The Feast of the Lord’s Passion, which we have longed for and which the whole world may well desire, has come, and it does not allow us to keep silence in the tumult of our spiritual joys.
Though it is difficult to speak often on the same subject worthily and appropriately, the priest is not free to withhold from the people instruction by sermon on this great mystery of God’s mercy. The subject itself, being unspeakable, gives him ease of utterance, and what is said cannot altogether fail where what is said can never be enough. Let human frailty, then, yield to God’s glory, and always acknowledge itself unequal to the unfolding of His works of mercy. Let us labour in thought, fail in insight and falter in speech: it is good that even our right thoughts about the Lord’s majesty should be insufficient. For, remembering what the prophet says, “Seek the Lord and be strengthened; seek His face always”, no one must suppose that he has found all he seeks, lest he fail to draw near if he ceases in his efforts. And among all the works of God which exhaust man’s wondering contemplation, what so delights and yet so confounds our gaze as the Saviour’s Passion? Ponder as we may upon His omnipotence, which is of one and equal substance with the Father, the humility in God is more astonishing than His power, and it is harder to grasp the complete self emptying of the divine majesty than the exaltation of the servant’s form in Him. Yet we are greatly helped in understanding this by remembering that, although the Creator and the creature, the inviolable God and passible flesh, are utterly different, the properties of both natures meet in the one Person of Christ, so that in His acts both of weakness and of power, the humiliation belongs to the same Person as the glory.
In that rule of faith, dearly beloved, which we have received from the beginning in the Creed, on the authority of apostolic teaching, we acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we call the only Son of God the Father Almighty, to have been born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. Nor do we deny His majesty when we profess our belief in His crucifixion, death and resurrection on the third day. For all that is God’s and all that is man’s are fulfilled together in His manhood and His Godhead, so that, through the union of the passible with the impassible, His power is not diminished by His weakness, nor His weakness overcome by His power. And rightly was the blessed Apostle Peter praised for confessing this union. When the Lord asked what the disciples understood about Him, he anticipated the others and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And this he perceived not by flesh and blood, which might have obscured his insight, but by the Spirit of the Father working in his believing heart, so that, in preparation for governing the whole Church, he might first learn what he was to teach, and for the strengthening of the faith which he was to preach, he might receive the assurance: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The strength of the Christian faith, therefore, which is built upon an unshakable rock and fears not the gates of death, confesses the one Lord Jesus Christ to be both true God and true Man, believing Him also to be the Virgin’s Son, who is the Creator of His mother: born at the end of the ages, though He is the Creator of time; Lord of all power, yet one of mortal stock; without sin, yet sacrificed for sinners in the likeness of sinful flesh.
In order that He might set the human race free from the bonds of deadly transgression, He concealed the power of His majesty from the raging devil and opposed him with our frail and humble nature. For if that cruel and proud enemy had known the design of God’s mercy, he would have sought to calm the minds of the Jews rather than inflame them with unjust hatred, lest he should lose his hold over all his captives by attacking the freedom of One who owed him nothing. Thus he was overcome by his own malice: he inflicted punishment upon the Son of God, which became the healing of all the sons of men. He shed righteous blood, which became the ransom and the drink of the world’s atonement. The Lord undertook what He chose, according to the purpose of His own will. He permitted men in their madness to lay their wicked hands upon Him, hands which, in bringing about their own ruin, served the work of the Redeemer. Yet so great was His compassion even for His murderers that He prayed to the Father on the cross, asking not for vengeance but for their forgiveness, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And such was the power of that prayer that the hearts of many of those who had said, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), were turned to repentance by the preaching of the Apostle Peter, and in one day about 3,000 Jews were baptised. They were all of one heart and one soul (Acts 4:32), now ready to die for Him whose crucifixion they had demanded.
This forgiveness the traitor Judas could not obtain. He, the son of perdition, at whose right the devil stood, gave himself over to despair before Christ had accomplished the mystery of universal redemption. For since the Lord died for sinners, perhaps even he might have found salvation if he had not hastened to hang himself. But that evil heart, given over at one time to theft and at another to treachery, had never received the signs of the Saviour’s mercy. Those wicked ears had heard the Lord say, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13), and “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10), yet they did not grasp the clemency of Christ, who not only healed bodily ailments but also cured wounded souls, saying to the paralytic, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you” (Matthew 9:3), and to the adulteress, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more”, showing in all His works that He came as Saviour, not as judge of the world. But the wicked traitor refused to understand this and turned against himself, not in repentance, but in despair. Thus he who had sold the Author of life to His murderers increased even in death the sin that condemned him.
Accordingly, what false witnesses, cruel leaders of the people and wicked priests did against the Lord Jesus Christ, through the agency of a cowardly governor and an ignorant band of soldiers, has been both the horror and the joy of all ages. For although the Lord’s cross was part of the cruel intention of the Jews, yet it is full of wondrous power through Him whom they crucified. The fury of the people was directed against one, but the mercy of Christ is for all mankind. What their cruelty inflicted, He freely endured, so that the work of His eternal will might be fulfilled through their unhindered crime. And so the whole order of events, as fully recounted in the Gospels, must be received by the faithful in such a way that, by firm belief in what took place at the time of the Lord’s Passion, we understand that not only was the forgiveness of sins accomplished by Christ, but also that the demands of justice were satisfied. But that this may be examined more fully with the Lord’s help, let us reserve this part of the subject until the fourth day of the week.
We trust that God’s grace, through your prayers, will enable us to fulfil what we have promised, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
