Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.
As a self-confessed
liturgy nerd and a closeted anglophile, my eyes were glued to my computer
screen this past Wednesday as I watched the installation service of the Most Reverend
and Right Honorable Dame Sarah Elisabeth Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of
Canterbury. It was a deeply beautiful and moving service, filled with joy and
tenderness. And of course, with glorious music and Anglican pomp and ceremony. But for me the most touching point came at the
very beginning when the new Archbishop was welcomed at the West door of the Cathedral.
Three children from a nearby school met her there saying: We greet you in the name of Christ. Who are
you and why do you request entry?
The archbishop replied: I am Sarah, a servant of Jesus
Christ, and I come as one seeking the grace of God, to travel with you in his
service together.
The children then asked:
Why have you been sent to us?
The archbishop again: I
am sent as Archbishop to serve you, to proclaim the love of Christ and with you
to worship and love him with heart and soul, mind and strength.
Then the children asked: How do you come among us and with
what confidence?
And the archbishop simply said: I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ
and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and in much trembling.
The children then invited her and us saying: Let us then humble ourselves before God and
together seek his mercy and strength.
“I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” These are, of course, words echoing those of Saint Paul, and if we are to be servants of Jesus Christ, they need to be our words as well. But these are not easy words. They are perhaps the most difficult words in scripture, especially for us contemporary folk.
Recently the
Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts developed a revised service for Palm Sunday,
a revision allowed as well in this Diocese of New York. The revised service
changes the focus totally to the triumphal entry of our Lord into Jerusalem and
moves the reading of the Passion narrative to the very end of the service…indeed,
to after the service. And it makes the reading of the Passion narrative entirely
optional. The intention behind this change is not unworthy. It recognizes that
our Passion narratives, each different from the other, have often been used or
misused to promote anti-Judaism. And it provides a pastoral note explaining the
reasoning behind this change, a pastoral note worth reading aloud:
“On Palm Sunday it is a tradition to proclaim the passion
narrative so that Jesus Christ’s love for all is made clear. Over time, this
narrative has been used to promote anti-Judaism. The responsibility for the
suffering and death of Jesus Christ cannot be attributed, in either preaching
or teaching, indiscriminately to all Jews of that time, nor to Jews today. The
Jewish people should not be referred to or represented as rejected or cursed by
God, as this claim cannot be found in Scripture. Christians must remember that
Jesus, his mother Mary, and his early disciples were Jewish. We must affirm the
long-standing teaching of the church that Jesus Christ entered into suffering
and death by his own free will as a sign of God’s saving and reconciling love
to the world.”
I get it. We know that it wasn't accidental that Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere felt the need to be especially vigilant and perhaps invisible during the Christian Holy Week when pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence became more common. But I do wonder whether avoiding these difficult texts, these Passion narratives, is the best way to engage them. Could there be other reasons operating here? Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, reminds us: “…we actually have no immediate access to the events of Holy Week other than via these texts. Other versions of this story we offer will be our creations and mirror our sensibilities.”
Could it be that our sensibilities include a real desire to avoid or forget the cross in all its scandal? Are we any different from those mentioned by Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians who find the cross a scandal, a folly and an embarrassment? The Reverend Vincent Pizzuto, a theology professor and pastor of Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church in, of all places Marin County, argues that this may be the deep truth about us. And not just us but American Christians generally. What the American church wants today, he says, is spiritual uplift, divine intimacy, ‘emotion devotion’--but please, God, not the cross. Anything but the cross. He continues: “Don't we, after all, secretly find all that gibberish about sin, divine wrath, judgment, suffering, sacrifice just foolishness from a bygone age? Vestiges of an archaic (even barbaric) worldview from which all of us undoubtedly bear some collective moral responsibility to unshackle the church in favor of a more enlightened values not centered on the cross but sanitized of it?” He quotes the famous line from Richard Niebuhr’s 1959 book The Kingdom of God in America: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” I doubt that Niebuhr, as wise as he was, could have foreseen churches which leap over Good Friday or who exalt a so-called ‘creation spirituality’ which has no place for the cross.
The cross is a scandal precisely because it holds up a mirror to the human heart. And, as Father Pizzuto says: “… what the cross will reveal with ruthless honesty is that the line between good and evil is never between us and them, but traverses straight through every human heart."
I'm not saying that we are more church-y or advanced because we read Matthew’s Passion narrative here this morning. It's easy even here, maybe especially here, to glide over the historicity and nitty gritty of it and make it a piece of light opera. Nor are we more advanced if we have a nicely developed theology of the cross, because in truth there are many theologies of the cross. Just as each of the gospel narratives of the Passion has its own theology of the cross--today in Matthew the cross is presented as fulfillment of prophecy, on Friday when we hear John's Passion we encounter a theology of the cross as glorification. There is no one theological explanation of how the great act of Godly love that we celebrate this Great and Holy Week leads to life and light and hope. Certainly not— forgive me—a literal substitutionary theory of the atonement. There will always be questions and divergences about the meaning of the cross, but not about its power to transcend time and help us see ourselves and our present world in its light, transforming that world and being ourselves transformed through it and by it, and being liberated and saved by its mysterious Truth.
Then the children asked:
How do you come among us and with what confidence?”
And the Archbishop replied: “I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and much trembling.”
We must all
come this way, or else we shall never arrive at all.
Amen.
Sources:
McGowan,
Andrew. “The Passions of our Lord Jesus Christ—March 24, 2026” https://abmcg.substack.com/p/the-passions-of-our-lord-jesus-christ
Pizzuto, Vincent. “Passion Sunday—April 13, 2025” https://www.vincentpizzuto.org/post/the-overture
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