Wonderful, beautiful, profound!

Thanks Christopher - but for me - God who joins us in our suffering - who hangs from the tree is the essence of incarnation - I did not know the church had moved away from that -- not in my small part of the world.

Christopher,

Thank you for this piece, for the poetry of it, and particularly for your theologically rich meditation on the essential oneness of all we celebrate in our HolyWeek/Pascha.

I don't see how the current stage of continuing liturgical reform has rejected a passion theme, and like Ann, I do find the incarnational integrity of Holy Week/Pascha that you write about familiar.

Good Friday in the 1979 Prayer Book is richer and more Catholic than it was in 1928 and I hear congregations working to find further enrichment of that celebration as I also hear a useful concern about a medieval distillation of atonement theory that would have us rejoice that 'God killed Jesus because God loved us so much.' I heard those words in a recent sermon in a Rite II liturgy. The preacher's account of who to blame for Jesus' death ultimately included all humankind (and so offered a kind of invitation to contrition). But making the God Jesus taught called Abba a killer severs Jesus' suffering and ours and that of other creatures from Good News.. That sermon's version of contrition made God's love a horror story.

So, trusting what I read in your piece, I'm continue to reflect on the difference between contrition as a simple, joyful gift (Good News) and contrition as a medium of exchange in the presence of a dangerous, killing Father God (a story I don't recognize as fully Christian).

Not too long ago, when I was still a parish rector, a Sunday School teacher asked me how to tell the children about Easter without talking about Jesus' death. Like you, I was concerned at such an impulse to abandon our " incarnational and cruciform tradition," and I was grateful for the teachable moment. Beyond her question
- which led to a substantial and serious engagement of Sunday School kids with their experience of unfair suffering and loss, stories they heard of people hurting and killing other people, and how Jesus' death shows us where God is in all that -

we talked talked more broadly about how we adults can celebrate the gift of life and God's love without averting our eyes from suffering, evil, violence and death. It is Good News that Jesus has gone before us and travels with us through the worst of human cruelty, scapegoating, and abandonment and that he's with us out of love no matter what. But like Ann, my impression is that many, many congregations and most of our lay and clergy teachers continue to invite us into the cruciform, unflinching story of God's mercy and love for us and God's presence with us in Jesus as we live through our worst fears and suffering.

Many of us ARE working to re-think atonement, exploring fresh inspiration in the ancient church's atonement theories. And knowing who killed Jesus and why does make a difference to how we practice contrition. Actually knowing that he died as freely as Oscar Romero or Gandhi, that he didn't die a victim changes contrition completely.

Many of us also see human destructiveness marring creation and are touched and moved by Celtic and other Christian traditions that renew our gratitude and awe for the great gift of the whole created world. I get that in your radiant delight in the richness of life in the woods where you walk your dog.

Maximus the Confessor (6th-7th century) boldly proclaimed that from even before creation's beginning, "Always and everywhere the God the Word longs to become incarnate in the entire created world."

A western writer like Julian of Norwich praying her way through the Black Plague, and spend her whole life meditating on a youthful vision of Christ's suffering (blood, sweat, agony, cold and darkness) also hears in that vision God's joyful voice reassuring her that, 'All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.'

My own concern about Holy Week celebrations church-wide is much less the impulse that some do have to distill our central remembering to a happy, spring-time story, as if St. Paul had said, 'I resolved to know nothing but Jesus Christ, and him resurrected,' (that is not 'Jesus Christ, and him crucified' as Paul actually wrote).
I worry about another liturgical-spiritual impulse that seems more common, an impulse and pedagogy that will keep us from the richness of what you write and experience here. I don't trust any sentimental and deliberately naive walk through Holy Week. I think it's less than fully Christian to strive for a feeling of re-enactment as if the events were unfolding without our knowing God's remaking them all in the resurrection. That's not an apostolic remembering. It's a form of contrition that still allows us to blame and scapegoat others. It goes to the Good Friday that the medieval Jewish ghetto dreaded for the violence it unleashed against them.

In St. Paul's writings, in the Gospels, and in our oldest liturgical and theological texts, all of Jesus' passion is clearly and consistently remembered and told through the perspective of a transforming resurrection experience, each text finding its distinctive way to Jesus resurrection/reconciliation promise from St. John's Gospel that Desmond Tutu loves to quote, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself." That's the vision that allows John's Gospel to give Jesus' triumphant words from the cross, 'It is finished.'

I appreciate how well your piece (like this old pattern of remembering) holds the terrible pieces of evil and suffering in the context of God's faithfulness and Jesus' resurrected presence. I hope and pray that more of our churches actually do get this single Passion/Pascha frame than you've experienced.

Fragmenting Holy Week/Easter through naive re-enactment is as dangerous to those doing it as it was to those, like the Jews who got labeled as Christ-killers. Naively re-telling of the story verges toward the spirituality of the Penitente sect's annual reenactment of a crucifixion. As their name suggests, their faith and practice centered in contrition and penitence. Their passion play used real nails. They didn't mean to kill anyone, just to enter wholly into the experience of Christ and his killers and betraying friends. Thank God, we don't 'honor' a member of our village by crucifying him in a passion re-enaactment. But the penitente sensibility persists in a much toned down form when our artificial (and sentimental) sense of 'contrition' gets stirred up as we act as if the Passion story is unfolding before us in the present tense. That's not a Pascha celebrated in the embrace of our living Lord Jesus.

Holy Week is a resurrection celebration from beginning to end. Even the terror of it. Even the worst of it.
Again, I hear that in what you've written. Your piece (and your prayer that shaped it) holds the whole mystery at once.
And how could we celebrate a Palm Sunday procession except in the living presence of our Resurrected Lord?
What would a Maundy/Last Supper celebration or a Good Friday CELEBRATION be without the resurrection?

So through all this I'm asking how our contrition can be like Julian of Norwich's
and our incarnational theology as embracing of the whole creation as Maximus the Confessor's.

Last night at St. Gregory's, San Francisco for Good Friday vespers,
the feeling in this Byzantine hymn reminded me of your piece:

You were naked and cold in death,
O You who wear light as a robe,
and the Nobel Joseph and Nicodemus
removed you from the cross with grief and tears so tender.
And Joseph mourned and prayed:
"O what has happened, O gentle Jesus?
The sun saw you suspended from the cross and shrouded itself in darkness;
the earth quaked from fear; and the temple veil was rent asunder!
For my sake, O Saviour, you willingly endured your passion.
How then shall array your Body O my God?
How then shall I wrap you in this shroud?
How then shall I hymn your burial?
O my Lord, most merciful!
You death and rising shall I praise as I sing
O Lord, glory to you!

Fr Schell,

It is precisely this, a wind of American cultural docetism, that concerns me and it shows up in some of our most popular spirituality and bible study books: "tell about Easter without talking about Jesus' death." Or, tell about Easter without telling of his bodily Resurrection, and I'm sophisticated enough to recognize that his is a changed body, but bodily nevertheless, a la St. Thomas, misnamed the Doubter. St. Thomas the Curious or the Courageous might be better.

Our BCP, I would agree, maintains a strong link, but popular writers do not and our culture does not. I would point out however that in my context, the West Coast, the BCP is increasingly sidelined for all sorts of (often not well-thought-through) liturgies. An observation I am not alone in making among liturgists.

And I would add, I'm not talking just of certain celebrations, but piety, overall image-formation and affect-formation, a spirituality. I would say that on the whole a Lenten-piety with its emphasis on Christ's passion and our sin overcome, does not characterize current Episcopal practice in the same way it did for say a George Herbert whose Love III is composed in the context of Cranmer's anaphora. Having examined our anaphora, the latest issuance seem less hardnosed about facing sin and its effects and his overcoming of it, the cost of God (the Son) facing into death, the cost of God's self, of Love.

Now, there are (at least) two ways to go to get us to recognition of utter dependence upon and confident trust in God, one is emphasize praise of God, the other is to show what sin hath wrought and Christ overcomes on the cross. In the words of the exchange of a Peace Offering as in Lancelot Andrewes, on the cross he takes our sin, and in the Holy Communion, he offers us friendship. The two pieties are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but the emphasis on sin and our nothing-ness, worth-lessness, life-lessness, properly understood as we are nought save God, has characterized many of our prayers and social reforms in a more passion-cruciform form rather than in a more praise form. I think we need both. And I think over the long centuries of our development as a tradition, we have incorporated both. I want us to keep it that way, and when I hear Anglican leaders say things like "The Resurrection isn’t about the after life, it’s about the living of this life free from the power of death,” I get concerned because it has implications all along the whole of Christological (and ecclesiological) teaching. And I've heard that saying a lot among more liberal Anglican leaders.

Christ's death is a contradiction to us, shows up our hardness of heart, uncovers our ways with one another. To pull that bodily challenge from the mix is not to deal with life honestly. A romanticizing can set in that has extended praises for creation without facing where we fall short. That's what our latest anaphorae look like for me, and so when I encounter the remains of a Snake as I did, I find a stronger cruciform and sin emphasis necessary.

At stake in such a perspective is ultimately the Incarnation himself. Just as we were, are, and will be always his, to quote, Maurice, for by him we are made, as I say, the minute God became human and came to his own, it was all over for the powers of sin and death--this is shown once for all on the cross where Christ triumphs over death by death, to borrow from that ancient Eastern hymn.

But this sort of spiritualizing of the Resurrection goes hand in glove with ignoring the effects of a market economy on others, both human and others creatures. And it isn't unrelated to how we spiritualize the Resurrection and then so materialize fellow creatures and creation as mere matter to use as we will rather than see these are God's creatures and they show forth something of God's glory.

Contrition for me is about receiving the Good News and acting from him, not about appeasement or propitiation. I would note that we misunderstand the likes of St Anselm, who so influences our BCP in its older forms, if we fail to understand that Jesus is God. That is where modern takes on St Anselm's own understanding of atonement, coupled with a failure to understand his Medieval context, go gravely awry and we get the sort of preaching you mention. But I wont' blame St. Anselm for others' misappropriations. His overall piety is closer to Mother Julian's than to modern Evangelicals.

Contrition is related to an affect, of seeing our hardened hearts before him who draws the whole world to himself lifted on high, high on a cross as well as high in his resurrection, and turning around--repentence, conversion, seeing God's handiwork in one another and in creation. The goal isn't to appease, or propitiate, but to recognize our utter dependency and in confident trust live for him.

Christopher, powerfully true and artfully composed. Thanks for this basket of good things.

Greg Jones

Christopher, this is great. Let me just say that your comment is a nice complement to the text, and I felt compelled to say a loud Amen to most of the points you raised.

Christ is risen. Alleluia. I wish everybody a joyful Easter!

This is excellent! I'm going to have to chew on this one a while to get the most out of the many angles you've put in here.