Sermons by Fr Guy Nicholls (Cong Orat), our Chaplain

Once more in the Gospel we return to the first Easter Day. Last Sunday we heard St John’s account of the two appearances to the Apostles in the Upper Room: the first on Easter evening, and the second the following Sunday, bringing Thomas to faith. We have just heard another account of that first appearance in the Upper Room, which St Luke describes as taking place after Cleopas and his companion had rushed back to tell the Apostles about their astonishing experience on the walk to Emmaus, how Christ had revealed to them His risen self in the blessing and breaking of the bread, and had explained to them how the Old Testament Scriptures had been fulfilled in all that had happened to the Him on Calvary.

Now we hear of the Lord’s appearance quite suddenly and those reassuring words, ‘Peace be with you’. The Apostles, however, in a state of alarm and fright, believe that they are seeing some kind of disembodied spirit. It is impossible that the man who was just now killed in so abominably cruel a way could be alive. Yet He doesn’t seem to sympathise with their fears, instead upbraiding them, ‘why are you so agitated and why do these doubts rise in your hearts?’ This is a constant theme in these appearances after the Resurrection. In St John’s Gospel, too, last week, St Thomas was especially upbraided by our Lord for his obstinate refusal to believe his companions when they told him that they had seen the Lord, risen from the dead.

Yet both Thomas in St John’s Gospel, and all the Apostles in this one, are made to change their minds precisely by the sight, and the touch, of Christ’s wounded hands and feet. It must seem strange at first that this should be reassuring, that to see and touch his wounds should even cause those frightened men to rejoice exceedingly. Why should the palpable evidence of the crucifixion fill them with joy? It is surely because from now on those wounds are the evidence that even that terrible death has not destroyed Him. More than that, not only has death not destroyed him, but He has brought the marks of the nails and spear into His new life, carrying them in His living body as a sign that He has not simply passed through death and left it behind like an old garment, but has absorbed death into Himself in a way that totally annihilates its destructive power.

So, too, He takes a piece of fish and eats it so as to prove to them - not that He needs that kind of nourishment any longer - but that He can still eat. This is not only another way of proving to them the sheer physical reality of His risen state, but it points towards something hugely significant about the risen state: the possibility of still being able to enjoy real food. Our Lord is, I believe, suggesting to the Apostles that, although He has now overcome the physical limitations of the body before death, His body still has the ability to enjoy nourishment in company with others, and thus He teaches us that when He has finally raised our mortal bodies and made them like His own in glory, we will likewise be able to eat and drink with Him in His heavenly kingdom.

Yet even so, all this is still only part of what He wants to teach them. After showing them that He is truly alive, He goes on to do what He had also just done on the road to Emmaus: He opens their minds to understand the scriptures. All that we read and understand in the Old Testament finds its meaning in Christ. Indeed, we only see and read Scripture in this way because Christ Himself has showed us how to read it. As I put it on Easter morning, the ‘fulfilment of the Scriptures’ of which we speak in the Creed, means not that Christ was compelled to act in certain ways simply in order to prove His credentials, but rather that those texts were obscure until He gave them their true meaning in His Passion. I think that this way of understanding the ‘fulfilment of the Scriptures’ also helps us to make sense of something else we hear in today’s first reading. Maybe you have wondered how it was possible that the High Priest, the Sanhedrin, all the chief priests and the Scribes, and all those who were whipped up into a frenzy to persuade Pontius Pilate that Jesus must die, could have failed to see that the Old Testament texts they read every week in the synagogue were even then being fulfilled in their presence, and through their own efforts. While they were doing those things to Christ, how can they not have heard those words of the prophet Isaiah echoing in their ears: ‘I offered my back to those who struck me...I did not cover my face against insult and spittle’, and in the psalms: ‘they tear holes in my hands and my feet...they divide my clothing among them, they cast lots for my robe’, and in His words on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And how did they not catch themselves saying some of those very words in mockery, like ‘He trusted in the Lord, let Him save him! Let him release him if this is his friend’? Yet Peter says to the people in the Temple that ‘neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing.’ They did not know at the time, for all those Old Testament prophecies were opaque, were without their true context, until they had been fulfilled in the person and sufferings of Christ. And in this way, says Peter, was God’s Will fulfilled.

Peter ends today’s first reading with this call to repentance: ‘Now you must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out.’ And how does our Lord end today’s Gospel? With a call to repentance: ‘So you see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in His name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations.’

In a world which no longer takes seriously the idea of sin, it is hard to get the urgency of this message across. Sin is not merely an infringement of the moral code, a breach of the Ten Commandments, serious enough as that is. Sin is far worse, it is an offence against the goodness and love of God and is a monstrous distortion of our true nature – so very horrid because we do not even necessarily realise just how much harm it does to us. Sin is at the root of all selfishness, the canker which blinds us to the horror of rebellion against God; and this can be nowhere more clearly and horribly seen than in the terrible things Christ endured solely for love of us and at our hands. All this ‘had to be fulfilled’ because of sin, and because God in His love and wisdom deemed that there was no other way to rescue us all from the stifling power of sin, and bring us back to the glorious image of the Creator, lost through sin.

A sense of sin is not morbid. It is a true sense of reality. It is like the sense of pain, without which we could do irreparable harm to ourselves. The denial of sin makes us unresponsive to God’s love. That is why the call to repent of our sins is central to the preaching of the resurrection. St John in the second reading says that he is writing to his children ‘to stop you sinning’. For St John, Christ’s sacrifice in us is not perfected until we have done with the corrosion of sin. Yet if anyone should sin, says St John, then we have our advocate with the Father, ‘Jesus Christ...[who] is the sacrifice that takes our sins away.’ Unless our sins are taken away, we cannot hope to share in Christ’s risen glory. It is by turning in repentance to our Advocate, Jesus our merciful Lord, and humbly acknowledging that, even though we had no idea what our sins were really doing, we, too were responsible for Christ’s sufferings, that we can find the way to life and glory. Simply put, we need to recover our love for our risen Saviour as He comes to us in confession, in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. In the words of a familiar Easter hymn; ‘Paschal triumph, paschal joy, only sin can this destroy. From the death of sin set free, souls reborn, dear Lord, in Thee!’ It is the death of the soul, as well as that of the body, which is overcome by Christ at Easter, and here and now He begins to share it with us, but He will bring it to perfection only when we, too, have passed beyond death and into eternal life, and see Him face to face for all eternity in glory.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, the words which ended the Gospel reading you have just heard seem originally to have been the closing words of St John’s account of all that he wanted to tell the Church about our Lord. At the end of this dramatic revelation of the risen Christ, first of all to the ten apostles without Thomas, then to the eleven with Thomas, our Lord commends Thomas’s words of faith, ‘My Lord and my God’ with these words: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ Those would have been the final words spoken by our Lord in this Gospel until the 21st chapter was added to make a new and different end of this Gospel, and how wonderfully reassuring those words of our Lord’s are to us, none of whom has yet seen our Lord in His human form.

I want to reflect a little on the significance of these final words in the light of what St John goes on to say himself in the following sentence which brought our Gospel reading and this chapter to an end, namely: ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book.; these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.’

This is the entire purpose for which St John has written down his Gospel; it is so that we may have faith in Jesus in two essential ways: first as the Christ, that is the ‘anointed one’ or Messiah, and secondly as the Son of God. As Christ, Jesus is a very special man: He is the one anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Redeemer of the world. Being our Redeemer is described as a particular work Jesus was given to do, a work that was to bring us to faith in Him. Exactly what is so important about having faith in Him will become clear in a few moments. The work of being our Redeemer was carried out by Jesus in all His signs, or miracles, and in His teaching, but most of all in His Passion, Death and Resurrection which we have just been celebrating. Those events, the events of Holy Week and Easter, are the climax and fulfilment of his work. But there is more to this than literally meets the eye. For all that is visible in Jesus is the human element. He is truly man. But there is also that about Him which is not visible to us: He is truly God as well as man. He is, in fact, as St John says here: ‘the Son of God’. That is more than a merely honorific title. It is the essence of what Jesus is in Himself. He is Almighty God who has become man in order to become the Christ, the anointed Redeemer. He is uniquely the Son of the Eternal Father, equal to Him in all ways.

Now what is so important about having faith in Jesus Christ, about believing in Him? It is that by this faith in Him we may, as John puts it, ‘have life in His name’. So, according to John, faith in our Lord, and life, belong inseparably together. Faith is not just some kind of abstract mental act. Nor is it just speaking or thinking in a certain way. It is about a wholly new way of life, a wholly new way of living in God. Note that I am not saying living with God, but in Him. For St John, faith has begun a wholly new kind of existence for those who are privileged to have been given it, a life which begins here in this world, but which looks forward to, and will be fulfilled in, eternal life in heaven.

What does this mean? Life in Christ is for St John the entire purpose of our Lord’s having become Man, and having died and risen to new life. This new life is a spiritual life, the one for which we were created by God in the first place – a life which was lost to us because of the sin of our first parents, and a loss which is continued whenever we sin. But once we have been set free from sin, then we do truly begin to live the life which we hope to live fully in heaven.

In order to understand what St John means by faith and life here in the Gospel, we must turn back to the second reading, taken from St John’s first letter to those he addresses as his own children whom he has begotten in baptism. Here we heard these words: ‘Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been begotten by God, and whoever loves the Father that begot him loves the child whom He begets.’ In baptism we were born anew, and in that birth God became our Father, not just metaphorically, but in reality. It is only because of this new birth that we are able to address God as ‘Our Father’. Without the new birth of baptism we simply could not do so except in a sort of poetic way. But God is truly our Father and we are truly His children through the new birth of baptism, and it is to baptism that we must turn to understand all this yet more fully.

At the Easter Vigil throughout the world the sacrament of baptism was celebrated in which many men and women were given the new birth by which they, like us who have already been baptised, became God’s sons and daughters. But there is only one person who can by nature be called Son of God, and that is Christ Jesus. As St John said at the end of today’s Gospel reading: ‘these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life in His name.’ Baptism, then, makes us into God’s sons and daughters by adoption, after the model of the Only Son of God by nature, Jesus Christ our Lord and Redeemer.

Now I have said that a new life has begun in us at our baptism. What sort of life is it, in fact? It is a life lived in unity with God and by leaving behind the old ways of sin and of the world. The world seems often to be very real and very enticing, but it is only full of empty promises and comes all to soon to an end in death. But the life we have been given in baptism endures to eternal life. Yet we would be very mistaken if we thought that this new life was something that made no demands on us. Leaving the ways of the world behind takes courage and something more: grace and love. St John emphasises constantly the power of God’s love to transform us into the ever greater likeness of Christ. He asks this question: ‘who can overcome the world?’ and he answers: ‘only the man who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.’ This is our new life: faith in Jesus and life in Him.

Life in Him. What does that mean? It means two things: first of all, obeying God’s commandments. These commands are not difficult for those who love God, says St John, because the difficulty comes from the world and Christ has overcome the world already by his death and resurrection. We share in the effects of that by our faith, which comes with baptism and becoming God’s children.

But there is something else which must not be missed. John says that Jesus the Son of God became man so that He might come to us ‘by water and blood’. What does he mean? He means that Jesus comes to us not only by His incarnation but by His death and resurrection. It is especially from His death and resurrection that He gives to us both the water of baptism and the blood of Holy Communion. The sacraments which we celebrate are the life of whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God. For these sacraments are not empty rites, but the actual lifeblood of the Church, guaranteed as true and real by the Holy Spirit who has also been sent to the Church as a witness to the truth that Jesus is Son of God, Redeemer, and is the risen Saviour who raises us up to new life in baptism. The water of baptism planted in us a seed which is nourished by the food of Holy Communion. This food prepares us for our own bodily resurrection to eternal life with God our Father, with God the Son our brother, and with God the Holy Spirit who is the love of God poured into our hearts.

This is what Thomas came to believe when he beheld Christ’s wounds: not signs of death but of new life communicated to us in Christ’s body and blood. So too we can say at Mass: 'My Lord and my God’, looking forward to that day when we will behold with ecstatic joy those wounds, knowing that we have been made alive by them for ever. This is what it means to ‘have life in His name’.

Think about these words from the Creed: “And [He] rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”. The fulfilment of the Scriptures has been a constant theme of the events of Holy Week. The great psalms of the Passion, especially psalms 21 and 68, provide many of the texts we have heard in the Gospels: “they have pierced my hands and my feet”; “for my garments they cast lots”; “In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”; and most poignantly of all: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Our Lord’s sufferings were very public. His enemies could stand before Him as He hung dying on the cross and they also used the words of psalm 21: “He trusted in God that He would deliver Him; let Him deliver Him then, if He delight in Him”.

Yet these psalms, although they are so full of anguish and loss, actually end in confident trust in God. They are written, not about the Suffering Saviour, but out of His own mouth, as though composed by Him. And so indeed, in a sense, they are. For the truth about the fulfilment of Scripture is not that Our Lord had to do certain things to prove His credentials, but that all the prophecies which were about Him remained obscure and mysterious until their proper and full meaning was at last revealed by Him. That is the way in which Our Lord Himself “expounded the Scriptures” to the disciples on the way to Emmaus on the evening of that first Easter Day, explaining to them how “it was necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter into His glory.”

It is Our Lord’s victory over sin and death that we are celebrating today. And yet again, thanks to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the psalmist provides us with insight into this great and wonderful mystery. The Introit of today’s joyful Mass begins with words from an ancient Christian version of psalm 138, using the words as spoken by our Saviour: “I have risen, and I am with you still; You have laid your hand on me.” The Lord has been raised from the dead. He first descended to the realm of the dead to share in their fate, but in order to set them free. In yesterday morning’s Office of Readings there was a reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday, which describes with powerful imagination the scene when, after His death, the Lord went to our first parents who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. It reads: “The Lord goes in to them holding His victorious weapon, His cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees Him, He strikes His breast in terror and calls out to all: “My Lord be with you all.” And Christ in reply says to Adam: “And with your spirit.” And grasping his hand He raises him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”

For all of us, like Adam, were doomed never to see the light again. The curse of sin had closed the gates of paradise. We were all condemned to the darkness and pain of eternal loss far from God. Yet Our Lord, taking psalm 138 as His theme, gives shape and meaning to the following mysterious words: “Whither shall I go from your Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, (the underworld of the dead,) You are there!.. … Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” This is the meaning Our Lord now breathes into those words: “I am your God, O man, who became your son, who for you and your kin now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise!” It is for this reason that He has had to die: to enter the world of the dead, not to be joined to them – but so that they might be joined to Him. He has already become man, He already shares our sinful nature, but not in order to share our everlasting shame; no – He has taken all this upon Himself to lead us out of darkness into light, in short, so that we might be able to share His life, who first for us endured our death.

This we also recalled last night at the Easter Vigil, during that surely most intoxicating moment in the whole Church year, when, out of the darkness of night, we heard proclaimed the resurrection of the Son of Man, by the light of the Candle which represents the risen Christ here on the Sanctuary for the next fifty days. For, yet again, in order to explain how the darkness of sin and death have been definitively shattered by Christ’s light, that Proclamation, known as the “Exsultet”, again uses more words from the same psalm 138, saying: “This is the night of which it is written: the night shall be as bright as the day”, for where Christ comes, darkness must simply give way. When Christ entered the realm of darkness, what did He do but shatter the darkness with His light? And then His resurrection is the fulfilment of this shattering of death and darkness. There can be no more eternal death from now on. For the Son of God says to His Father: “It was you who knit me together in my Mother’s womb”. It was by becoming Mary’s son that the Son of God became Adam’s son. It was only thus that He became Adam’s Saviour, and Saviour of all his descendants, ourselves included. Therefore Mary plays a special part in this great and joyful mystery of the redeeming resurrection of her son. This is why the Church in Rome where in ancient times the Pope celebrated Mass today is Our Lady’s principal Church, St. Mary Major. That is also why the Church has frequently interpreted the first words of today’s Introit as addressed to Our Lady: “I have risen, and I am still with you.” Often in ancient stained glass and artwork Our Lord is shown on this Easter morning greeting His blessed Mother with these same words.

On the Cross Our Lord had spoken to His Mother, but the words were hardly a comfort, for He was bidding her farewell, and giving her into St. John’s keeping. Today He speaks to her to tell her “I have risen, and I am still with you, Alleluia!” Now the Gospels do not tell us of an Easter appearance by Our Lord to His blessed Mother, but are we to assume from that silence that such a visit did not take place? It seems hardly credible. Yet why do we not then know of it? Perhaps it is because in all instances, we know only what the Holy Spirit judges to be necessary for our enlightenment. The words of our Lord to His Mother from the Cross were intended to let us all know that we now have His Mother for our own. What took place between them after his Resurrection was, perhaps something that we shall know only when we at last see Him face to face in the glory of the General Resurrection, when we shall be like Him, for we shall then see Him as He really is.

It is through Mary, then, that the Son of God can make the words of the psalmist His own. And so, then, can we. “Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed,” as we heard in the Exsultet. Had we been eternally lost in hell, we could hardly have said those words of ps. 138: “I thank you for the wonder of my being” to our Creator. It would surely have been better for us if we had never been born, had Christ not come as our Redeemer and given us His Mother as our very own. On Good Friday, our Lady must have been pierced with sorrow to be given care for us sinners whom she received and accepted at the foot of the cross. But now, in the light of her Son’s victory, and in the knowledge that He has come to her and exclaimed that joyful greeting, “I have risen, and I am still with you”, surely she rejoices as never before, and rejoices evermore. And why, therefore should we not rejoice too, that our Mother in heaven is rejoicing at her Son’s victory, for this victory is also her redemption as well as ours? And so we will greet her during throughout Eastertide with that lovely anthem, which we will so happily sing once again at the end of the Bidding Prayers: “Regina Caeli, laetare, alleluia… O Queen of heaven, rejoice, Alleluia! For He whom you were worthy to bear, Alleluia! Has risen as He said, alleluia!” Therefore with confidence we can ask her who is God’s mother and ours to: “Pray for us to God, Alleluia!”

There is no other night like this night, the night where darkness becomes brighter than day, not by natural light, but by transcendent light; for this is the light of Christ rising in glory which shatters no ordinary darkness, but the hopeless darkness of the grave, of death and of sin. So on this wonderful night even ordinary candle light becomes extraordinary. For when we came into this darkened chapel, empty as though it were a tomb, we filled it with light and then listened to the ‘Exsultet’, the ecstatic announcement of the resurrection: ‘This is the night’, was the constantly repeated phrase, when God led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt by their passage through the Red Sea, the night when Christ broke the prison bars of death; a night so holy that it dispels wickedness, washes guilt away, restores both innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners; this truly blessed night is the one on which things of heaven are wedded to those of earth, and all that is divine to all that is human.

For Christ’s new life utterly surpasses the one He gave up on the cross, and yet wonderfully it is still His own. For it is as man, as son of Adam, that He died and was buried, and as Son of Man too that He has risen, glorious from the grave, incapable of ever dying again.

It is only once we had been enlightened by this light of the risen Christ, and after we had cast out the darkness with His light, that we turned back again to the pages of Scripture, to see how they have now been fulfilled, made perfect, only in that light. So we have heard how God made all things in the beginning, and made them all good, delighting in the work of His hands – and then saw that all this was finally to be made new in the resurrection. Then we heard how Abraham, our father in faith, offered his son Isaac in sacrifice at God’s command. But although God in His mercy saved Isaac, nevertheless, as we once again witnessed yesterday, God did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all. Then we heard of the origin of this Passover feast in the dramatic account of God’s leading his people out of Egypt under Moses. And after this we heard from the prophets that God would at last put His chosen People’s sufferings and infidelities behind them, and crown them with beauty and glory; that God would take away His people’s hunger and thirst by giving them heavenly food and drink, and would make a new and eternal covenant with them, pouring clean water over them to cleanse them of sin and renewing their hearts to be able to love Him in return for His undying love.

After all that, and having heard the Gospel account of the women at the empty tomb, what else can we do to celebrate this wonderful night? There is only one way we can improve on what we have already heard, and that is to give thanks as our Lord has taught us. Here again we are bringing something to a new perfection.

For if Christ’s priesthood was perfected on the cross, then the victim is perfected in the resurrection, and that holy victim is Christ’s Body and Blood which He has offered for us on the cross, and now offers to us in Holy Communion. For we do not consecrate and receive as Communion a dead body, nor blood poured out in death, but a living and immortal one. Whenever we receive Him, we receive Him as He is now, glorious and immortal, not dead and buried. His Resurrection brings about the transformation of His Sacrifice into a living reality, in which we are about to share once more in Holy Communion. For when He comes to dwell in us as the risen Lord, He brings us to a share in His resurrection here and now.

He is our perfect sacrifice, uniting us with the Father by atoning for our sins; He is our perfect priest, offering Himself to us just as He offers Himself to the Father, making us sharers in His risen Body; He is our perfect new life, the promise of immortality even after death may seem to have had the last word over all mankind – for it is not so. Indeed, Christ’s rising from the dead is the inauguration of a wholly new and glorious life not only for Him, but for all those who believe in Him and receive Him in His life-giving sacraments, as we will do shortly, thus sealing His victory within our own mortal bodies. So Easter is not only our greatest feast, it is the sign and pledge of our future glory. With this all in mind, we cannot stop repeating that cry of praise and joy which we have neither heard nor sung from the beginning of Lent until it was renewed just before the Gospel: ‘Alleluia!’

‘It is accomplished.’ Having said this, Our Lord gave up His Spirit to His Father. Thus He returned to the One who had sent Him into the world to be our Redeemer. The hour for which He had prepared Himself throughout his life on earth, had now been fulfilled.

There is something that we should know about this word, this one word which Our Lord utters at the extremity of His life, at the very moment of death. First, it is only St John who tells us this word – St John who himself ‘saw these things’, and who personally guarantees their trustworthiness. St John wrote his Gospel in Greek, and in Greek there is just one word meaning ‘it is accomplished’: ‘tetelestai'. We can also translate this in English in several ways: ‘it is accomplished, it is finished, or, better still, it is perfected.’ Now I want to remind you of the beginning of last night’s Gospel, when John told us that Jesus had always loved His own in the world, and now He wanted to show how perfect His love was. The Supper was the means He chose to show how ‘perfect His love was’, where the word ‘perfect’ is in Greek the same word, ‘teloV’, which means ‘end’. Hence, according to another translation of St John, at the Last Supper Jesus ‘loved them to the end.’ Now ‘telos’ does not only mean ‘end’ in the sense we often use it in English, the conclusion of a series of events, closure, finality. It means ‘end’ in the sense of ‘purpose’, the fulfilment or completion of that for which a certain thing has begun.

The Last Supper was the ‘end’ of Jesus’s love, not in the sense that His love was now over and done with, but in the sense that it encapsulated the very purpose for which He had lived in the world. Think of it, - the Last Supper was not just a final meal with friends, it was the culmination of all that He had done in the way of signs of His true identity and of His infinite love for us. Yet even so, as we learned last night, the Supper was not even on its own the end, because without the cross it would have no completion, no fulfilment. The Last Supper in which He gave us His Body and Blood sacramentally, would not have been the beginning of the Mass had He not given up His Body and Blood sacrificially for us on this day. For, as I said last night, the Supper and the Cross are one. Today sees the fulfilment, the accomplishment, of what He gave us at the Supper.

Yet there is also another sense of ‘telos’, as a bringing something to perfection. In today’s second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews it was said that ‘Although He was Son, Jesus learned to obey through suffering; but having been made perfect, He became for all who obey Him the source of eternal salvation.’

In the Old Testament, the word ‘made perfect’ was used of priests being consecrated for their sacred duties, that is, to be mediators between God and man, by offering sacrifices to God. Well, that sense is surely contained deep within that word of our Lord’s, ‘it is fulfilled’, ‘tetelestai’.  His telos, the end or perfection He has now achieved at the end of His sufferings is the perfection of His priesthood. Now His Sacrifice is complete, and now the Church can begin to celebrate it after the manner He has instituted for us at the Last Supper – in the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Truly at that moment on the cross, at the end of all His sufferings, death perfects His priesthood. That is the meaning of that other scene which John especially emphasises: the piercing of our Lord’s side, from which pours Blood and Water. We should see in this outpouring of the last drops of Christ’s blood the sign of the perfection of His love. He did not need to shed more than a single drop as a perfect sacrifice, had that been all He wanted to achieve. But He wanted to show yet more, His love for all of us to the end, to completion, to perfection. God the Father does not demand a cruel fate for His Son out of anger, but that His Son should show in this way how complete, how total, how perfect is His love, and how it transforms us in the sacraments, fruit of His priesthood. In this spirit we will soon behold the cross, the instrument of Christ’s telos, His ‘tetelestai’, by which He has accomplished His perfection as our Priest, King and Redeemer unveiled before us. Come, let us adore such a great sign, such a marvellous instrument, by which Christ has fulfilled and brought to completion and perfection His work for us.

It may seem strange that we began tonight with an introit antiphon which did not mention the Last Supper, nor the Blessed Sacrament, nor the inauguration of the priesthood, nor the new commandment to love one another. The introit of Maundy Thursday is in many ways the introduction to the whole Triduum, the most sacred three days of the entire year. It is like the overture which leads us into the great mystery of these events which we are now reliving in the heart of Christ’s Body, the Church.

Here are the words we sang: ‘We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection, through whom we are saved and delivered.’ This is an introduction to all of the Passion, death and Resurrection of our Lord. Yet it is also an introduction to what in detail we celebrate this night. For in a short while we shall repeat that account of the events of the Last Supper which we do at every Mass, beginning: ‘On the day before He was to suffer...’ and so the events of this evening are told every day, and we have heard from St Paul’s account to the Corinthians. To make the point even clearer, that this is indeed the anniversary of that very day, the day before He suffered, the priest changes the words of the consecration, for the only time in the whole year, adding these: ‘on the day before He was to suffer, for our salvation and the salvation of all, THAT IS, TODAY.’ Of course, we do not mean that this is necessarily the anniversary in the sense that, for instance, September 8th is precisely the anniversary day of the accession of King Charles. After all, the priest says the same words every year on Maundy Thursday night, regardless of what date it falls. It is a liturgical anniversary, it is the day before we commemorate the Lord’s passion and death, and leading up to the Sunday of His resurrection, the greatest day of the year, every year.

Today is that day, whereon He showed us the fullness of the love that would take Him to the Cross and beyond – to the dawn of eternal life. As the Gospel we have just heard makes clear, Maundy Thursday has many aspects. The very name by which we in England know it, Maundy, comes from a form of the word ‘Mandatum’, that is, the ‘commandment’ which Our Lord not merely gives to His Apostles, but which He demonstrates in various ways. Note, first of all, that John introduces the Last Supper, an event which will take up fully five chapters of the entire book, with these words which give the key to understanding all that follows, and not only in the chapters dedicated to the Last Supper and our Lord’s teaching there, but to all that follows on Good Friday, and which we shall hear in John’s Passion tomorrow afternoon.

Note the first thing John says is that this was before the Passover, not the Passover itself. I will say more about that tomorrow. But also note what John says next, that Jesus knew that at last this was the hour, when He should pass, or cross, from this world to the Father. He had spoken many times of this ‘hour’, right from Cana when He said to His Mother, ‘my hour has not yet come’, to the event we heard on the Sunday before last, when His soul was troubled, and He even sought to pray, ‘Father, save me from this hour.’ Yet He knows that it is for this very hour that He has come into the world in the first place. This ‘hour’ is His Passover, and it comprises not just the Supper, but all that the Supper represents and all that it leads towards over the next twenty four hours.

I next want to bring to your attention a very important detail which is not clear in the translation of this passage from St John’s Gospel we have heard. St John summarises the entire Gospel so far in one small but highly significant phrase, saying, ‘He had always loved those who were His in the world’; that is the meaning of all He has done, all His signs of love and mercy have been proofs of His love, and now that the hour of His passing from this world has come, before He goes to the Father there is something He must do to bring everything He has ever done and said to a focus, and to make it the beginning of a new way of life for His Apostles, just as His own life on earth comes to an end. So, as our translation put it, ‘now He showed how perfect His love was.’ This sums up well the meaning of the Greek phrase, but it doesn’t help us to see an important key to understanding what happens on the morrow on the cross. For the exact words John actually uses here are that ‘He now showed them that He loved them to the end.’ I want to remind you of those words tomorrow afternoon, because they are a vital indication of how close this night’s events are to those of tomorrow afternoon – the Last Supper and the Crucifixion are totally united in this perfection of love, in this loving ‘to the end’ of our Lord for all His followers and for all mankind.

From this moment, all that our Lord did at the Last Supper can make sense to us in a new way. It is not only the institution of the Blessed Sacrament in memorial of Him, it is also the sign that this night will give us the means to make this continue to be a living presence in our lives; this night will provide both the key to the meaning of the Cross, and the means of its continued presence and power in the lives of everyone who will every live in union with Christ thereafter, including us here and now.

To turn briefly to St Paul’s familiar words in the 2nd reading, ‘on the night he was betrayed, [Jesus] took bread, and thanked God (i.e. the Eucharist), and broke it, (symbolising His approaching death), and gave it to His disciples saying, “This is my Body which is for you”.’ Likewise He took the chalice saying, “This chalice is the new covenant in my Blood.” This must have been difficult for the Apostles to understand. What was He saying about His Body and Blood, and about the Covenant between God and His chosen people? St Paul concludes this passage with an explanation: ‘every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you are proclaiming His death.’ The gift of Holy Communion, of the Lord’s Body and Blood, which is for us, given under those forms He took into His holy and venerable hands on this night, are the living continuation of His sacrifice which He would achieve once and for all, that is, bring to perfection or fulfilment, on the following day. Without the crucifixion, there would be no Holy Communion, no Holy Mass.

But, finally for now, we cannot forget the Maundy, i.e. the Commandment, which gives today its name in our tradition: ‘Maundy’ or ‘Commandment Thursday’. In fact, our Lord gives the Apostles not one commandment, but two: first He says, ‘love one another as I have loved you’, showing the Twelve what He means by washing their feet in true humility, and then He commands them to ‘do this in memory of me,’ not as a mere commemoration, like a re-enactment of an historical event. The Mass is not a historical reconstruction of the Last Supper, nor is it meant to be. Many of the details of how we fulfil the Command to ‘do this’ are not mere copies of what He did that night. It is the fulfilment, in one and the same celebration, both of the events of the Last Supper and of the Sacrifice of the Cross, by means of all of which our Lord returned to His Father, and gave Himself to us, that we do whenever we do ‘this’ in memory of Him.

This is why on this night, Mass does not actually come to an end in the usual way with a blessing and dismissal. Instead we will joyfully and reverently accompany our Lord’s precious Body to the Altar of Repose where we are invited to keep watch with Him in silence for one hour if possible; otherwise for a little while before going home, and then we will reassemble tomorrow afternoon for the completion of what we begin tonight, namely, the Liturgy of the Passion and Cross. And as tonight’s liturgy has no ending, but in effect continues in silence through the night, so tomorrow’s liturgy has no normal beginning, for we will begin that in total silence. And from that opening silence we will go on to witness the completion, the fulfilment, the perfection of the love He has shown us in tonight’s sacred supper. For tonight and tomorrow are one.

The Gospel we have just heard takes place during the Last Supper, a few days after the passage we heard yesterday at Mass, also from St John, which recounted the supper at Bethany when Mary anointed the Lord’s feet with a pound of costly nard as a sign of her love for Him and her gratitude for raising her brother from the dead. In that Gospel we heard St John’s account of how Judas had complained at the waste of the perfume which could have been sold for an enormous price, as much as labourer’s wages for a year, to support the poor.

Now in some circles in recent times there has been a tendency to try and paint Judas in something of a heroic light; a flawed hero, yes, a failed hero, certainly, but nonetheless a man of high principles. He is proposed by some as a man who had looked for God’s kingdom to come by expelling the pagan Romans and re-establishing the glorious days of the kingdom of David. He had seen our Lord as just the kind of leader who might bring that about. He had the charisma, the power and the authority to lead the people in a religious and political revolt against foreign domination.

Yet Jesus had clearly failed to act. He had even famously failed to condemn paying taxes to Caesar. Now, according to some commentators, Judas sought to betray our Lord, not in order to have Him killed, but rather to try and provoke Jesus into leading the rebellion Judas had dreamed of. Judas was really a noble figure, they say, trying to bring about a great end, albeit in a very mistaken way which, of course, failed utterly. Instead of seeing Jesus resist arrest and lead the revolt, he saw Him captured and condemned to death. It was this failure of his plan that drove him, they say, to suicide.

Yet this is not the way St John saw it. Writing his gospel at the end of his very long life after years of meditation on those strange and wonderful events which we are now commemorating, John’s memory had not grown dim. Instead, he saw more clearly than ever the real issues at stake, and this is why he wrote about the betrayal in the way he did. For John rarely describes any event in our Lord’s life which the other evangelists had already dealt with, unless he wants to add something new, or show a differing perspective. This is just one such occasion. For whereas in the other Gospels, when Jesus announces at the Supper that one of those sitting with Him at table is about to betray Him, they all ask Him in turn, ‘Is it I, Lord?’. When Judas in his turn asks the question, our Lord replies to him, ‘they are your own words.’ John, however, remembers it differently, and from the viewpoint of one whom, according to his own account, ‘the Lord loved’, in a particular way.

It was because of his being ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ that he had a special place near to our Lord at the Supper, and on account of that Simon Peter asked him to find out secretly from the Lord who the betrayer was to be. John then recounts what our Lord told him privately, that it would be by a sign, the sign of the morsel dipped in the dish which He, the Lord, would then give to the betrayer.

This sign was then fulfilled in the giving of the morsel to Judas. Was this Communion with our Lord’s body and blood? This seems unlikely, both on account of the neutral word ‘morsel’, and the ‘dipping in the cup’ which belongs to the earlier stages of the supper. But

we must also remember that because John does not tell us directly of the institution of the Eucharist, we therefore cannot be absolutely certain, though the other evangelists do describe the institution of the eucharist taking place at the end of the supper, which must have been some time after Judas had left.

John does make it clear, however, that no one knew the identity of the betrayer but Jesus and John to whom He confided it. Hence the enigmatic words, ‘What you are to do, do quickly’ not being understood by anyone else in the room. This command of Our Lord’s given to Judas may well have meant that, after Jesus had made His last attempt to bring Judas back from the brink by the loving gesture of the morsel, nothing more could be done for him. So indeed John understands all this when he makes two striking comments: first that Satan now entered Judas, and secondly that when he went out, it was night. The clear meaning of the first statement confirms the interpretation just given of our Lord’s words here, that now as far as Judas is concerned all is lost forever. He is going to perdition, let him be as swift in this terrible self-destruction as he can be. Satan has now taken control of Judas, but this can only have happened by Judas’s own will. Judas had hardened his heart to refuse the last loving gesture of his Lord and Master. He had given himself over to Satan.

Moreover, John tells us that when Judas had gone, ‘it was night’, not merely the ordinary darkness when the sun has set, but a spiritual darkness, a terrible state in which the light is eclipsed by Satan’s darkness. It is the end of the ‘day’ in which our Lord had said He must work and the beginning of the ‘night’ in which no one can work, and now in a short time all our Lord will be able to do is to suffer Satan’s hatred and malice, his utter darkness.

This brings us to another important point: the contrast between Judas and Peter. Both will fail our Lord spectacularly this coming night, but in different ways and with infinitely differing ends. After Judas has left, Our Lord mysteriously tells the eleven of His impending leaving of them, so much that they cannot follow Him where He is going. Peter indignantly declares that he, at least, will lay down his life for the Master. Jesus’s reply is a warning, that far from staying firm to his own death, Peter will deny any knowledge of Jesus thrice before morning.

It is a devastating prediction. One can only imagine how Peter reacted to it, with dumbfounded consternation. And he does indeed fail just as our Lord had foretold. Yet at the end of the night, Judas will be on the way to perdition, while Peter will begin the long, hard road to penance and restoration. What is the secret of the different fates of these two Apostles? Judas is the one who, St John tells us, is corrupted by his love of money. The three hundred lost denarii of Mary’s perfumed oil now give way to the thirty silver pieces, the price put by the Chief Priests and Judas on his Master’s head. Peter, on the other hand, although weak and fickle, puts an infinite value on his Master. After the Resurrection, Peter will make amends for tonight precisely by answering the question, ‘Simon, do you love me?’ This is what matters. Peter’s answer is the entire difference between him and Judas. It is his love which will enable him to seek forgiveness where Judas had seen no hope of forgiveness, for he had no love for Jesus. This is the heart of John’s message concerning Jesus, Judas and Peter on the night of the Last Supper; the meaning and the cost of true love. That which leads Judas to suicide, leads Peter to repentance, and Jesus to the Cross.

If we are not shocked by the Gospel we have just heard, then maybe that is because we haven’t understood it properly. We have heard how Mary of Bethany anointed our Lord’s feet with costly ointment, or as we might call it, perfume, or scent. It is, of course, a very extravagant act on her part, to take a pound of scent, no small volume, and pour it all simply on our Lord’s feet. It is an enormous quantity of a very expensive commodity, expensive because it is rare, it requires great intensity of labour to procure and distil it, and it comes from a great distance. This is nard, which comes from a plant that grows in the Himalayas. In the other gospels we are told that several of the bystanders grumbled about this extravagance, calling it ‘waste’ and suggesting that it might have been sold for 300 denarii. Now we should stop a moment to think about that. We are used to being told that a denarius is the equivalent of a penny, but in real terms that is not helpful. We must remember that, in one of His parables, our Lord had spoken of a denarius as a reasonable day’s wage for a labourer. Therefore, by that reckoning, 300 denarii would represent the better part of a year’s wages for an ordinary working man. This nard was therefore not only a huge volume, but also far more costly than anything we can imagine using ourselves, even in our most wildly extravagant dreams.

So in the light of this analysis, we ourselves may well not be too indignant at the reaction of some that this was an unjustified waste of something enormously valuable. However, John puts a very different slant on this event. He tells us that the one, and in his account the only one, who complained bitterly about this, was Judas, who protested that the nard should have been sold and the money given to the poor. Now John, writing his gospel in his old age, was not trying to blacken Judas’s name out of hatred for the man who had been responsible for his beloved Master’s betrayal and death, but rather explaining how the whole event brought to light something intrinsically wrong about Judas’s attitude to our Lord.

John comments that Judas made this complaint not because he cared about the poor, but because he loved money and helped himself to the common purse which he had charge of. This is noteworthy. Judas was not as high-minded as he wanted the others to think. This is why our Lord rebukes Judas in the way that He does, defending Mary’s action and her motive in this extraordinary act of extravagant devotion to Him. Nor is it the first time that our Lord says something quite shocking in defence of Mary of Bethany. On another occasion at another celebration in which our Lord and His apostles were present at Martha’s and Mary’s and Lazarus’s home in Bethany, Martha had asked our Lord to rebuke Mary for not helping her, but instead our Lord defended Mary as having chosen the ‘better part’. Now He does something similar and equally unexpected.

We recall that at the very beginning of this passage John had told us that this dinner took place ‘six days before the Passover’. John never tells us details of time without some important reason. On this occasion it is to point forward to what would happen at that fast approaching Passover: it would be the Lord’s own Passover from death to life, His passing from this world to the next, His return to the Father. Hence His describing Mary’s action as a preparation for His burial. It is, of course, an action born of great love; the love of Mary for the One who has just raised her brother Lazarus from the dead. None of this can Judas

appreciate. He is only concerned about the possible profit that might be made from selling the scented ointment.

There is another point worth making. Today is March 25th, which would ordinarily be the solemnity of the Annunciation. We will keep that feast instead on the Monday following the Octave of Easter. Yet although we cannot keep it today on account of Holy Week, we can note the coincidence. In fact, there is an important way of looking at the coincidence of 25th March with other days in this week, but especially with Good Friday and Holy Saturday, which has often been noted over the centuries. However, I am not going to explore those now. Just to point out that there is something to note about today’s coincidence of Monday of Holy Week with March 25th.

We have heard how Mary of Bethany poured out the rich perfume of her ointment upon our Lord’s body on this date, as a sign of her great love for Him and in gratitude for the raising of her brother Lazarus. But on March 25th we recall a greater Mary and a yet greater outpouring of love. For it was on this day that Mary of Nazareth poured forth the perfume of her heart’s intense love for God when she accepted the call to give her womb so that the Son of God would take flesh therein and become her son in order to be our Redeemer.

After all that we have heard, we must fall silent. We began the morning by singing ‘Hosanna,’ which means, ‘Save us, we pray!’ And we have now heard how our Lord has indeed saved us, at what a cost to Himself, and by whose doing it was brought about: by the will both of God and of man.

We heard our Lord in the Garden praying earnestly, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me!’ and yet He went on, ‘but let it be as you, not I, would have it.’ For in His heart our Lord knew that it was for this very hour that He had come into the world at His Father’s will, as we also heard in last Sunday’s Gospel according to St John.

So, then, we recognise the Father’s will in Christ’s death on the cross, but also our own human fickleness. For some of the same crowds that sang ‘Hosanna,’ may well have been among those who shouted, ‘Crucify him!,’ just as we ourselves constantly vacillate between sin and repentance and sinning again. So it is that both God and mankind are responsible for the death of Christ, yet that death is necessary to save us from the very sin that has nailed Christ to the cross and left Him there to die, surrounded by mockery and insults, the screams of rejection by those whom He loves, including ourselves.

Let us think about this Gospel according to St Mark. Although it is the shortest of the Gospels, it is not just an abbreviated version of the others. What does Mark in particular tell us? First of all, we need to know that Mark was St Peter’s assistant and wrote his Gospel at Peter’s bidding and under his guidance. So, it was written specifically for the people of Peter’s see, the city of Rome. It is for this reason that Mark tells us some details that no other Evangelist does. He tells us, for instance, that Simon of Cyrene, who helped to carry the cross behind Jesus, was the father of two brothers, Alexander and Rufus. Clearly these were Christians known to the Romans, and indeed St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, also mentions Rufus by name. The Romans Christians who heard this Gospel when it was newly written would hear those familiar names and would say, ‘yes, we know this is all true because our friends here, Alexander and Rufus heard it from their father.’ And incidentally, it is from this fact that we can be sure that Simon of Cyrene, the stranger forced to carry the cross, indeed must have become a convert to Christ, and all his family with him. May a share in carrying Christ’s cross also bring us to deeper faith in Christ.

Then, too, we remember Peter’s prominence in the Passion. All the Evangelists tell us about the denials. As his secretary Mark makes the denials such a major feature of the Passion, this must be part of Peter’s own preaching, a sign of his great humility.

He taught his flock how he had been the most vehement of the Apostles in denying all knowledge of Jesus, and yet hours before he had sworn faithfulness even to the point of death. Peter was not only determined to show the Church which acknowledged him as bishop that although he was the Prince of the Apostles, he was also the one who let his Lord down so badly. It is St Mark who relates the small, yet telling detail, that after he realises what he had done, Peter burst into tears, or as the Greek text says, ‘he fell to weeping.’

We can imagine this personal account recalling the sudden violence of Peter’s realisation, not so much that he had let himself down and broken his word, but rather that he had utterly failed to support our Lord, and had so openly and dramatically abandoned him in his moment of utter isolation – the Lord who had prayed to be released from this terrible cup of suffering, which was not only his bodily passion, but his anguish of soul at the abandonment by those who should have stood by him.

And so, too, the strange detail which only Mark records, that in the Garden of Gethsemane there was a young man who was following Jesus even after the Apostles had run away. This unnamed young man, who was he? Why did he follow when all the Apostles had fled? He seems to have been captured as a follower of Jesus, one who had not abandoned him, at least not at first. Yet in that moment when the captors laid hands on him, he, too, was so terrified that he left his only garment in their hands and ran away naked. There is no better explanation of this little scene that I know of than this: it was Mark himself. This is perhaps his signature in the pages of the Gospel he wrote for Peter’s flock.

This abandonment is total. Christ has no one to comfort Him. Alone He is taken to the Jewish authorities who have only one intention: to get Him killed by the Roman authorities. We may wonder at the High Priest rending his garments and crying ‘Blasphemy!’ Mark makes it clearer than any of the Evangelists why this is so. For it is the most dramatic moment of the trial, when the High Priest, aware that the evidence against Jesus was very weak, and seeing that Jesus stood silent under his questioning, asks Him outright, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?’ Jesus answers utterly unambiguously, ‘I AM.’ Make no mistake about this reply. It is the divine name! God’s own name for himself as revealed to Moses, and so sacred that it was never uttered aloud. Jesus not only says it but says it of Himself: I am God. It is for this that He is condemned for blasphemy. Yet we know that it is not blasphemy, it is the simple and stark truth. This man, as he stands in all his vulnerability, bound and captive in their presence, is the one true God who made all things, who is the ruler and judge of the entire human race, but who is also humanity’s Redeemer, and He is now on the road that will bring Him to fulfil that role as our Saviour.

This helps us to see clearly the significance of Mark’s Gospel. From the moment He was entering the city on that first Palm Sunday, our Lord was in control. He directed the apostles to collect the colt and tell the owners with His authority who required it. He freely rode on it in accordance with Zechariah’s prophecy of the humble entry of the king into his own city, accepting the enthusiastic acclamations of His people. He freely gave Himself to the Apostles in Holy Communion at the Last Supper as the sign of His forthcoming sacrifice of His Body and Blood on the cross, and freely surrendered Himself to the soldiers who came to arrest Him by force. He has undertaken all this as we have just witnessed. But whereas we, frail and fickle humanity as we are, so often vacillate between ‘Hosanna’ when we need His help, and ‘Crucify him!’ whenever we sin, He is in complete control of Himself and utterly consistent, for the simple reason that He is God, and that as God He loves us with an infinite and everlasting love. May He be praised for all eternity, and may we adore Him, our crucified and risen Lord for ever. Amen.

Today we are beginning a new phase of Lent. Last week we enjoyed the brief interlude of Rosy colour to celebrate Laetare Sunday. Now, not only has the sombre purple returned but it is even more intense with the veiling of the cross and statues in purple. This signifies for us the beginning of Passiontide. From now on until the Holy Triduum of our Lord’s Passover, from Maundy Thursday until the Easter Vigil, we enter into the last few days of our Lord’s life on earth, not in order merely to remember it, nor in order to try and imitate it, but to live in Him, as members of His body. As He, who is our head, prepares to suffer for us, we remember that we, too, must suffer not only like Him, but with Him and in Him. As members of His body, it is our place, even our privilege if we could learn to see it in this way, to suffer with Him in some way that He chooses. As He says in the words we heard sung before the Gospel: ‘If a man serves me, he must follow me; wherever I am, my servant will be there, too.’ The Church as a whole in every time and place must take her part in this suffering, for unless we take part in Christ’s suffering, we can have no part in His resurrection and glory.

One of the events of our Lord’s final days which we probably have too little time to think of, because it comes and goes between very significant liturgical services on consecutive days, is the Agony in Gethsemane. It follows so hard on the heels of the Last Supper, with all that happened there, in which we take our part in the Mass which began on Maundy Thursday night, and is followed so breathtakingly fast by our Lord’s arrest, His trials before the Chief Priests, Pilate and Herod, and His scourging and condemnation to the death of crucifixion, that we may perhaps only notice it without reflection.

We will hear of our Lord’s Agony in the Passion Gospel of St Mark next Sunday, but then we will have no time to pause. Today offers us a unique opportunity to do just that. For we have just heard an extraordinary passage from St John’s Gospel which, although not taking place in Gethsemane after the Last Supper, is in many ways the nearest St John comes to telling us about the Agony of spirit our Lord suffered before His Passion, as He naturally recoiled from the forthcoming suffering He had to face. What else can those words mean, ‘Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say: Father save me from this hour?’ Admittedly, John does not tell us of the bloody sweat, but he does tell us of this moment of deep perturbation: ‘My soul is troubled.’ There can be no stronger indication of His agony at the thought of what was coming to Him. Hence this question which He asks of the Father, which can be rephrased like this: ‘in this moment of extreme distress, shall I pray to my Father to save me from all that is about to befall me?’ Surely that is the same prayer as ‘Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass me by.’ So too the answer He supplies Himself is strikingly similar: for as in the Garden He says: ‘Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done’, here He seems to pray in the same way, saying: ‘But it was for this very reason that I have come to this hour.’

The important thing to note is that our Lord was bewildered not only at what awaited Him in a short time, but at what He saw in His mind’s eye at that moment; ‘My soul is troubled.’ Can it be that his Father truly wants Him to suffer and die? Can it be that He must endure all this knowing that not only in the near future, but throughout all the centuries to come, so many of His followers will forsake Him, or betray Him, or will fall far short of what they should live up to, or will give a terrible example, or again, many will bring shame and disgrace on His name and on His Church? Knowing all that as He did, it is not surprising that even He should have been ‘troubled’ and overwhelmed with grief and sorrow.

Just as His prayer in the Garden became: ‘nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done’, so in today’s Gospel He says: ‘Father, glorify your name.’ Then we are told that a voice came from heaven to comfort, that is, to strengthen Him, saying: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ Moreover, it was this divine message of strengthening that was heard by some as a clap of thunder, and by others as the voice of an angelic messenger, in a way which recalls St Luke’s account of the Agony in Gethsemane, when he tells us that at the end of the Agony ‘an angel came and ministered to Him’.

In Gethsemane we are told that He returned to His sleeping Apostles and roused them to witness His arrest, which is His solemn entry into His Passion. Here, in St John’s account, we have heard Him foretell His crucifixion: ‘when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself.’ So, St John concludes, ‘by these words He indicated the kind of death He would die.’ The crisis had passed, and He was able to say: ‘Now sentence is being passed on this world; now the prince of this world is to be overthrown.’ From these words, announcing confidently the defeat of Satan, the prince of this world, we can guess that a struggle had just taken place between our Lord and Satan once again. As they had fought in the desert during our Lord’s forty days’ fasting, and as we are told that the devil left Him ‘until a favourable time,’ so we may understand that this Agony was just that time of bitter trial caused by Satan, greater even than anything He had faced in the wilderness. Did Satan reveal to Him all the failures His work, His Passion, His death, would leave behind? He surely foresaw Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial, each of them the first of so many in the Church down the many centuries still in the future. No wonder the divine voice spoke to strengthen Him. Once that trial had been faced and overcome, Satan’s overthrow was at last assured. Christ would face His Passion. He would be lifted up from the earth, and He would draw all to Himself, implying that precisely on the cross He would draw all men away from Satan’s power and all Satan’s empty promises. No wonder Satan tried so hard to make Christ despair and walk away from the cross.

All this must also help us to interpret the passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews which we heard in the second reading: ‘during his life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard.’ But note that these words ‘his prayer was heard’ do not mean that God saved our Lord from facing the cross and death, but rather that God made the cross and death of His Son the answer to His prayer for the salvation of mankind. For if Christ had not endured the shame and agony of the cross and death, we would quite simply not have been saved, not have been taken out of the power of Satan, not have been made sharers of Christ’s victorious resurrection. That is what the Second Reading means when it concludes that ‘having been made perfect, [Christ] became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation.’

One more question remains here, and that is, what does the Letter to the Hebrews mean by saying that Christ was ‘made perfect’? Was He not already perfect? What this perfection means is found in today’s Gospel event. For it is in facing down the possibility of escaping Satan’s rage by avoiding death, that we are told Christ was made perfect. It was, to put it another way, by learning ‘to obey through suffering’ that He became perfect as a man. Satan hoped to intimidate the humanity of Christ, to overwhelm Him with horror and despair in the face of terrible suffering and apparent failure. But this would prove to be a lie. Christ’s death would not represent a failure, but a victory – and Satan feared it. Christ’s suffering was Satan’s overthrow, not Christ’s; Satan’s failure, not Christ’s.

And so we end where we began, recognising that we must share in that suffering, so as to share in His overthrow of Satan. We must share in His cross, so as to bring about Satan’s failure in his attempt to destroy us. Our victory is not yet certain, we should not need to be fighting for it if it were. But if we are prepared to suffer with Christ and be united with Him and in Him, then our victory will indeed be assured. Christ will prove to be just what the Letter to the Hebrews said, ‘the source of eternal salvation’. That is what we are about to relive in our own lives, in our minds, hearts, souls and wills, during this Passiontide and Easter feast now fast approaching. Let us join our Lord there! Amen!