Tuesday in Holy Week: Love That Feels and Pities All

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 71:1-14
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
John 12:20-36

As I mentioned last night, during this week we are using the poetry of John Keble’s The Christian Year in order to engage emotionally and devotionally with the events of Holy Week, the events of our Lord’s passion and death. In a sermon on the theme of “Christ’s Own Preparation for His Passion”, Keble asks: “For what is the purpose of the Holy Church Universal in appointing this particular time of the year, in which for so many days we are to follow step by step, through all the stages of his bitter passion first, and then of his triumphant victory over death?” He answers his own question, when he says that “what is meant is, that we, by the help of God’s Holy Spirit, should make what happened to him as present to us, and as near to us, as ever we can; that we should…‘have the mind of Christ’ ”. He hopes that by making those events present to ourselves and us present to them, they will not “fail to come home to us”, they will not fail to touch us in ways more than just intellectual or theological, but emotional and experiential.

To that end in his poem for the Tuesday before Easter, Keble paints with words a touching image of the suffering Christ:

“The Cross is sharp, and He

“Is tenderer than a lamb.

“He wept by Lazarus' grave – how will He bear

“This bed of anguish? and His pale weak form

“Is worn with many a watch

“Of sorrow and unrest.

“His sweat last night was as great drops of blood,

“And the sad burthen pressed Him so to earth.”

Keble wants us to enter truly into the feelings of our Lord, into the agonies of his Passion, without allowing our intellectual knowledge of Christ’s divinity or of his eventual resurrection to dim the reality of the pain and suffering he endured. As I spoke last night about God’s love for us particularly, not just generally or theoretically; so tonight we are asked to contemplate truly the suffering of Christ, “the long hours of death as, one by one, the life-strings of that tender heart gave way.” We are called to enter into the heart of Christ as far as we are able to contemplate with our hearts how all this could have been possible. Keble draws us to almost ask of Christ himself: how could he deliver himself to be “now of mortal pangs, made heir, and emptied of [his] glory, awhile, with unaverted eye…[meet] all the storm?”

Keble does arrive at an answer, but it is the not the answer of theology, not an intelletualised response based on classical definition of the nature of Christ, neither a reasoned argument of sacrifice or salvation. Keble discerns an answer not in the mind of Christ, as such, but in the heart of Christ. Keble finds it in love which is willing to “feel all, that [it] may pity all”. Keble discerns it in Christ’s love:

As the deep calm that breathed, “Father, forgive,”

Or, “Be with Me in Paradise to-day?”

And, though the strife be sore,

Yet in His parting breath

Love masters Agony…

It is not Jesus knowing, but Jesus loving that which saves us; and we cannot apprehend that love’s depths, or breadth or height unless we are willing to set aside for awhile – and especially at this time – our intellectual pondering and listen closely to our heart, our emotions, our own ability to love and desire to be loved; in short, unless we do as Jesus himself did and enter fully into what it means to be human.