I lie in bed in the small hours reading St Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John. This isn’t some extreme Lenten discipline. I can’t sleep because I have just returned from retreat-giving in Phoenix, Arizona, seven hours behind our time.
I am, of course, seeking grist to the mill of Holy Week preaching, but I am also hoping that St Augustine’s expansive rhetorical style of telling you what he thinks and why he thinks it, and why one might think something else, and whether or not that’s correct, will prove to be gently soporific.
It’s fascinating to see how he treats the Gospel line by line, discarding nothing. He always begins with the literal meaning, and he never resorts to the modern exegetical conceit of presuming to know better than Jesus what Jesus meant. For Augustine the words and actions of Jesus are at all times revelations of his divine person and mission rather than the serendipitous flounderings of a Jewish prophet of the 1st century bound by cultural attitudes and assumptions. Jesus is the fulfilment of Scripture, its own best interpreter.
Augustine treats the Gospel as a well-spring of Revelation, the sweetness of which is obtained by repeatedly drawing deeper, and not as a convenient fiction written by the Early Church and only comprehensible as the expression of its ambition. From it the person of Christ emerges from such exegesis strong and clear and sovereign.
There are so many tiny details that nurture a fresh look at the mysteries of the Passion, and so far I have only gone as far as his commentary on the first line of the Gospel for Maundy Thursday, John Chapter 13, with its majestic opening: “Before the festival day of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that the hour had come when he had to pass from this world to the Father, having loved those who were his own in the world, loved them to the end.” St Augustine marks the similarity between the Hebrew noun Pascha, or Passover, and paschein, the Greek verb to suffer. They interpret one another. Jesus’s suffering is also his passing over – it will complete what the Old Testament passing over the Red Sea represented in figure. In the mysterious designs of the Trinity, Jesus will pass through suffering and death to glory, and escape the destruction which seemed inevitable.
Because we are not so steeped in the Old Testament, we are more likely to ascribe a kind of boomerang quality to Jesus’s death and Resurrection, making his Passion a temporary inconvenience before normality reasserts itself and life carries on as before. This is not scriptural. Hitherto sin and death have held human nature enslaved like Pharaoh held the Israelites, with no prospect of release. Now Jesus, the new Moses, in his transitus, takes human nature out of slavery, and passes over to the Father, to rest at the Right Hand of God. His suffering, instead of being a terminus ad quem, is the sacrifice which saves us from death. He will become the slaughtered Passover lamb, says Augustine, whose blood sprinkled on our doorposts; which, by the sign of his cross on our foreheads in baptism, allows us to pass from the power of the Devil to God’s kingdom. Just as once Moses had led God’s people into the desert to receive a covenant – a way man may live in relationship with the All-Holy – so in his passing Jesus gives a covenant far more wonderful than Sinai, for it is graven on his own, pierced heart offered up for us.
To celebrate the Easter Feast, then, is to recognise that there is nothing static about being a Christian. It offers finite comfort for 50 days, but impels towards a transitus of infinite hope. The joy of the Resurrection is not that normal service has been resumed and human nature is invulnerable, but that sin, suffering and death cannot separate me from the light and love in Christ, it cannot hold me captive. The risen Jesus shows me the way; his “love to the end” is the sum of what makes human life beautiful.
Like the Israelites of old I should now be living as one ready to depart in haste from a world in which I do not truly belong. Christ goes before me, a pillar of fire in the darkness, the only sure way. Another Easter, another paschal candle shared, must renew in me the desire to let myself be moulded and transformed by the risen Christ “so as to pass continuously from the side of him who destroys to the side of Him who saves”.
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