[Sermon delivered by Br. Lee Hughes, OP, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2024.]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
How many of us as we say the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary really think about it? Fifteen Mysteries, twenty if you adopt the changes put forward by Pope John Paul II, each of these Mysteries pertaining to a scene from the story of Salvation. Just focusing on the original fifteen, we have five scenes from the Infancy narratives, the last five portray events from the Resurrection onward, and the middle five, the Sorrowful Mysteries, are snapshots from the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. We recite them. We spare a few thoughts on each Mystery. Perhaps we listen to a meditation seeking a deeper spiritual meaning. Very rarely do we consider them in context with the rest, realizing them to be the linchpin of the whole story contained in the Rosary.
I say this because our readings today are all about the Suffering and Death of Our Lord.[1] We have the very familiar “Suffering Servant” passage from Isaiah, an account of Jesus as both High Priest and Sacrificial Victim from Hebrews, and His own declaration that He was to be the ransom for many in St. Mark’s Gospel. Each reading finds its reflection in the Sorrowful Mysteries: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging before Pilate, the Crowning with Thorns, the Bearing of the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death. Yet these Mysteries we enjoy the least and find the most unsettling. The mind shies away. The body recoils. The spirit shrinks. The unrelenting savagery of the progression from the suffering of anxiety and anticipation to the increasing viciousness of every injury and insult inflicted upon His innocence is too much, and we ask why we even mention these things, let alone contemplate them? It seems to be a morbid and macabre revelry in the brutality, dwelling on each detail in a strangely disturbing manner. All wonder why these events occur when they are flanked by the much happier Joyful and Glorious Mysteries.
The key phrase here, my friends, is “ransom for many.”[2]
We read, “He has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases,” and further on, “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities,” because “We like sheep have gone astray and all have followed his own way.” The Prophet Isaiah affirms here that humanity is gravely, even mortally, ill. Long ago our species separated from the life-giving presence of God, had gone its own way, and entered into a vicious cycle of Sin and Death. The Ancestral Sin ushered in Death, the presence of Death stirred up more Sin, and more Sin meant more Death. The infection is so deep that even our best actions, our most radical treatments often come with negative side-effects, our best efforts resulting often in committing the Sin which we are trying to avoid. St. Paul also understood this well. He too affirms that we all have sinned, and we all have fallen short of the glory of God, that is, we are infected with Death.[3] Despite his own best but failed efforts to expunge the curse, he cries out in frustration, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”[4] Not being one given to keep people in suspense, the Apostle immediately shares with us the solution: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[5]
My friends, the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us to address this terminal illness. We were all born circling the drain, each new life rushing headlong to oblivion, so God took on our Humanity to redeem it, to ransom it from the Void, to deliver it from the utter absurdity of its being, an act that did not go unnoticed. Enter in the principalities and powers of this present darkness. The rulers of this Age understood the Incarnation as being God’s move to effect reconciliation between Himself and those He created in His image but now were sad shadows wasting away in their mortality. Having themselves rejected God and knowing they could not destroy the object of their hatred, these same powers instead had turned to the destruction of those created a little lower than they, but created in the image of Him Whom they despised, doing everything in their power to separate Humanity from its Creator, and doing a fairly good job of it. Yet suddenly here God was! He was within the Order He created, walking as one of the despised Humans, offering reconciliation and a way out of the savagery that afflicted them since these powers drew them away from Him.
The most powerful among them tried to do the same with the Incarnate Word which had proven so successful at the beginning of Time, to entice this Human to separate from God, to set Himself up as the centre of His universe, to regard and exploit equality with God as was His right.[6] Each time, however, they were frustrated when Jesus reminded them that apart from God one could not live,[7] that one should never test God’s favour with one’s deliberately stupid choices,[8] that no one should put anyone in that relational centre except the One Who is Good, Who is Love, Who is Being, Who is Life.[9] Failing to corrupt Him, they turned to more brutal methods. Satan had trotted out Psalm 91 as the basis for one of the failed temptations in the Wilderness, so the powers of darkness decided to put that to the test. To rescue their plan to fully ruin God’s image bearers,[10] they threw every injury they could at Him by the hands of those He had come to restore. They caused multiple evils to happen to Him and sent a plague of abuse and torture at His fleshly dwelling.[11] They put stones in His path.[12] The lion and adder of mortal human cruelty they let loose upon Him,[13] hoping that He would crack and abandon this plan, or better yet die and let Hope die with Him.
The first Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary underlines that this attempt was not without merit. Our Lord prayed in the Garden fervently that if it were God’s will, that what was to come would not come to pass.[14] Yet Jesus our Great High Priest still found it in Him to pray fervently for the flock He came to redeem, and as we read in our Epistle stayed faithful and in perfect obedience sacrificed Himself, enduring the semi-flaying of the Scourging as we encounter in the second Sorrowful Mystery, the utter mocking of His authority encountered in the third Sorrowful Mystery, His humiliation before all Humanity encountered in the fourth Sorrowful Mystery, and the final torture and killing of the Incarnate Son of the Most High encountered in the fifth Sorrowful Mystery. Having failed to get God to abandon the Incarnation, having failed from corrupting the New Adam, the principalities and powers of the present darkness succeeded in destroying the body of Our Lord, hoping to destroy the plan of redemption.
Had they understood the plan, however, “they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.”[15]
Our Lord stated that He was to give His life as a ransom for many.[16] He did not come among us to enjoy being served in yet another form. God’s eternal purpose was indeed to suffer and die, to realize the archetype of the Passover Sacrifice in the Person of the Word, to reconstitute the bearer of the Divine Image by uniting Divine Nature with Human Nature so that when the perfectly obedient New Adam incurred unjustly the penalty of our separation from God, the presence of the Divine Nature wedded to Human Nature would destroy that separation. The nothingness of Death cannot prevail when Life is present, and when Life Eternal accompanied the New Adam to the place of the Dead, Death was banished, and hope was restored. The antidote to our terminal condition came with the Death of the Lord of Glory, for Death could not hold Him, and Human Nature was renewed, reconstituted, reconciled to God.
As we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, we need to keep this in mind. We need to keep these readings in mind. We pray them not to engage in some hyper-romantic morbid fixation on a horror story, but to remember the struggle God Himself endured so that we might be reconciled to Him. He carried our Nature through the fires of Death in order to reunite it to the fire of Life, to make it anew, free from the taint of separation from God, for it was no longer separated from God and enjoys new life in God through the obedience of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In entering Baptism, we through the Holy Spirit engage in the His death, with Him dying to our old Nature, and in coming up from the water uniting with His Resurrection and putting on the new Nature. The Sorrowful Mysteries are not a sad tale of the death of hope but the account of the forging of our Redemption, the furnace, the hammer, and the anvil that shaped our new Nature, won for us by Our Lord. No longer is the call to repentance a hopeless struggle to abandon our separation from God, because God has obliterated that separation so that our repentance has a focus, has meaning, has effectiveness, for Our Lord has made us holy, has given us a new Nature, so that we in turn have something to sustain us when the old Nature passes away, as it is destined to do.
“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”[17]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, and the power of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross, Saviour save us. Amen.
[2] Mk. 10.45
[3] Rom. 3.23
[4] Rom. 7.24
[5] Rom. 8.1
[6] Phil. 2.6
[7] Lk. 4.4
[8] Lk. 4.12
[9] Lk. 4.6
[10] This concept is further explored in the Diocese of Calgary’s new catechism, The Call of the Image Bearers: A Narrative Catechism (Br. Jason Carroll, OP, Anglican Diocese of Calgary, 2024).
[11] Ps. 91.10
[12] Ps. 91.12
[13] Ps. 91.13
[14] Mt. 26.39
[15] 1 Cor. 2.8
[16] Mk. 10.45
[17] Rom. 6.25
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