Psalm 36:5-11
Hebrews 9:11-15
John 12:1-11
Among other aspects of the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was the centrality of emotion. In one sense, the movement’s definition of humanity was as “feeling” beings”, more than “thinking beings. This view affected all aspects of society and thought, including theology, preaching and devotional writing. In these was demonstrated a renewed emphasis on the love of God, and on the humanity of Christ as expressed in his feelings and emotions. John Keble’s writings were no exception, and the poems of his work The Christian Year are infused with an appeal to our emotions, they tug at our hearts with the hope that we will be wakened into devotion and renewal. Each of the days for which there are propers in the English Book of Common Prayer, there is poem to bring into sharper focus the meaning of the day in relation to the Church’s year – certainly, but more especially in relation to the reader’s own journey with God. In each of the days of Holy Week he highlights some real emotion, whether of God the Father, or of Jesus himself, and challenges us to enter into those emotions for a renewed experience of God, but also for a more immediate experience of the Holy Week mysteries we are observing.
I would like to offer that in each of these three nights we examine the poems not as “rational” beings – although we can never really put aside our reason, but as emotional beings, allowing ourselves to be placed into various parts of the Holy Week story and thereby hopefully glimpse something of them in a new way, hear them in a new voice. Now, the lectionary of the English prayer book is different from ours, and so the readings on which Keble based his poetry are not the same. Nevertheless his poems for each the days of Holy Week still sit well with our present lectionary.
In the 14th century Julian of Norwich discerned the meaning of Christ’s suffering and death as love. Knowingly or not, Keble focuses on this love in his poem for the Monday before Easter:
Out of the bosom of His love He spares –
The Father spares the Son, for thee to die:
For thee He died – for thee He lives again:
O'er thee He watches in His boundless reign
Thou art as much His care, as if beside
Nor man nor angel lived in Heaven or earth:….
Thou art thy Saviour's darling – seek no more.
But the love of God about which he writes, is not essentially a generic, even universal love. It is a particular and personal love. It the sort of love that a parent may have for a child, or one friend for another. It is the kind of divine love expressed in the lesson from Isaiah, which while representing God, as “the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it” (Isaiah 42:5), also represents God as one who calls each of us “in righteousness”, who takes us by the hand and keeps us (cf. Isaiah 42:6) and who shares with each of us – personally – the divine glory. (cf. Isaiah 42:8).
If we were raised in the Christian faith, we heard from a young age that “God is love” with the injunction that we “love one another”. Yet, that love we hear about can sometimes feel generic or carry with it a cosmic sense, so that we never can apprehend it as directly focused on ourself. It rarely feels personal. Yet, when we examine the Scriptures more closely they reveal the particularity of God’s love and care. They so often reveal the divine love not in generic ways, but in personal and specific ways, in personal and specific relationships: he chooses Abram and Sarai to be parents of a great nation, he chooses Moses to lead that nation out of slavery, and eventually he chooses David to lead that nation into a great kingdom. We see it further revealed in the person of Jesus, who – but for some exceptional cases – always engages with people as individuals. His love and care are somehow localised. Even at his passion and crucifixion, his care and attention seems always personal – the women of Jerusalem, the thief on the cross, his mother Mary and disciple John. Keble extends this to suggest that in that final week before his crucifixion, Jesus thought of each person, each soul, particularly:
E'en in His hour of agony He thought,
When, ere the final pang His soul should rend,
The ransomed spirits one by one were brought
To His mind's eye…
As we walk with Jesus through Holy Week, engage with your emotions and see for a moment all that he does and has done for you; not in some theological or intellectual sense, but in the sense that touches us where we live, as it were. We can sometimes us the theological understanding of God’s love to avoid facing emotionally its meaning and implications. But God, loves you; not you in any generic sense, but you in a very personal sense. While God’s love indeed, “reaches to the heavens and [his] faithfulness to the clouds”, it reveals itself in the lives of particular people, in particular situations; it is the kind of love under which you can take refuge, and which comes into your own heart and home. Part of the observances of Holy Week is the Church’s way of trying to make palpable the love of God, make it a real and present reality. She helps us to recall that in all that happens, God’s meaning is love – real love for you and for me, for each and everyone of us, particularly.
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