Holy Week

Sunday of the Passion:  Palm Sunday
Almighty and everliving God, who, of thy tender love
towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ
to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the
cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his
great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow the
example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his
resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God,
for ever and ever. Amen.

Monday in Holy Week
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but
first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he
was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way
of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and
peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God,
for ever and ever. Amen.

Tuesday in Holy Week
O God, by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an
instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life:
Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly
suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus
Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Wednesday in Holy Week
O Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his back to
the smiters and hid not his face from shame: Give us grace
to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full
assurance of the glory that shall be revealed; through the same
Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with
thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.


It has been a whirlwind of a week...last weekend I went away with 115 Brooklyn teens as a blogged about last post....then two wonderful days up at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY, back for a music gig last night and finally church all day today. I've gotten farther and farther behind on Holy Week...but I can't let this week go by without some posting. So I've decided to deal with all the collects of the week in one post...at least Sunday to Wednesday. They are all based around a single theme anyway and I think it will work.

The collects of Holy Week are dominated by the Cross. It is understandable since the crucifixion/resurrection passage is the single most crucial event in Christian history. Without it, Jesus is a very odd moral teacher with some very sound advice...and not a few difficult sayings. The crucifixion/resurrection is what sets him apart from so many other prophets and moral teachers. (In this post I'm not in the least interested in questions of historical accuracy and the Jesus Seminar, as interesting as I find those debates...and I often find myself on all sides of that debate. Ultimately it's the Christian mythos that I am interested in...not mere fact.)

Jesus is not the only god figure to have died and resurrected. There is a form of death and resurrection in both Egyptian and Babylonian mythology. And Dionysus also goes through a death and resurrection as does Mithras. Gods dying and coming back to life are pretty typical of the ancient Near East. But Jesus is different in several ways. First of all, he is a historical personage...flesh and blood...even if he is the Son of God. He isn't even unique as the Son of God as that was typical to call the Emperor Augustus...and Caligula later. But none of those personages rose from the dead...Son of God or not, once they were dead they stayed dead. Not so with Jesus...

So Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection pose something different in the history of religion...and of the world. It's not wonder it took so long for the early Christians to "figure" out what happened...was Jesus another God masquerading as a human? Was he a demi-God like Dionysus? Was he just a really skilled magus? A prophet? It would take three hundred years before anything like general agreement was reached on these issues...and even then there was more hashing out. In fact the debates are still not finished as Unitarians and Muslims can attest.

And then there was the thorny issue of the meaning of the crucifixion...what happened and why did it have to happen? Did Jesus die as some example to us all? Did he ransom us from our bondage to Satan? Did God demand sacrifice because of our sins and did Jesus substitute himself for the death God demanded of us? Was the Cross in some mystical way the way to God? The finer points of Atonement Theology have been debated since the patristic period. I have my opinions on the matter as do many people. But the collects do have a distinct point of view on the crucifixion and it is explored over the first four days of Holy Week.

The collect from Palm Sunday announces the theme. The Lenten collects have been a school in humility and the Palm Sunday collect is the climax of that journey. The Palm Sunday theme will be developed in differing ways all week. The recurring theme is that Jesus' crucifixion was the perfect example of humility.

The orthodox have a theological view on the cross that is quite different from the legalistic views that have dominated both the western Catholic and Protestant theological debates. It is based in the Pauline hymn in Philippians:

Let the same mind be in you that was^* in Christ Jesus,
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

In this passage the crucifixion is not about substitution or ransom...it is about humility. Christ, as God, empties himself of all honor due God and becomes the lowest of humanity, dying the most humiliating death of the Roman world...and through this self-disregard Jesus is able to be both fully human, experience full humanity, while also reaching his full Godhead.

This is the same point that our collect makes. And, as the orthodox hold, the collect recommends the way of the cross. It is not just a single salvation event...but it is a model for our own development and transformation. Walking the way of the cross is extolled in each of the collects. We are reminded of the pain and death Jesus went through, and yet equate this with the means of "life and peace". We are reminded of the shame and horror of this Roman torture, and exhorted to similarly bear our own trials and losses as sacrifices. Indeed, by undergoing this death, Jesus makes all of our human suffering worthy of God.

It always stuns me when people get all bent out of shape about the "insults" to Christianity, real or perceived from the culture. As our collects make clear, you can't insult this religion...as it is a religion in which humility is total and complete. There is nothing that an atheist, an anarchist....or horror of horrors...a liberal can do to Christianity that God hasn't already experienced. And honestly...the "war on Christmas" and other manufactured outrage has nothing to do with Christianity at all.

So why all this humility? Why all the self-emptying? Well...it is useless if it's puffed up humility...of the fake martyr quality that so often passes itself off as real humility. And we are all full of that quality. But what Jesus, Paul, and our collect is asking here is something deeper. For the Self which we empty is the worldly self....the self that has been created since our childhood and is concerned with status, position, achievement, outward appearance. That is the self that empties in death anyway. We are called to accelerate the process, to consciously crucify this self...to give it over to God.

And why? So that we might be changed into His likeness. In the old Athanasian formula: God became man so that Man might become God. This is the theosis of Orthodoxy. We empty ourselves so that we, as partakers of the resurrection, are able to enter into God. And while God's essence will be forever unknown to us, we can fully and more fully be filled with God Energies...deified...so that together we become truly the Body of Christ which we are promised.

This is not the only meaning of the cross....but it is a meaning that I can do something with...and that's enough for me now.