King of the Jews

The traditional devotions of Good Friday, with their concentration on the sufferings of Christ, and our own implied or stated responsibility for them, are too much for many people. But in fact they are a great school of Christian mysticism. Christ’s suffering and death was not just an unfortunate consequence of the fact that people did not “get” his message. He was actually taking on and living through the consequences of sin – absorbing it, so to speak, into himself. And that means we can find ourselves in him.

None of us can judge himself. We may secretly think we are not so bad, but none of us really knows how many sins he has committed, or how serious they are, and what their consequences were. In a sense we are complicit also in the sins of others, or else in prayer we can offer ourselves for those who committed them. And then there are sins of omission: things we have failed to do, graces we have resisted. For all these reasons it makes sense to accept responsibility for the numerous small slights and wounds that were inflicted upon Christ, and even for his death. If we absolve ourselves we are usurping the role of the eternal Judge who sees all things aright.

Plunged into the experience of the Passion, we can see the results of what we collectively and individually have done to God, in the world and in ourselves: in the world, where we have silenced him, or despised him, or misinterpreted him, or used him for our own purposes; in ourselves, where we have taken him for granted, or denied him, or ignored him. The sufferings in our own life, which are due if not to our own sins then to those of others, can be located somewhere on the map of Christ’s Passion, or in the mirror of the Cross. In this way we live in him, and he lives in us, through death into resurrection.

Unity in the soul

I said the key to the religious quest is unity, which is how we become fully real, and that this unification can only be brought about by love.

That makes sense of the idea of sin - viewed not as the breaking of some arbitrary rule, but as an obstacle to our own spiritual progress. The modern world doesn’t like to talk of sin, but it still views hypocrisy as a great evil, and seems to admire integrity. Sin is that which divides us. It is that which divides us from ourselves, from God, and from each other.

Charles Williams defined sin as “the preference of an immediately satisfying experience of things to the believed pattern of the universe”. For example, each time I do something in private that is inconsistent with what I profess to be and believe in public, or which would make others think less of me if it were discovered, I am dividing myself, and therefore committing a sin.

The root of sin is a conflict of desires, since it is desire that leads me to act inconsistently. But this conflict only exists at the level where we have many desires. In the end, at the deepest level, we desire only one thing, and that is union with the Infinite, with God. Human desires are insatiable, because we are built to desire the Infinite, and we cannot find the Infinite in the realm of the finite. The purpose of a religious practice is to discover our true self, which is also the discovery of our desire for the Infinite. Everything else is either a distraction from that, or a sacrament of it. Everything else is “intermediate”.

This is precisely why the Eucharist is so powerful and necessary for us, if we can receive it in faith. It feeds our body-soul-spirit unity. Swallowing the Host, knowing what it is, we take into ourselves a kind of “magnet” that helps to draw our divided selves together into one Self.

More on the dynamics of the Eucharist another time.