, stared at, his clothes confiscated, dice being thrown for his cloak. All this literally happens: it happens as the Psalmist has sung it. He submits to it in his vulnerability. The vulnerable face of God on the face of Christ who makes himself vulnerable to the same plight as of the soul which despises God and God’s creation: the withdrawal of God from making his presence felt.
Obviously this is a subjective experience: for God, we know, fills the world. He is not so much removing himself from us, as choosing not to make his presence felt, and when this happens we are the poorer for it. God will not be manipulated. He only hides himself in order to make himself known, and it is inconceivable that he should be experienced at times of our imperiousness, our petulance, our manipulativeness, or our vengeful pride. The source of all that is good, the fount of love is dry in the well of self-will. You will never encounter God in your resentments. God will always seem never to be found in an atmosphere and an attitude of self-righteousness. The Russian Archbishop Anthony Bloom tells this story about the absence of God, in his book Courage to Pray?
“One day a man came to see me, a man who has been searching for God for many years. He told me in tears: ‘Father, I cannot live without God. Show me God.’
I did not think that he was in a fit state to see him anyway. Astonished, he asked me why. Then I asked him a question which I often ask those who come to see me: ‘Is there a passage in the scripture which goes straight to your heart, the most precious passage you have found?’ ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘the story of the adulterous woman in John, chapter 8.’
Then I asked him, ‘Where do you see yourself in this scene? Are you the woman who has become conscious of her sin and stands to be judged, knowing that it will be a judgment of life or death? Or do you identify with Christ who understands everything and will forgive her, so that she can live with a new life henceforth? Are you waiting for a reply and hoping it will be merciful, as the apostles must have been? Are you one of the crowd, one of the old men who knew they had sinned themselves, and were the first to withdraw, or one of the young men who gradually realized they too were sinners and dropped the stones they had picked up to throw? Who are you in the dramatic scene?’
After a moment’s reflection this man replied, ‘I am the only Jew who would not have withdrawn without stoning the woman.’ So I said, ‘You have your reply. You cannot see God who is a total stranger to you.’ ”
(Bloom, Anthony and Georges LeFebvre. Courage to Pray: p.23)
It is simply not in the realm of possibilities for him to be recognizable in the presence of wickedness. Go back if you will to the other thief, the bandit crucified on the other side of Christ. I have often wondered about him. He and his companion had cursed Christ, cursed their luck, cursed the world. But his companion had recognized something in the man who hangs helpless in his suffering between them. He had “changed his tune”. He had acknowledged Christ in his own loneliness. But the other doesn’t. His resentments remain. His hatred smolders still. He is to die without God’s reality evident to him. The encounter has eluded him to the end. In that way he is to die Godforsaken.
But that cannot apply to Christ himself. Yet he is declaring just this, his forsakenness; not as though the encounter has eluded him. This is the horror.
The dark powers of disruption, division and disorder assemble to pit themselves against the claims Christ has ever made:
“I and the Father are One.”
“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? I am not myself the source of the words I speak to you: it is the Father who dwells in me doing his own work.” (John 14:10)
Those powers gather to make nonsense of that claim to sonship, to sunder that relationship. This terrible groan, this protest, this horror in his loneliness, his dereliction, persuaded a Communist of our time, Simone Weil, of the truth of Christ’s claim.
This cry is the outcome of what the hymn describes as “the last and fiercest strife.” It is the cry of the furthest isolation endured by Christ. Whatever has been breaking his heart, wounding his soul as well as his loving flesh, has been contained within. But now, the shout, the loud voice, the plea to the Father who is his God who seems no longer in him, not he in his Father. This, my friends, this if of all moments the most danger-filled, for him who is experiencing it and for us who have since been the beneficiaries of it. For before our tongues can frame another Alleluia our duty is to try to know what it is to experience that isolation of a man dying alone, unwanted by man and (so it seems to him) by his God: the breath of his breath. The Devil’s temptation to deny his own integrity and true identity:
“If thou be the son of God….,”
had almost succeeded. Stones into bread could not. Temple parapet dives could not. Kingdoms with their particular glories could not. But isolation might. Dereliction might.
And what in the world can have the power to do that? Almost to succeed in breaking apart the one thing which makes sense of all Christ has said and done?
St. Paul it is who tells us the answer in an extraordinary way when in this second letter to the Church at Corinth (5:21) he says.
“For our sake, God made the sinless one into sin, so that for in him we might become the goodness of God.”
“Christ was innocent of sin, and yet for our sake God made him one with the sinfulness of men…” (New English Bible translation)
Christ for love of the Father in and in his name has drunk to the dregs the chalice of bitterness – the cup he had at first begged in the Garden of Gethsemane to be taken from him – and that was the total experience of humanity’s earned and merited isolation from its Creator:
“…men preferred darkness to light.”
I suppose you can call that a preferred option. Given the choice, humanity preferred its own shadow.
Remember that the one almost flawless, totally human construction and fabrication, bereft of any Divine inspiration, any Godly help, is loneliness. It is utterly alien from the nature of the Godhead. And we have succeeded in perfecting it, almost, for ourselves in order to crown Christ with it later. We conceived our crown of loneliness, we refined it, we fashioned it, we adorned it. Ours is a perfect fit, and because it fits us it hurts us, as all selfishly conceived things hurt us in the end. We measured its size, and we placed it on Christ’s head where it did not fit. We cram if over his brow, we force his head to wear it. We want him like us, in the perverse way, the way of true envy, that very envy of which the Scriptures speak when Matthew writes:
“They delivered up [Christ] for envy” (27:18)
“We can’t bear the thought of becoming one with him, so we’ll make him one with us.”
The Fifth Word from the Cross:
“I Thirst.”
The Suffering Face of God
Another loud cry from the man who has shown us the vulnerable Face of God. Vulnerable: woundable. Thirst wounds. Thirst hurts. You can suffer from thirst, go mad in your suffering from it.
And here is perfect love hanging suspended by nails on a criminal’s gibbet, defenceless in its suffering.
The very idea of God, who keeps everything in the universe in motion, kept motionless, nailed to a piece of wood, victim of human brutality and sensible to its agonies, disturbs me deeply. How can God submit to it? Love moves him to submit to this fearful punishment and violence. And when I hear him articulate his suffering, admit it, reveal his need, I am surprised to the depths of my soul. It is, when you dare to think about it, one of the greatest surprises in Creation. It is pretty nearly unthinkable. God restricted; God telling the pain of his thirst.
“I thirst.” This sense of deprivation, isolation, which suffering of any and every kind brings with it is experienced by Christ, as part of the experience of being human. He could have made his own the great classical Latin saying, “Nil humanum alienum a me puto:” Nothing that is human is alien to me. Look at him. He had suffered the pain of social isolation. People heard him say what he had to say – and left. It is a crushing experience to be rejected, either for what you are or for what you stand. Never have I seen a man so isolated, feel so alone in his suffering for having spoken out as Michael Ramsey did at his protest when Rhodesia unilaterally declared her independence of Britain; and all Britain, it seemed, arose in wrath at what he said. What he said was too hard for many to take, and some politicians saved their skins by letting him say it.
Christ spoke and was deserted, by the people who could not take him for the hardness of his words, who could not face the sacrifice involved. Christ spoke and a wall of opposition began to arise.
He preached in the synagogue and the elders threw him out. Rejection. He tried to heal and in one place failed “because of their unbelief.” Rejection. There was a time in his ministry when in his spiritual loneliness he exclaimed, “…the son of man has no place to lay his head.”
He was dismayed and made to suffer by the crass stupidity he met in the twelve he had gathered around him: vying for status, misunderstanding his role, being rough with the people who flocked to him. And then to the week of his Passion and to the keenest suffering of all: it begins with isolation from his most trusted friends. The Gospels make a special point of this. He had made a point of asking them to pray through the night with him on the Mount of Olives in the Gethsemane garden and had taken men who had witnessed his Transfiguration, Peter and James and John, apart to do just that. He had gone forward a little, the Scriptures say, had thrown himself on the ground of that great flat rock in the garden and had gone through such a terrible experience of spiritual grief and loneliness at the reality of what his life’s purpose was to mean in terms of cost that sweat like blood, we are told, fell from him. That is what we refer to in the Litany as Christ’s
“agony and bloody sweat.”
“Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will but thine be done.” (Luke 22:42)
There was nobody who could share that.
Certainly not his closest friends. There is no friendly arm, no embrace, no whispered word of comfort to him, no wiping of tears or sweat from his face from them. As if to emphasize the isolation his suffering is causing him, Christ discovers them all fast asleep, dead to the world, dead to his grief, dead to his deepest human need. There is to be nobody, there is to be nothing that might come between Christ and the suffering, nothing between him and the dregs of the chalice his Father had handed to him.
He wakes them. The soldiers come – and his disciples go. Helter-skelter for their lives, ducking through the olive trees in the dark garden, down the slope, jumping into the Kedron brook at the bottom, back up into the crowded anonymity of a city at festival time. “They forsook him and fled.”
It had to be so. Part of the cost of his suffering was to be his isolation, of which the bitter dregs was the withdrawal of his awareness of companionship with the Father. “The Father and I are one.” From the cross as he hangs there, he has shouted,
“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”
Nobody there. Not even God. That is suffering: the thirst unquenched for companionship, re-assurance, nearness.
We have a notion of a planet in pain, The earth has absorbed untold pints of blood from millions who have been cut down in cruelty; from disease, from war, for revenge, to obliterate a nation – now given an antiseptic name: ethnic cleansing. The perpetrators of indiscriminate carnage of one particular race can always find reasons which satisfy blood-lust or sadism. Along with you, I am outraged at the attempts thrust at us to deny the existence of Nazi atrocities in the death camps of Europe, to make us doubt the truth, to suggest that it all was a figment of the imagination.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. True. True also, that for dark reasons a human soul can flatly deny it has seen something standing stark in front of it, deny that it was there at all, or deny that it had the shape it had. We can persuade ourselves about almost anything. Not least, human suffering. I have seen a man get angry at the mention of starvation in Africa, as if it was an intrusion (which it was) upon a dinner-table conversation. There is in Holy Scripture a brutally graphic expression,
“To shut up the bowels of mercy and compassion.”
It describes pity-constipation, to put it bluntly. People become inured to suffering. The New York Times more than once has drawn attention to people’s attitude to the homeless, the inadequate, and the indigent. What were once alarm and concern have sunk to indifference and resentment. And that has reached me, too. When I hurry past a bundle of rags with a voice pleading for help and a hand outstretched, when I tell myself that to give is not the path to solution, am I shutting up the bowels of compassion? I suppose you ask yourselves this same question, too.
When I am bombarded with begging letters from AIDS agencies; when I received a letter from a prisoner with AIDS asking my help to buy him food in prison to supplement his diet; when the atrocities in Darfur turns my stomach; when I am bombarded with the scalding hate in the occupied territories of Israel or what is happening in Iraq. When all this scream of human suffering bids fair to deafen me, where do I look?…where do I go to look?
I go to Calvary. I look at the Christ who hangs there helpless, calling out his need. The mystery is too terrible to plumb. The well of suffering within him is too deep. The Divine vulnerability is an ocean of uncharted depth, a universe of unmeasured capability to suffer, and in so doing, to draw all suffering souls to himself, with our names engraven on the palms of his hands.
The Sixth Word from the Cross:
“It is Finished.”
The Victorious Face of God
When Pilate scored a cheap point against his Jewish critics who complained at the notice he had painted and nailed to Christ’s cross: THE KING OF THE JEWS: “quod scripsi, scripsi: What I have written, I have written,” he thought he had finished the argument. When he had reached for the water to wash his hands of responsibility for the fate of Jesus, he thought he had finished the case.
In neither event had he finished. In both he had evaded the issue. But he hadn’t finished. When Judas threw himself over the gorge of the Hinnom and was found dangling at the end of the rope that had strangled him, he had planned to finish it all. But he hadn’t finished. His life was interrupted by violent death. It wasn’t finished. Unfinished business.
To finish something is entirely different. There is an orchestration of events: a beginning, an accomplishment, a climax and a tidying away.
God knows how to finish. The legend of Creation tells you so, that at the end of every day God beheld all that he had made and “he saw that it was very good” –Creation was achieved.
Christ knows how to finish: he sees his time on earth as no sentimental gesture to humanity, no question of his “putting in an appearance” only to disappear again into the safe comfort of the heavenly realms. His name is not Emmanuel for nothing: “God with us.”
“My Father has never yet ceased his work, and I am working, too.” (John 5:17)
His life is his work, and the work given to him to do, work gladly accepted by him to perform and to perfect, is that we “may have life and have it more abundantly.” His is a working partnership with his beloved Father in the world God loves so much; to reconcile humanity to its Creator, to restore, recreate, to make all things new.
“What the Father does, the Son does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all his works, and will show greater yet, to fill you with wonder. As the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son gives life to men…(John 5: 19-21)
There it is – bluntly and briefly – this is the scope of the work of Christ. This is his raison d’etre. This is his story and this is his song, his work, for his Father.
“…the son came to do nothing by himself; he does only what he sees the Father doing… (John 5:19)
What he sees the Father doing is maintaining the Creation of the world, caring for it, caressing it, loving it with the “love that makes the world go ’round.”
For him it means not only laying his reputation on the line but his life down as a pledge, for that is what it will take to finish the work. And from his Cross he declares it to be finished. He offers his finished work, his achievement, to the Father. We see in his exhaustion and in the shadow of death the Victorious Face of God. It is not the groan of capitulation to forces more powerful in their cunning or their cruelty: “It’s all over. I’ve had it.” It is once again the loud cry of joy at creativity’s triumph: of a composer writing the final notes of resolution of a vast symphony’s crescendo: of an architect who sees his life’s masterpiece built and shining in front of him: of a gardener who after months and years of hard work and disappointment now watches the transformation of a wilderness “blossom as the rose”, as the Bible says. It is all this, and more. Infinitely more; eternally more.
He presents the perfect sacrifice: himself, unblemished, “without spot or blemish”, totally and unreservedly set aside for God the Father, dedicated to him, and everything he is and all he does is gladly and obediently passed out as an offering; sealed with his life blood on the cross where through no fault of his own he is made to die. That oblation, that self-giving, is perfect and sufficient. Nothing can question its integrity of motive, or its effective power.
There is no question for Christ of any unfinished business. Do you know this hymn-line:
All for sin could not atone:
Thou must save, and Thou alone…
What was it? This business?
Early in his ministry, not long after John the Baptist has proclaimed Christ’s Messiahship, Christ had to pass through Samaria and has reached the town of Sychar. By this time it is high noon. The trek over the countryside, the hot day, finds Jesus worn out; exhausted. He sits in the shade by the well, thirsty and hungry – his disciples had gone into the town to buy food. They come back and urge him to eat. He replies, “I have food to eat of which you know nothing.” The disciples look at each other and say, “Can someone have brought him food?” To which Jesus says, “It is meat and drink for me to do the will of him who sent me until I have finished this work.” (John 4)
This work? The heavenly Father invites us to close companionship. That invitation has to be taken seriously, and the soul’s response to God’s initiative is that of approach. But the journey isn’t easy. Christ’s own part in the process involves an intimacy with himself that many are not prepared for. They cannot stomach the responsibility. This is the great dilemma of humanity.
We balk at the responsibility of intimacy with God. We all know you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Mankind’s fatal predicament is our brutish, stupid, refusal, at the brink of our happiness, to drink that water of life, for we have to bow our heads and bend over to drink it. And our false sense of dignity is threatened. We tell ourselves in some vague way that our freedom will be compromised if we let down our defenses, lower our heads, and placing our hands in the supplicant position to cup the precious water of the Divine Life and bring it to our lips.
So in our frenzy to find a suitable loophole from commitment we turn on our heel and walk away feeling sorry for ourselves
This is Christ’s business: to reconcile us to the Father. To bring us despite ourselves to acknowledge the intimacy of love which the Father never ceases to offer. To help us get over ourselves, our fatal irresponsibility, our refusal to take Christ’s yoke of friendship which he offers and to lean on him, only to discover that the yoke is a garland of joy and the willful freedoms we have shackled ourselves with have been struck away.
The freedom we enjoy to express our preferences has had disastrous consequences for the whole of Creation: our self-preoccupation has wrought havoc with our relationship towards the God who loves us. The logical consequence of that selfish preoccupation has created isolation not only from our Creator but from each other. Sin divides. The further we drift apart the worse our sin pulls us down. He is lifted up, on his Cross, and the lifting up draws the sting of death from us to him as he shoulders our predicament. You know the terrifying Biblical phrase in the Scriptures: “The wages of sin is death.” Those wages are placed into Christ’s hands: nails. Paul says “For our sake God made him one with the sinfulness of men.” (II Corinthians 5:21)
He takes those wages as though he earned them. But he hasn’t earned them. We have. But he takes them and makes them his own, unasked, uninvited. For love. For love. That is his business. To succeed in doing that is a victory for perfect love.
This is the gift and its secret source bequeathed to us as He hangs there and declares with a single-word loud cry, “Finished!” It is perfected: it is achieved, for God. The world, for God.
Glorious, more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
By meekness, called thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believed,
And now the matchless deed’s achieved,
Determined, dared, and done.
(Christopher Smart: 1722-1771. Song to David)
The Seventh Word from the Cross:
“Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit.”
The Trusting Face of God
And now the matchless deed’s achieved…determined, dared and done…
The whole symphony has reached its climax and now, the final resolution of it all. It is a moment when silence will add its contribution to the music. Christ utters his little-boy prayer, taught at his Mother’s knee along with everyone else of his time and country then and since: before giving himself to sleep, God’s great gift, “for so he giveth his beloved sleep”, (Psalm 127:3) bringing a soul to a fresh day. You look at the trusting face of God in Christ.
The temptations are conquered, the frustrations at family disbelief are resolved, the physical labor of his never-ending public ministry is done, the lies have done their worst, and have contradicted each other as the Gospels tell us: the heartbreaks at the final isolation by friends and the Father have been eased, the confrontation with the forces of disruption are over, and the trust that has given him and his words and ministry the authenticity they deserve, the authority which people have noticed as of a different quality from the self-starting authority of the scribes and religious leaders has come back, in full measure, flowing as fully as it had ever flowed. He has enjoyed the full trust of his Father, he has rejoiced in it as he speaks of it. St. John again records this:
“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he came from God and goeth unto God…”
“Goeth unto God…” Jesus has known his hour, his time for the “last and fiercest strife”, and he has come to it, worked through it, and stared unafraid into Death’s dark face to make the final confrontation with its power of evil.
It is the glory of this day, Good Friday, that the Divine love should be seen not to be immune so much as vulnerable, and without any other defense mechanism in the face of a watchful, waiting chaos than that of its own trustfulness.
Perfect love, it is, which casts out fear. When Christ murmurs, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” he is merely bringing that prayer to its glorious, courageous finale, trust.
He is also telling us what sacrifice means because, when you think of it, it is the prayer of someone about to offer himself soul and body.
The people of God have been hearing about this sacrifice since the family’s earliest days. Back to Abraham, in fact, when God intervened in the life of his chosen servant to summon him to make a sacrifice; his only son, his heir:
“Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac…and offer him…for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass, and two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he clave the wood for a burnt offering…and went.” (Gen. 22:3)
He finds the place. He makes the servants stay with the beast whilst he and the lad go to worship, as he says
“And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son…” (Gen. 22:6)
Can you hear any echoes? The only son, the beloved son, carrying wood up a hill? Tertullian, the third century Christian writer, hears those echoes as he contemplates this account. Isaac, he sees as Christ carrying his cross, the beloved son, the only son. And this echo was heard long before: by no less a person than the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, who paints the picture of Christ’s sacrifice in the terms of Abraham and Isaac; Abraham’s readiness, if need be, to sacrifice his only son in order to fulfill the will of God. You can hear these echoes as you listen to the account:
“[Abraham]…took in his hand the fire and the knife; and they went both of them together…And Isaac…said…behold, the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, ‘God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son’…and Abraham built the altar…and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the Angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven…and…said, ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad…for now I know thou fearest God.’ ” (Gen. 22:6-12)
Obviously, there always comes the time when analogies break down and this analogy is such a one. Isaac was the passive victim. Christ submitted to the will of God in obedience, but his obedience was active and not passive. He sacrificed himself, he offered himself. It was the drama of this ancient account which we can still catch; the suspense of it and the poignancy of Abraham’s trusting readiness to hold nothing back, to expect no return or reward, and to risk losing everything by being willing to give everything back to God which enthralled the members of the early Church and awed them with the mysterious resemblance to what had happened on Calvary’s Hill.
The noblest and finest sacrifice you can make is that of your self-trust, and place your whole trust in Christ. Christ offers us a series of things. They are surprising. Christ does not offer success. He offers struggle, up a narrow stony path with a cross on your back. He does not tell you how to find yourself. He tells you to lose yourself…in him. He does not offer happiness. He offers joy; and joy is curiously not alien to pain; it is on rare occasions actually found in triumph over pain, in triumph over disaster or disappointment. He does not offer you security. He offers you risk of failure, for love of him. He does not offer you popularity; he offers you strength when you are misunderstood because you follow him. He does not offer you sexual fulfilment; he offers you a chance to increase in the measure of the stature of the fullness of Him, and life eternal because of his sacrifice. He does not offer a prize for perfection. He assumes you want to be perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect. What he offers you is himself: his life in you, to live in you and work through you “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.”
So we can look at Christ and smile back on him, and know we are forgiven, our declaration firm, and our determination fixed, when we say to him: “All this you have done for me, as you trust your Father. Hear this prayer of our trust in you:”
Preached by
The Reverend Canon John Andrew, O.B.E., D.D.
Rector Emeritus, Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue
during
The Three Hours’ Devotion
on Good Friday,
April 6th, 2007
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