A Sermon for Passion Sunday
by Dr. Robert Crouse
King’s College Chapel, 2006
“The princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them…
but it shall not be so among you.” (St. Matthew
20.25)
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Our lectionary – that is, the series of Epistle and
Gospel lessons appointed for Sundays and major festivals throughout the year
– has remained substantially unchanged for well over a thousand years. Even
through the tumults of the Reformation, the lectionary, taken over from
medieval service books, remained largely intact, with only here and there a
slight addition of subtraction of a few verses. That stable pattern of
public readings, year by year, century by century, first in Latin, then in
various vernaculars, has, of course, been immensely important for the
shaping of the mind of Western Christendom; and it’s a factor of which we
should always be conscious when we try to understand the history of
literature, or music, or the other arts, as well as the history of theology
and popular piety.
Because the tradition is so venerable, and because alterations to it have been
so slight, changes in it should attract our thoughtful attention. One such
change – quite recent, introduced in our 1962 Canadian revision of the Book of
Common Prayer, is the Gospel lesson for Passion Sunday (which we’ve just now
read). The old lesson was the story of Jesus’ final conflict with the Jewish
authorities before the events of Holy Week. Now, instead, we have the story of
Zebedee’s wife, and her sons, James and John. It’s a change which somewhat
disrupts the logical pattern of the lectionary; but it’s also a change which
introduces a striking and important emphasis in the Church’s proclamation of
Christ’s Passion.
When I say that this change somewhat disrupts the logical pattern of the
lectionary, I mean that, in general, the Gospel lessons for Lent and Passiontide
set before our minds and hearts what Christ has done and suffered for us; while
the Epistle lessons spell out the practical implications of that for our own
lives, to show us how the sacrifice of Christ must, as today’s Epistle, for
instance, puts it, “purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living
God.”
Christ’s sacrifice is not only something done for us, once for all; it
is that, certainly; but it is also something which is done in us, in
our minds and hearts, day by day. Our faithful and thankful acceptance of
Christ’s work for us, must also change us, must transform our
minds and hearts, must sanctify our lives.
It is that side of the matter – our sanctification – that our Gospel lesson
insists upon. The way of Christ’s Passion demands in us an inner change of
direction, a reversal of perspective, a different aspiration, a conversion. In
today’s story, the standpoint of the natural man is perfectly represented by
James and John, by their mother, and by the whole band of disciples. Their
aspirations are surely perfectly natural human ambitions. But Jesus contradicts
those aspirations, and points a different way. “You know,” he says, “that the
princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them”. That is to say, there are
certain worldly ways of doing things, certain worldly desires and ambitions:
for the Gentiles, greatness is a matter of power and dominion, sitting on the
right hand of majesty, having one’s own way. But in the Kingdom of God, says
Jesus, that’s not the way things are: “It shall not be so among you.”
Your greatness, your dignity, your nobility, is the humble obedience of the
servant. And there – you see – is the essential meaning of Passiontide for our
own inner lives, our conversion.
Lent leads into Passiontide, and it is in the Passion of Jesus that all the
lessons of Lent are summed up: the demons in the wilderness, the demons of
worldliness, the demons of false and empty ambitions and aspirations, all the
destructive and self-destructive demons of self-seeking must be cast out from
us, “by the finger of God”. “It shall not be so among you.” Our souls must be
filled, instead, with the living bread from heaven, miraculously multiplied for
us here in the wilderness: the word of God himself, the word of obedient and
sacrificial love, which is both death and resurrection; death, day by day, to
our old and worldly selves, but a new birth in us, day by day, of a life which
is eternal.
In our liturgy, we celebrate Christ’s Passion, the sacrifice of Calvary,
represented here in bread and wine, the signs of body broken and blood
outpoured. We celebrate the presence of his sacrifice, as something done for us
once for all – a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice – something which we
gaze upon with adoration and with thankful hearts; but that same sacrifice, we
know, must also be something done in us; it must be our food and drink,
it must have its way in the transformation of our minds and hearts. “Let this
mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus…”
Amen. +
