Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Eternal Word in Time 
For Easter, Die Tagespost published a 12-page supplement to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German branch of EWTN. Having been asked to contribute to the supplement, I wrote a brief piece you can find here. Below is an English version.
The Read More
The Read More
Desert Fathers 17 Below is the text of the seventeenth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. Read More
Pope Francis RIP To the faithful of the Prelatures of Trondheim and Tromsø,
Christ is risen!
Our Holy Father Pope Francis is dead. He fell asleep in the Lord at 7.45 a.m. this morning, Easter Monday. We commend him to God’s sweet mercy, thankful for Read More
Christ is risen!
Our Holy Father Pope Francis is dead. He fell asleep in the Lord at 7.45 a.m. this morning, Easter Monday. We commend him to God’s sweet mercy, thankful for Read More
Easter Day 2025 Even Klassekampen [a daily paper that began life under the aegis of the Marxist Leninist movement] takes it for granted that its readership will, in their inner ear, hear the resonance of our country’s signature Easter hymn Easter Morning Cancels Read More
Easter Vigil 2025 In the beginning the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s Spirit hovered over the water. God said, Let there be light! And there was light.
Life presupposes light. Creation began with coruscation. The Bible Read More
Life presupposes light. Creation began with coruscation. The Bible Read More
Via Crucis I remember standing in the much-regretted Cambridge Music Shop in All Saints Passage well over thirty years ago listening to a magnificent recording of Stephen Hough playing Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. Transported, I bought the disc. Liszt’s Read More
Conversation with Luke Coppen The online version of this interview is here.
What does the Church expect of us in Holy Week? One thing is clear: it wants us to take part in the great services of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Holy Read More
What does the Church expect of us in Holy Week? One thing is clear: it wants us to take part in the great services of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Holy Read More
Good Friday 2025 Isaiah 52.13-53.12: The crowds were appalled on seeing him.
Hebrews 4.14-5.9: He offered up prayer and entreaty.
John 18.1-19.42: Woman, there is your son.
‘The crowds’, says Isaiah in his mystic prophecy, ‘were appalled on seeing him’. We do not know whom in Read More
Hebrews 4.14-5.9: He offered up prayer and entreaty.
John 18.1-19.42: Woman, there is your son.
‘The crowds’, says Isaiah in his mystic prophecy, ‘were appalled on seeing him’. We do not know whom in Read More
Eternal Word in Time
For Easter, Die Tagespost published a 12-page supplement to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German branch of EWTN. Having been asked to contribute to the supplement, I wrote a brief piece you can find here. Below is an English version.
The omnipresence of the media has long been a feature of western society. We have got used to the absence of eye contact in metros and trains. Passengers’ gaze is fixed to screens that provide customised information, entertainment, or titillation.
On this status quo endless counsels have been given. We are faced with a phenomenon of civilisation. We must deal with it somehow. It will not go away unless someone somewhere pulls the plug and leaves us disconnected, distraught.
These days, though, the stakes are changing. Advances in artificial, inhuman intelligence ensure that media content may have no sentient or pondered origin. We are, more or less wittingly, the audience of algorithmically ordered 0s and 1s.
The Italian paper Il Foglio recently launched a trial AI supplement, all the articles for which were written by machines, sometimes with engaging (virtual) self-irony. The trend will spread. It is fascinating in a way. We watch such prodigies amazed, the way we watched the first moon-landing, microwave, email, and chauffeurless bus.
But what will happen to discourse once it is surrendered to automation?
On the one hand we have computing engines ready to spew out news real or fake, not to mention Zauberberg-like novels, at the merest murmur to Alexa or one of her pliant sisters; on the other hand we have software that will read these texts on our behalf and summarise them in tin-voiced audio messages.
And we, what shall we do meanwhile? Spend our days in gormless contentment drinking Piña Coladas on the beach? Hardly. More probably we shall sink further into the weary, ineffable loneliness that constitutes the defining epidemic of our time.
The Christian proposition is founded on the claim that an Eternal Word, the metaphysical and intentional source of all there is, engages with the world and speaks to it for its flourishing’s sake; and that this Word, at a given point in time, entered history to renew human nature from within, repairing malfunction, so to speak, by re-installing the operating system. This intervention let us redefine relationships, acquire new notions of purposefulness, and be relieved of the cyclic vengeance to which history shows mankind, left to its devices, congenitally prone. The Word let us form a society worthy of that name.
Each generation has need to hear that Word resound afresh, of course. But our time’s need is exceptional, posed as we are on the brink of self-destruction, disposing of unprecedented means to effect it.
To be instruments by which the eternal, personal Word through ever more dehumanised media may resound in its perennial, creative, unprogrammable newness is an urgent apostolic task.
Blessed are those who undertake it.
This young lady, born as Rita Rizzo on April 20, 1923, would turn into the redoubtable Mother Angelica, foundress of the Eternal Word Television Network.
The omnipresence of the media has long been a feature of western society. We have got used to the absence of eye contact in metros and trains. Passengers’ gaze is fixed to screens that provide customised information, entertainment, or titillation.
On this status quo endless counsels have been given. We are faced with a phenomenon of civilisation. We must deal with it somehow. It will not go away unless someone somewhere pulls the plug and leaves us disconnected, distraught.
These days, though, the stakes are changing. Advances in artificial, inhuman intelligence ensure that media content may have no sentient or pondered origin. We are, more or less wittingly, the audience of algorithmically ordered 0s and 1s.
The Italian paper Il Foglio recently launched a trial AI supplement, all the articles for which were written by machines, sometimes with engaging (virtual) self-irony. The trend will spread. It is fascinating in a way. We watch such prodigies amazed, the way we watched the first moon-landing, microwave, email, and chauffeurless bus.
But what will happen to discourse once it is surrendered to automation?
On the one hand we have computing engines ready to spew out news real or fake, not to mention Zauberberg-like novels, at the merest murmur to Alexa or one of her pliant sisters; on the other hand we have software that will read these texts on our behalf and summarise them in tin-voiced audio messages.
And we, what shall we do meanwhile? Spend our days in gormless contentment drinking Piña Coladas on the beach? Hardly. More probably we shall sink further into the weary, ineffable loneliness that constitutes the defining epidemic of our time.
The Christian proposition is founded on the claim that an Eternal Word, the metaphysical and intentional source of all there is, engages with the world and speaks to it for its flourishing’s sake; and that this Word, at a given point in time, entered history to renew human nature from within, repairing malfunction, so to speak, by re-installing the operating system. This intervention let us redefine relationships, acquire new notions of purposefulness, and be relieved of the cyclic vengeance to which history shows mankind, left to its devices, congenitally prone. The Word let us form a society worthy of that name.
Each generation has need to hear that Word resound afresh, of course. But our time’s need is exceptional, posed as we are on the brink of self-destruction, disposing of unprecedented means to effect it.
To be instruments by which the eternal, personal Word through ever more dehumanised media may resound in its perennial, creative, unprogrammable newness is an urgent apostolic task.
Blessed are those who undertake it.
This young lady, born as Rita Rizzo on April 20, 1923, would turn into the redoubtable Mother Angelica, foundress of the Eternal Word Television Network.
Desert Fathers 17
Below is the text of the seventeenth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Peter said: ‘I questioned [Abba Isaiah] saying, “What is the fear of God?” He said to me: “A man who puts his trust in that which is not God, such a man has not the fear of God in him”’.
What is ‘the fear of God’? It may seem a contradiction in terms. Are true believers not supposed to be fearless? Does not perfect love cast out fear? Fear is a humiliating sentiment. We associate it with the trembling of a cornered dormouse before a fat cat. Is that an appropriate spiritual attitude for people having put their trust in God?
Of course not. The fear of God stands for something else, not a nervous anxiety, but an existential consciousness of reverence. Fear of God stands for the natural response of a creature, a thing made out of nothing, faced with divine, uncreated Being. In Scripture we find instances of such fear reverently expressed, for example in the fifth chapter of Isaiah. It recounts a vision the prophet entertained in the year King Uzziah died, so in the mid-eighth century BC, a period of trial for the peoples of Judah and Israel, brother-nations tragically divided, locked in rivalry. Most people’s minds were on transactional matters concerned with national security. Isaiah meanwhile was confronted with the overwhelming reality of God, summoned to recall his brethren to a sense of proportion and to re-establish the principles by which God’s people was to live. Here is how Isaiah describes what he saw:
I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
On the face of it, Isaiah’s experience would seem desirable. Who does not yearn to see God, the beatitude pledged to the pure of heart? Such vision is traumatic, however, when our heart is not pure. The confrontation with God’s glory, which the Bible likens to fire of unparalleled intensity, will burn away that in us which is not of God, which is incompatible with the presence of the Holy One attended by seraphs whose name means ‘burning’, whose being is fire, configured to sustain divine truth.
The image of gold refined by fire is used several times in the Bible to describe the trajectory of faith. Zechariah, two centuries after Isaiah, spoke of God’s putting Israel’s remnant into fire to ‘refine them as one refines silver, to test them as gold is tested’. Experientially, such refinement is traumatic. It means letting go of all claims to self-reliance as I stand before God stripped of anything but essentials, conscious of contingency, having nothing of my own to lean on, neither wealth nor degrees nor acquaintances nor accomplishments. No wonder we run a mile from this kind of testing, preferring to rest instead in our own illusions of significance, however brittle.
Abba Peter’s criterion of discernment, therefore, remains relevant. He answers the simple question put to him, ‘What is the fear of God?’, not by proffering a tidy definition but by setting in motion instead a process of self-examination. He asks: ‘Do you in fact trust God?’ People of faith easily assume that they place their trust in God. It is one thing, though, to stand in church on a Sunday and recite the creed; it is another to confront circumstances that threaten to turn our existence upside-down.
Do I trust God when confronted with illness, the loss of a job, betrayal in marriage or friendship? Do I trust God in the face of strategic and environmental menace?
To show trust in hardship and in situations of risk is not tantamount to being fatalist; it is not about leaning back thumb-twiddlingly, expecting God to just sort everything out. Things do not always get sorted out; illness is not always healed; sometimes fractured relationships cannot be mended. To trust God is not to assume that I will be alright. It is to know that, whatever happens, sense may emerge from senselessness, redemptive purity from destructive contamination.
We make progress on this path when we come to appreciate how utterly other God is. For being, in Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, God remains utterly beyond our notions. His thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways not our ways. There will be times when all we can do is, Job-like, to bow down deep and adore uncomprehending. A thousand years in our counting are but a day before God. Sometimes the purposefulness of present hardship takes time to be revealed. Sensing God’s greatness, we learn to revere him in a healthy way, astonished that such Majesty should, for love, have come so close to us in the incarnation, drawing forth our love, which in turn casts out for good all undue anxiety. To balance childlike trust with reverent worship, knowing that underneath all life’s vicissitudes are the everlasting arms: this is what it means to know the tremendous fear of God, which at once pierces and heals human hearts.
Miniature depicting the prophet Isaiah’s vision of God and decorative initial page showing the cleansing of the prophet, from an Isaias glossatus made in Reichenau, Germany, ca. 1000. Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc.Bibl.76, fols. 10v–11r.
You can browse the full manuscript here.
Abba Peter said: ‘I questioned [Abba Isaiah] saying, “What is the fear of God?” He said to me: “A man who puts his trust in that which is not God, such a man has not the fear of God in him”’.
What is ‘the fear of God’? It may seem a contradiction in terms. Are true believers not supposed to be fearless? Does not perfect love cast out fear? Fear is a humiliating sentiment. We associate it with the trembling of a cornered dormouse before a fat cat. Is that an appropriate spiritual attitude for people having put their trust in God?
Of course not. The fear of God stands for something else, not a nervous anxiety, but an existential consciousness of reverence. Fear of God stands for the natural response of a creature, a thing made out of nothing, faced with divine, uncreated Being. In Scripture we find instances of such fear reverently expressed, for example in the fifth chapter of Isaiah. It recounts a vision the prophet entertained in the year King Uzziah died, so in the mid-eighth century BC, a period of trial for the peoples of Judah and Israel, brother-nations tragically divided, locked in rivalry. Most people’s minds were on transactional matters concerned with national security. Isaiah meanwhile was confronted with the overwhelming reality of God, summoned to recall his brethren to a sense of proportion and to re-establish the principles by which God’s people was to live. Here is how Isaiah describes what he saw:
I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
On the face of it, Isaiah’s experience would seem desirable. Who does not yearn to see God, the beatitude pledged to the pure of heart? Such vision is traumatic, however, when our heart is not pure. The confrontation with God’s glory, which the Bible likens to fire of unparalleled intensity, will burn away that in us which is not of God, which is incompatible with the presence of the Holy One attended by seraphs whose name means ‘burning’, whose being is fire, configured to sustain divine truth.
The image of gold refined by fire is used several times in the Bible to describe the trajectory of faith. Zechariah, two centuries after Isaiah, spoke of God’s putting Israel’s remnant into fire to ‘refine them as one refines silver, to test them as gold is tested’. Experientially, such refinement is traumatic. It means letting go of all claims to self-reliance as I stand before God stripped of anything but essentials, conscious of contingency, having nothing of my own to lean on, neither wealth nor degrees nor acquaintances nor accomplishments. No wonder we run a mile from this kind of testing, preferring to rest instead in our own illusions of significance, however brittle.
Abba Peter’s criterion of discernment, therefore, remains relevant. He answers the simple question put to him, ‘What is the fear of God?’, not by proffering a tidy definition but by setting in motion instead a process of self-examination. He asks: ‘Do you in fact trust God?’ People of faith easily assume that they place their trust in God. It is one thing, though, to stand in church on a Sunday and recite the creed; it is another to confront circumstances that threaten to turn our existence upside-down.
Do I trust God when confronted with illness, the loss of a job, betrayal in marriage or friendship? Do I trust God in the face of strategic and environmental menace?
To show trust in hardship and in situations of risk is not tantamount to being fatalist; it is not about leaning back thumb-twiddlingly, expecting God to just sort everything out. Things do not always get sorted out; illness is not always healed; sometimes fractured relationships cannot be mended. To trust God is not to assume that I will be alright. It is to know that, whatever happens, sense may emerge from senselessness, redemptive purity from destructive contamination.
We make progress on this path when we come to appreciate how utterly other God is. For being, in Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, God remains utterly beyond our notions. His thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways not our ways. There will be times when all we can do is, Job-like, to bow down deep and adore uncomprehending. A thousand years in our counting are but a day before God. Sometimes the purposefulness of present hardship takes time to be revealed. Sensing God’s greatness, we learn to revere him in a healthy way, astonished that such Majesty should, for love, have come so close to us in the incarnation, drawing forth our love, which in turn casts out for good all undue anxiety. To balance childlike trust with reverent worship, knowing that underneath all life’s vicissitudes are the everlasting arms: this is what it means to know the tremendous fear of God, which at once pierces and heals human hearts.
Miniature depicting the prophet Isaiah’s vision of God and decorative initial page showing the cleansing of the prophet, from an Isaias glossatus made in Reichenau, Germany, ca. 1000. Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc.Bibl.76, fols. 10v–11r.
You can browse the full manuscript here.
Pope Francis RIP
To the faithful of the Prelatures of Trondheim and Tromsø,
Christ is risen!
Our Holy Father Pope Francis is dead. He fell asleep in the Lord at 7.45 a.m. this morning, Easter Monday. We commend him to God’s sweet mercy, thankful for his ministry and testimony.
Any death, any person’s passage from time into eternity, fills us with reverence. The pasch of a pope does so in a remarkable way. The pope, bishop of Rome, is Peter’s successor: ‘the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful’, as we read in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (n. 23).
We are conscious of the immense load the pope has carried. We know what he, through illness, has suffered. May he now hear the longed-for summons: ‘Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master!’ (Matthew 25.21).
We feel bereft. We have lost a beloved father. Together, at one in the Church, we express our grief — and at the same time our unshakeable confidence in God’s uninterrupted agency through his holy Church. God calls us, as always, to conversion: to love in truth and to speak the truth in love.
At a cardinal moment in the unfolding of the Gospel, one day near Caesarea Philippi, the Lord said to Simon, the apostle who, when he began to realise who Jesus is, exclaimed, ‘Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5.8): ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16.18).
These words are written in enormous letters inside the cupola of the Basilica of St Peter. From the cross that crowns the cupola a vertical axis descends through the papal altar in the church down to the apostle’s grave: a divine promise rooted in the historical call addressed to a man of flesh and blood passes through our time incarnate in a singularly graced, singularly burdened person. Pope Francis has occupied this position with fortitude for twelve year, a link in a long chain.
Christ is Lord of the Church. He will guide her onward, also through times of uncertainty. His word is eternal. It carries through storms as well as through calm weather.
The fact that our Holy Father was called to God at Easter, while we exultantly celebrate the Lord’s resurrection, is beautiful and moving. We see the darkness of the night illumined by the Paschal flame. Pope Francis spent his life proclaiming the historical, ethical, and metaphysical impact of the resurrection. He taught us to see, and to interpret, life’s circumstances in the light of Christ’s victory over death. This we will faithfully do.
The Missal gives us the following prayer to be recited in Masses offered on the death of a pope:
Divinæ tuæ communionis refecti sacramentis, quæsumus, Domine, ut famulus tuus Papa Franciscus, quem Ecclesiæ tuæ visibile voluisti fundamentum unitatis in terris, beatitudini gregis tui feliciter aggregetur.
That is to say:
Lord, we, who have been restored by sacraments of divine communion with you, pray that your servant, Pope Francis, whom you wished to be the visible foundation of your Church’s unity on earth, may be united in gladness to your flock’s heavenly beatitude.
To restore God’s people by divine communion through the Church’s oneness so that it may be perfected in eternal bliss: this is a pope’s great mission.
It is ours as well.
The Church exhorts us: ‘all the faithful of Christ are invited to strive for the holiness and perfection of their own state. Indeed they have an obligation so to strive. Let all then have care that they guide aright their own deepest sentiments of soul’ (Lumen Gentium, 42). With this august commandment before us, we pray for our dear Pope Francis.
I invite you to attend the Requiem Masses that, in the days ahead, will be offered in our parishes and communities. Remember Pope Francis in your prayers. I myself will fervently pray a prayer monks sing for their beloved dead:
Come towards him, saints of God, come to meet him, angels of the Lord: Receive his soul and present it before the face of the Almighty. May Christ who called you receive you, and may the angels lead you to Abraham’s bosom.
Lord, let perpetual light shine on our pope Francis! May he rest in peace! Amen.
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Bishop of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
Subvenite Sancti Dei, occurrite Angeli Domini: Suscipientes animam eius, offerentes eam in conspectu Altissimi. Suscipiat te Christus qui vocavit te, et in sinum Abrahae Angeli deducant te.
Christ is risen!
Our Holy Father Pope Francis is dead. He fell asleep in the Lord at 7.45 a.m. this morning, Easter Monday. We commend him to God’s sweet mercy, thankful for his ministry and testimony.
Any death, any person’s passage from time into eternity, fills us with reverence. The pasch of a pope does so in a remarkable way. The pope, bishop of Rome, is Peter’s successor: ‘the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful’, as we read in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (n. 23).
We are conscious of the immense load the pope has carried. We know what he, through illness, has suffered. May he now hear the longed-for summons: ‘Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master!’ (Matthew 25.21).
We feel bereft. We have lost a beloved father. Together, at one in the Church, we express our grief — and at the same time our unshakeable confidence in God’s uninterrupted agency through his holy Church. God calls us, as always, to conversion: to love in truth and to speak the truth in love.
At a cardinal moment in the unfolding of the Gospel, one day near Caesarea Philippi, the Lord said to Simon, the apostle who, when he began to realise who Jesus is, exclaimed, ‘Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5.8): ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16.18).
These words are written in enormous letters inside the cupola of the Basilica of St Peter. From the cross that crowns the cupola a vertical axis descends through the papal altar in the church down to the apostle’s grave: a divine promise rooted in the historical call addressed to a man of flesh and blood passes through our time incarnate in a singularly graced, singularly burdened person. Pope Francis has occupied this position with fortitude for twelve year, a link in a long chain.
Christ is Lord of the Church. He will guide her onward, also through times of uncertainty. His word is eternal. It carries through storms as well as through calm weather.
The fact that our Holy Father was called to God at Easter, while we exultantly celebrate the Lord’s resurrection, is beautiful and moving. We see the darkness of the night illumined by the Paschal flame. Pope Francis spent his life proclaiming the historical, ethical, and metaphysical impact of the resurrection. He taught us to see, and to interpret, life’s circumstances in the light of Christ’s victory over death. This we will faithfully do.
The Missal gives us the following prayer to be recited in Masses offered on the death of a pope:
Divinæ tuæ communionis refecti sacramentis, quæsumus, Domine, ut famulus tuus Papa Franciscus, quem Ecclesiæ tuæ visibile voluisti fundamentum unitatis in terris, beatitudini gregis tui feliciter aggregetur.
That is to say:
Lord, we, who have been restored by sacraments of divine communion with you, pray that your servant, Pope Francis, whom you wished to be the visible foundation of your Church’s unity on earth, may be united in gladness to your flock’s heavenly beatitude.
To restore God’s people by divine communion through the Church’s oneness so that it may be perfected in eternal bliss: this is a pope’s great mission.
It is ours as well.
The Church exhorts us: ‘all the faithful of Christ are invited to strive for the holiness and perfection of their own state. Indeed they have an obligation so to strive. Let all then have care that they guide aright their own deepest sentiments of soul’ (Lumen Gentium, 42). With this august commandment before us, we pray for our dear Pope Francis.
I invite you to attend the Requiem Masses that, in the days ahead, will be offered in our parishes and communities. Remember Pope Francis in your prayers. I myself will fervently pray a prayer monks sing for their beloved dead:
Come towards him, saints of God, come to meet him, angels of the Lord: Receive his soul and present it before the face of the Almighty. May Christ who called you receive you, and may the angels lead you to Abraham’s bosom.
Lord, let perpetual light shine on our pope Francis! May he rest in peace! Amen.
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Bishop of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
Subvenite Sancti Dei, occurrite Angeli Domini: Suscipientes animam eius, offerentes eam in conspectu Altissimi. Suscipiat te Christus qui vocavit te, et in sinum Abrahae Angeli deducant te.
Easter Day 2025
Even Klassekampen [a daily paper that began life under the aegis of the Marxist Leninist movement] takes it for granted that its readership will, in their inner ear, hear the resonance of our country’s signature Easter hymn Easter Morning Cancels Grief. That appeared from yesterday’s newsletter.
Grundtvik wrote this hymn in 1843, it was set to a melody by Lindeman. Both text and tune are festive. The music is defined by an implacably major key and proceeds by way of chromatically rising chords: ‘Guilt is redeemed, darkness weeps, to us light and life are given in sweet sunshine.’
We do believe this! It is true! But how might we celebrate Easter if our heart is tuned in a minor tonality; if our life does not let itself be ordered by means of bombastic end rhymes; if when we look around, at ourselves and the world, we are fearful?
One reason why otherwise sensible people may distance themselves from Christianity, I sometimes think, is the impression they have that Christians who believe in Easter must somehow inhabit a make-believe world, obliged to pretend that the sun is always shining and always to whistle cheerful tunes. That we don’t should be obvious. Furthermore, it appears from the Gospel, which speaks of perplexity in the face of Christ’s resurrection, of uncoordinated reactions, hesitant response.
People mill about. Mary Magdalene hastens from the grave to Peter and John; the two then run to where she set out from, apparently racing; or did Peter let John get there first, uncertain of what he might say, should Jesus be found living, he who only on Thursday night denied his friend?
Be that as it may. Finally the disciples, the beloved and the not-yet-rocklike, arrive and ascertain: He is not here. His shroud is, so is the napkin that covered his face, neatly folded the way we might fold our pyjamas before taking our morning shower.
Christ’s victory over death is apparent, first, as absence. Here one is, in the province of death, within the tomb, surrounded by death’s accoutrements; but there is no dead body.
John ‘saw’, we are told; then he ‘believed’. May he have been mindful of words heard just three days before, ‘This is my body, given for you’? A body given in this way, to give life, must surely be alive? Faith rises in John like a slow Norwegian dawn.
To believe in the resurrection; to believe that by baptism we have been incorporated into Jesus’s death-defying body, that our life is ‘hidden with Christ in God’, that guilty humanity has been reconciled — none of this means that everything automatically falls into place. Our world is and remains a vale of tears. Even though the victory of grace has been won once for all, it must constantly be kneaded afresh into concrete lives, surrendered to our freedom. The kingdom of God must be lived into unfolding history. It depends on you and me.
A few days after the encounter at the empty tomb, we find Peter and John again, this time in the presence of the Risen One, by the Sea of Tiberias. Jesus asks Peter: ‘Do you love me? Will you live as I have taught you?’ (John 21.15-19, 14.21).
He poses the same questions to us. Our answer in principle is clear, but must become embodied, like anything to do with Christianity.
The New Testament likens Easter faith, life in Christ, to yeast. The dough must be leavened. That is our life’s task. The yeast culture lives, count on that. Only do not put it in the freezer. Provide it with the conditions it needs. Then it will slowly but surely suffuse your life’s ingredients and fill them with nurturing strength.
Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign. Live by that certainty and you will ascertain it exultantly, in crescendo. It will turn into your uniquely new song (Ps 96.1).
The Lord is risen, truly risen! Alleluia. Amen.
Grundtvik wrote this hymn in 1843, it was set to a melody by Lindeman. Both text and tune are festive. The music is defined by an implacably major key and proceeds by way of chromatically rising chords: ‘Guilt is redeemed, darkness weeps, to us light and life are given in sweet sunshine.’
We do believe this! It is true! But how might we celebrate Easter if our heart is tuned in a minor tonality; if our life does not let itself be ordered by means of bombastic end rhymes; if when we look around, at ourselves and the world, we are fearful?
One reason why otherwise sensible people may distance themselves from Christianity, I sometimes think, is the impression they have that Christians who believe in Easter must somehow inhabit a make-believe world, obliged to pretend that the sun is always shining and always to whistle cheerful tunes. That we don’t should be obvious. Furthermore, it appears from the Gospel, which speaks of perplexity in the face of Christ’s resurrection, of uncoordinated reactions, hesitant response.
People mill about. Mary Magdalene hastens from the grave to Peter and John; the two then run to where she set out from, apparently racing; or did Peter let John get there first, uncertain of what he might say, should Jesus be found living, he who only on Thursday night denied his friend?
Be that as it may. Finally the disciples, the beloved and the not-yet-rocklike, arrive and ascertain: He is not here. His shroud is, so is the napkin that covered his face, neatly folded the way we might fold our pyjamas before taking our morning shower.
Christ’s victory over death is apparent, first, as absence. Here one is, in the province of death, within the tomb, surrounded by death’s accoutrements; but there is no dead body.
John ‘saw’, we are told; then he ‘believed’. May he have been mindful of words heard just three days before, ‘This is my body, given for you’? A body given in this way, to give life, must surely be alive? Faith rises in John like a slow Norwegian dawn.
To believe in the resurrection; to believe that by baptism we have been incorporated into Jesus’s death-defying body, that our life is ‘hidden with Christ in God’, that guilty humanity has been reconciled — none of this means that everything automatically falls into place. Our world is and remains a vale of tears. Even though the victory of grace has been won once for all, it must constantly be kneaded afresh into concrete lives, surrendered to our freedom. The kingdom of God must be lived into unfolding history. It depends on you and me.
A few days after the encounter at the empty tomb, we find Peter and John again, this time in the presence of the Risen One, by the Sea of Tiberias. Jesus asks Peter: ‘Do you love me? Will you live as I have taught you?’ (John 21.15-19, 14.21).
He poses the same questions to us. Our answer in principle is clear, but must become embodied, like anything to do with Christianity.
The New Testament likens Easter faith, life in Christ, to yeast. The dough must be leavened. That is our life’s task. The yeast culture lives, count on that. Only do not put it in the freezer. Provide it with the conditions it needs. Then it will slowly but surely suffuse your life’s ingredients and fill them with nurturing strength.
Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign. Live by that certainty and you will ascertain it exultantly, in crescendo. It will turn into your uniquely new song (Ps 96.1).
The Lord is risen, truly risen! Alleluia. Amen.
Easter Vigil 2025
In the beginning the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s Spirit hovered over the water. God said, Let there be light! And there was light.
Life presupposes light. Creation began with coruscation. The Bible tells us this; science confirms it.
Our Vigil, too, begins with a flame. Before a word is spoke, the Easter fire burns, a homily in itself, not least when it spreads from taper to taper within our church. A dark space starts to sparkle comfortingly. Joy flashes through our senses and minds: the power of darkness is dispelled! The world, and our presence in it, has meaning and finality. That inspires hope.
We know where and when Christ rose from the dead. His resurrection counts among Antiquity’s best documented events. Easter, however, is about more than an historical triumph. What we rejoice in is not the time-bound return from death of Lazarus.
Christ is not overwhelmed by death. He enters death as a battle, confronts it as a foe. Art shows him descending into the netherworld armed with the cross as weapon, constraining death, depicted as a greedy Leviathan like Jonah’s whale, to set its captives free. Adam and Eve emerge as the ambassadors of all their children. They stand there simultaneously ancient and fresh: a new humanity.
Such images may seem to us naive. That is how it must be. Face to face with eternal truth, our transient forms of expression are reduced to stuttering. The truth imperfectly represented, of Christ’s victory over death, carries, however; it constitutes the criterion by which to evaluate other truth claims.
God made all there is by his Word. Man was formed to resemble the Word and to be illumined by it. We opted for darkness. God did not abandon us. The Word became flesh to re-ignite his light in us. The Word entered the mute silence of death in order to resound there and to let his essential fire burn so that Christ’s faithful, when their hour comes, may go forth to encounter physical death in peace, with hope, recognising in it, as St Francis sang, a sister that does not close, but opens.
When the priest blessed the Easter fire, he prays:
O God, who through your Son bestowed upon the faithful the fire of your glory, sanctify ✣ this new fire, we pray, and grant that, by these paschal celebrations, we may be so inflamed with heavenly desires, that with minds made pure we may attain festivities of unending splendour.
We perceive the glory in flashes. We experience the desires intensely, in both body and soul. The most holy night of Easter confirms our intuition: it is possible even now to conduct a heavenly existence provided we live in Christ, the Living One, who is Resurrection and Life. The fire of glory that eludes us in the chaos that often constitutes life can become a mighty blaze if we let the Spirit of Christ breathe upon it and constantly add new fuel by living a Christlike life.
Through baptism, which the Fathers called φωτισμός, ‘illumination’, we have been granted a share in Christ’s consoling victory over sin and death. By his holy and glorious wounds we are guarded and protected. Night no longer has a claim to us. We belong to the day. Let us live accordingly, bearing our light graciously, singing Alleluia with conviction.
In the name of Christ! Amen
From a Spanish 13th-century ensemble, designed as panels of a tabernacle. Now in the MET Cloisters in New York.
Life presupposes light. Creation began with coruscation. The Bible tells us this; science confirms it.
Our Vigil, too, begins with a flame. Before a word is spoke, the Easter fire burns, a homily in itself, not least when it spreads from taper to taper within our church. A dark space starts to sparkle comfortingly. Joy flashes through our senses and minds: the power of darkness is dispelled! The world, and our presence in it, has meaning and finality. That inspires hope.
We know where and when Christ rose from the dead. His resurrection counts among Antiquity’s best documented events. Easter, however, is about more than an historical triumph. What we rejoice in is not the time-bound return from death of Lazarus.
Christ is not overwhelmed by death. He enters death as a battle, confronts it as a foe. Art shows him descending into the netherworld armed with the cross as weapon, constraining death, depicted as a greedy Leviathan like Jonah’s whale, to set its captives free. Adam and Eve emerge as the ambassadors of all their children. They stand there simultaneously ancient and fresh: a new humanity.
Such images may seem to us naive. That is how it must be. Face to face with eternal truth, our transient forms of expression are reduced to stuttering. The truth imperfectly represented, of Christ’s victory over death, carries, however; it constitutes the criterion by which to evaluate other truth claims.
God made all there is by his Word. Man was formed to resemble the Word and to be illumined by it. We opted for darkness. God did not abandon us. The Word became flesh to re-ignite his light in us. The Word entered the mute silence of death in order to resound there and to let his essential fire burn so that Christ’s faithful, when their hour comes, may go forth to encounter physical death in peace, with hope, recognising in it, as St Francis sang, a sister that does not close, but opens.
When the priest blessed the Easter fire, he prays:
O God, who through your Son bestowed upon the faithful the fire of your glory, sanctify ✣ this new fire, we pray, and grant that, by these paschal celebrations, we may be so inflamed with heavenly desires, that with minds made pure we may attain festivities of unending splendour.
We perceive the glory in flashes. We experience the desires intensely, in both body and soul. The most holy night of Easter confirms our intuition: it is possible even now to conduct a heavenly existence provided we live in Christ, the Living One, who is Resurrection and Life. The fire of glory that eludes us in the chaos that often constitutes life can become a mighty blaze if we let the Spirit of Christ breathe upon it and constantly add new fuel by living a Christlike life.
Through baptism, which the Fathers called φωτισμός, ‘illumination’, we have been granted a share in Christ’s consoling victory over sin and death. By his holy and glorious wounds we are guarded and protected. Night no longer has a claim to us. We belong to the day. Let us live accordingly, bearing our light graciously, singing Alleluia with conviction.
In the name of Christ! Amen
From a Spanish 13th-century ensemble, designed as panels of a tabernacle. Now in the MET Cloisters in New York.
Via Crucis
I remember standing in the much-regretted Cambridge Music Shop in All Saints Passage well over thirty years ago listening to a magnificent recording of Stephen Hough playing Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. Transported, I bought the disc. Liszt’s sacred, contemplative piano works have accompanied me for decades, then; but I’d never heard his Via Crucis until I came across Leif Ove Andsnes’s newly released album. The pared-down, serene essentiality of this music is astounding. Often enough it does not sound like Liszt at all – yet it is, an expression of the later stage of the composer’s life: he was 68, and a cleric in minor orders, when the work was completed. Liszt’s Via Crucis was first performed in Budapest on Good Friday in 1929. I put it on today after celebrating the solemn Commemoration of the Passion. I listened with reverence, consoled.
Conversation with Luke Coppen
The online version of this interview is here.
What does the Church expect of us in Holy Week? One thing is clear: it wants us to take part in the great services of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. But what about the times in between?
Although the Triduum can feel like a frantic rush between church and home, and back again, sometimes there are quiet moments. What’s the best way to fill them? One possible answer is the rosary: the ancient and ingenious Marian prayer using 59 stringed beads. As you pray, you meditate on events in the life of Christ, including those commemorated in the Holy Triduum.
How can the rosary lead us deeper into the events of Holy Week? The Pillar asked Bishop Erik Varden, a spiritual writer, Trappist monk, and Prelate of Trondheim in Norway.
The mysteries of the rosary cover many of the events commemorated in Holy Week. Does that make it a particularly apt prayer for this week?
The rosary is an apt prayer for every day. It lets us interiorise the mystery of faith while lodging it in the historical account of the Gospels. Personally, I have always been partial to the custom — of German origin, I think — of articulating the series of specific mysteries within the Hail Mary: ‘…and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, who sweated blood…’, et cetera. Such litanic repetition lets the sequence of Christ’s life and saving work penetrate our consciousness peacefully and powerfully.
In what ways might praying the rosary during Holy Week serve as a bridge between personal devotion and the communal liturgies of the Triduum?
Ideally the twain should overlap in any case. What the liturgy does with singular force during Holy Week is to integrate us personally into the celebration. It engages our sensibility and agency by means, for example, of the procession with branches on Palm Sunday, the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, the individual veneration of the cross on Good Friday, the lighting of tapers during the Easter Vigil.
By these simple but efficacious means the Church, a sterling pedagogue, lets personal and communal spheres overlap; indeed she allows us to express in public intensely intimate realities, as when each of us, in full public view, kneels to kiss the wood of the cross without in any way feeling we are victims of a violation of privacy; on the contrary, it is strangely consoling to find fellowship in vulnerability. The rite’s predictability provides the right balance of palpable communion and respectful distance.
This is a dimension of society that otherwise has been entirely lost to us. But are we not hungry for it? The rosary wonderfully infuses these Paschal encounters with unsentimental, maternal sweetness.
The rosary is, of course, a Marian prayer. Why is it helpful to meditate on Mary’s role in the events of Holy Week through the rosary’s mysteries?
Is the rosary in fact a ‘Marian prayer’? I’d say yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the Blessed Virgin is the person to whom our entreaty is addressed; no, insofar as the thrust of Christian prayer is always christocentric. The first part of the Hail Mary is itself a mosaic of scriptural passages. It draws us into the annunciation of Christ’s incarnation, the enthralling meeting of the ambassador of Transcendence with the young woman who represents the hurting density of ‘all flesh’.
Speaking of mosaics — think of the wonderful representations of the Virgin in the apse of many ancient basilicas, most famously in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. Are these works manifestations of ‘Marian devotion’? No, we couldn’t really say that. The terms would have seemed meaningless, I expect, to believers of the ninth century. The Virgin is given pride of place in the sanctuary, above the altar on which the Sacred Mysteries are enacted, not as an added extra to enliven piety, but as the Guarantor of the Mysteries’ embodied realism. Even as Christ our Lord was incarnate in the Virgin’s flesh at a given, datable moment of history, so he is really present in the Eucharistic sacrifice.
Wherever, whenever the Virgin is present in Scripture, art, and devotion, it is as Hodegetria, that is, as one who ‘shows the way’, who points towards Christ and indicates where we can find him, saying, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. This dynamic strikes us when we pray the rosary during Holy Week. It enables us to consider the passion through the prism of the incarnation, drawing the whole of Christ’s life into unified perception. Our ancestors in the faith had a keener sense of this connectedness than we today, who for all sorts of cultural and digital reasons are much better at categorisation than at synthesis. I am sure you will have seen medieval statues or paintings of the Pietà, Mary holding Jesus after the deposition from the cross, in which there is explicit reference to the nativity motif of Mother-and-Child. I am always lost for words before such images. They express a truth, an internal coherence, that is vital but exceeds the expressive potential of mere words. The rosary can help us make, and make sense of, such connections.
Would you recommend combining praying the rosary with other personal devotions in Holy Week, for example, the recitation of the seven penitential psalms?
By all means. Above all, though, I would counsel people to focus on the missal and breviary, letting themselves be drawn into the mighty current of the Church’s prayer, oriented through centuries to irrigate the earth and our dried-up hearts. In the Holy Week Masses, in the offices of Tenebrae, in the Commemoration of the Passion and the Paschal Vigil, we have at our disposal a magnificent mystagogy, a careful introduction into the saving mystery that is at once sublime and wholly accessible. Why not let ourselves be taken by the hand by the Church, our Mother? That way we shall appreciate the Marian dimension of our faith, not just as ‘devotion’, but as the atmosphere within which, as a Christians, we live and move and have our being, where, with Mary, Christ’s Mother and ours, we learn to own and express our deepest grief and our most exultant joy, carried by a well-founded hope that is at once intelligent and visceral.
What does the Church expect of us in Holy Week? One thing is clear: it wants us to take part in the great services of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. But what about the times in between?
Although the Triduum can feel like a frantic rush between church and home, and back again, sometimes there are quiet moments. What’s the best way to fill them? One possible answer is the rosary: the ancient and ingenious Marian prayer using 59 stringed beads. As you pray, you meditate on events in the life of Christ, including those commemorated in the Holy Triduum.
How can the rosary lead us deeper into the events of Holy Week? The Pillar asked Bishop Erik Varden, a spiritual writer, Trappist monk, and Prelate of Trondheim in Norway.
The mysteries of the rosary cover many of the events commemorated in Holy Week. Does that make it a particularly apt prayer for this week?
The rosary is an apt prayer for every day. It lets us interiorise the mystery of faith while lodging it in the historical account of the Gospels. Personally, I have always been partial to the custom — of German origin, I think — of articulating the series of specific mysteries within the Hail Mary: ‘…and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, who sweated blood…’, et cetera. Such litanic repetition lets the sequence of Christ’s life and saving work penetrate our consciousness peacefully and powerfully.
In what ways might praying the rosary during Holy Week serve as a bridge between personal devotion and the communal liturgies of the Triduum?
Ideally the twain should overlap in any case. What the liturgy does with singular force during Holy Week is to integrate us personally into the celebration. It engages our sensibility and agency by means, for example, of the procession with branches on Palm Sunday, the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, the individual veneration of the cross on Good Friday, the lighting of tapers during the Easter Vigil.
By these simple but efficacious means the Church, a sterling pedagogue, lets personal and communal spheres overlap; indeed she allows us to express in public intensely intimate realities, as when each of us, in full public view, kneels to kiss the wood of the cross without in any way feeling we are victims of a violation of privacy; on the contrary, it is strangely consoling to find fellowship in vulnerability. The rite’s predictability provides the right balance of palpable communion and respectful distance.
This is a dimension of society that otherwise has been entirely lost to us. But are we not hungry for it? The rosary wonderfully infuses these Paschal encounters with unsentimental, maternal sweetness.
The rosary is, of course, a Marian prayer. Why is it helpful to meditate on Mary’s role in the events of Holy Week through the rosary’s mysteries?
Is the rosary in fact a ‘Marian prayer’? I’d say yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the Blessed Virgin is the person to whom our entreaty is addressed; no, insofar as the thrust of Christian prayer is always christocentric. The first part of the Hail Mary is itself a mosaic of scriptural passages. It draws us into the annunciation of Christ’s incarnation, the enthralling meeting of the ambassador of Transcendence with the young woman who represents the hurting density of ‘all flesh’.
Speaking of mosaics — think of the wonderful representations of the Virgin in the apse of many ancient basilicas, most famously in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. Are these works manifestations of ‘Marian devotion’? No, we couldn’t really say that. The terms would have seemed meaningless, I expect, to believers of the ninth century. The Virgin is given pride of place in the sanctuary, above the altar on which the Sacred Mysteries are enacted, not as an added extra to enliven piety, but as the Guarantor of the Mysteries’ embodied realism. Even as Christ our Lord was incarnate in the Virgin’s flesh at a given, datable moment of history, so he is really present in the Eucharistic sacrifice.
Wherever, whenever the Virgin is present in Scripture, art, and devotion, it is as Hodegetria, that is, as one who ‘shows the way’, who points towards Christ and indicates where we can find him, saying, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. This dynamic strikes us when we pray the rosary during Holy Week. It enables us to consider the passion through the prism of the incarnation, drawing the whole of Christ’s life into unified perception. Our ancestors in the faith had a keener sense of this connectedness than we today, who for all sorts of cultural and digital reasons are much better at categorisation than at synthesis. I am sure you will have seen medieval statues or paintings of the Pietà, Mary holding Jesus after the deposition from the cross, in which there is explicit reference to the nativity motif of Mother-and-Child. I am always lost for words before such images. They express a truth, an internal coherence, that is vital but exceeds the expressive potential of mere words. The rosary can help us make, and make sense of, such connections.
Would you recommend combining praying the rosary with other personal devotions in Holy Week, for example, the recitation of the seven penitential psalms?
By all means. Above all, though, I would counsel people to focus on the missal and breviary, letting themselves be drawn into the mighty current of the Church’s prayer, oriented through centuries to irrigate the earth and our dried-up hearts. In the Holy Week Masses, in the offices of Tenebrae, in the Commemoration of the Passion and the Paschal Vigil, we have at our disposal a magnificent mystagogy, a careful introduction into the saving mystery that is at once sublime and wholly accessible. Why not let ourselves be taken by the hand by the Church, our Mother? That way we shall appreciate the Marian dimension of our faith, not just as ‘devotion’, but as the atmosphere within which, as a Christians, we live and move and have our being, where, with Mary, Christ’s Mother and ours, we learn to own and express our deepest grief and our most exultant joy, carried by a well-founded hope that is at once intelligent and visceral.
Good Friday 2025
Isaiah 52.13-53.12: The crowds were appalled on seeing him.
Hebrews 4.14-5.9: He offered up prayer and entreaty.
John 18.1-19.42: Woman, there is your son.
‘The crowds’, says Isaiah in his mystic prophecy, ‘were appalled on seeing him’. We do not know whom in particular Isaiah had in mind; but the reality he describes corresponds so perfectly to Christ on the cross that his millennial words give us goosebumps.
The prophet draws a picture of justice spurned, tenderness trodden under foot. We see philanthropy spat at, human dignity denied. That such things can, and do, happen, we know well; but we prefer not to think about it. We avert our gaze, zap to a different channel, glad to be distracted.
Today, though, distraction is no option. We stand face to face with the cross, with Christ’s wounds. In faith we acknowledge what Isaiah intuited: ‘he was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins’. We are part of the picture. The crucifixion cannot be turned into an abstraction à la Salvador Dalí. The cross is sovereignly palpable. It touches us; and today we touch it. One by one we kneel before it to kiss it, each of us carrying his or her own burden, often known to no one but ourselves. We are excused, today, from having to pretend that all is well. We bear our load, at the same time know we are carried. ‘By his wounds we are healed’. Yes, it is accomplished.
‘Behold the man!’, said Pilate, the politician. True enough, the crucified shows us what we, you and I, are capable of doing to each other: ‘The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man’, wrote Primo Levi. He had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. He knew what he was talking about. This is a perspective we must not lose out of sight, for it is repeated incessantly; it is unfolding now. The cross confronts us with our penchant for cruelty, indifference, hatred. It invites us to weep over our hardened hearts, to cry Kyrie eleison!
Though we choke on our exclamation when we realise: he, our Kyrios, is nailed before our eyes. Our misdeed is not perpetrated against man alone; it is God we have sought to tear ‘away from the land of the living’. We have wanted to finish him off. The cry we just heard in the Passion — ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ — stirs our conscience. For have I not, albeit more subtly, in secret, thought likewise? Have I not sometimes wished to cancel God in order, at least for a while, to be free of his demands and my betrayals? When I hear him say, ‘what I have done for you, you must do for one another’, do I not often wilfully turn a deaf ear?
To fix our gaze on the crucified is to recognise these three contrasting, apparently contradictory facts: my weakness, my rebellion, and God’s patience. It is good for a person, and for a people, to be measured against such a standard. Considered responsibly it can lead us to humility, penitence, and loving fear of God.
If we look back over a thousand years of Christian civilisation here in our country, and in Europe, we see it has flourished best, and brought forth its finest fruits, when the cross has been kept in attention thus. We ascertain from the accomplishments of Christians — Fra Angelico and Dante, Undset and Bruckner, Mother Teresa and Gaudí — that the cross is, as the liturgy acclaims by way of imagery, the Tree of Life. ‘For behold’, we sing on this day, in what may be the Church year’s boldest assertion, ‘by the cross joy entered the world.’ We do not glorify the cross’s pain and humiliation. No, we shed tears over them. But we ascertain that God can effect consolation through pain, life through death. Even sin itself, our absurd mutiny against beatitude, can be yoked into service for the sake of the good.
The cross displays compassion as a carrying force in relations both human and divine. God bears our burden on our behalf. That way he annihilates death. He short-circuits the current of violence by freely letting himself become ‘a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim’, as we pray in the Roman Canon. He bids us live and die likewise. This commandment is explicit in the teaching Jesus proclaimed while he walked about doing good: ‘Whoever would be my disciple must take up his cross and follow me’ (Mt 16.24). It is symbolically manifest on Calvary when Mary, the Mother of the Lord, in whom the Church recognises an image of herself, stands at the foot of the cross. What she must have suffered there only mothers among us can know, humanly speaking. What her compassion meant in principle we learn from theology. It is underneath the cross, in wholehearted incorporation into Christ’s saving work, that the mission of the Church is enacted. When the Church blesses and consecrates, it is with the sign of the cross. Should she try to work otherwise, she would cut herself off from the tree of life and wither.
This is a message the world has always struggled to understand. The cross, as a pledge of transformative compassion, was scandalous already in apostolic times: that much is clear from St Paul’s letters. Nietzsche despised the cross as a denial of his notion of the Übermensch: we know what that led to. Recently a tradesman who these days has much to say about a lot, and has sophisticated broadcasting equipment, declared that empathy is the West’s Achilles heel which ought to be replaced by a digitally engendered prosthesis in steel. It cannot be stated too clearly that Christians must distance themselves from such drivel.
The world rejoiced by the cross is not a world of deals in which people, and peoples, are tradable; it is a world that inaugurates a new earth where a wounded God shall be all in all, and our nature will be renewed by grace. Sing, then, tongues of Christians of the triumph of the cross and of its price! Do not be brought off course by siren songs. Christ, our high priest, offers us the bread of life and the wine of gladness at the altar of the cross. Shall we then instead opt for a nourishment of trollish pebbles? No way. Amen.
Relief from the Cistercian abbey of Cardeña, showing St Bernard’s vision of the crucifixion.
Hebrews 4.14-5.9: He offered up prayer and entreaty.
John 18.1-19.42: Woman, there is your son.
‘The crowds’, says Isaiah in his mystic prophecy, ‘were appalled on seeing him’. We do not know whom in particular Isaiah had in mind; but the reality he describes corresponds so perfectly to Christ on the cross that his millennial words give us goosebumps.
The prophet draws a picture of justice spurned, tenderness trodden under foot. We see philanthropy spat at, human dignity denied. That such things can, and do, happen, we know well; but we prefer not to think about it. We avert our gaze, zap to a different channel, glad to be distracted.
Today, though, distraction is no option. We stand face to face with the cross, with Christ’s wounds. In faith we acknowledge what Isaiah intuited: ‘he was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins’. We are part of the picture. The crucifixion cannot be turned into an abstraction à la Salvador Dalí. The cross is sovereignly palpable. It touches us; and today we touch it. One by one we kneel before it to kiss it, each of us carrying his or her own burden, often known to no one but ourselves. We are excused, today, from having to pretend that all is well. We bear our load, at the same time know we are carried. ‘By his wounds we are healed’. Yes, it is accomplished.
‘Behold the man!’, said Pilate, the politician. True enough, the crucified shows us what we, you and I, are capable of doing to each other: ‘The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man’, wrote Primo Levi. He had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. He knew what he was talking about. This is a perspective we must not lose out of sight, for it is repeated incessantly; it is unfolding now. The cross confronts us with our penchant for cruelty, indifference, hatred. It invites us to weep over our hardened hearts, to cry Kyrie eleison!
Though we choke on our exclamation when we realise: he, our Kyrios, is nailed before our eyes. Our misdeed is not perpetrated against man alone; it is God we have sought to tear ‘away from the land of the living’. We have wanted to finish him off. The cry we just heard in the Passion — ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ — stirs our conscience. For have I not, albeit more subtly, in secret, thought likewise? Have I not sometimes wished to cancel God in order, at least for a while, to be free of his demands and my betrayals? When I hear him say, ‘what I have done for you, you must do for one another’, do I not often wilfully turn a deaf ear?
To fix our gaze on the crucified is to recognise these three contrasting, apparently contradictory facts: my weakness, my rebellion, and God’s patience. It is good for a person, and for a people, to be measured against such a standard. Considered responsibly it can lead us to humility, penitence, and loving fear of God.
If we look back over a thousand years of Christian civilisation here in our country, and in Europe, we see it has flourished best, and brought forth its finest fruits, when the cross has been kept in attention thus. We ascertain from the accomplishments of Christians — Fra Angelico and Dante, Undset and Bruckner, Mother Teresa and Gaudí — that the cross is, as the liturgy acclaims by way of imagery, the Tree of Life. ‘For behold’, we sing on this day, in what may be the Church year’s boldest assertion, ‘by the cross joy entered the world.’ We do not glorify the cross’s pain and humiliation. No, we shed tears over them. But we ascertain that God can effect consolation through pain, life through death. Even sin itself, our absurd mutiny against beatitude, can be yoked into service for the sake of the good.
The cross displays compassion as a carrying force in relations both human and divine. God bears our burden on our behalf. That way he annihilates death. He short-circuits the current of violence by freely letting himself become ‘a pure victim, a holy victim, a spotless victim’, as we pray in the Roman Canon. He bids us live and die likewise. This commandment is explicit in the teaching Jesus proclaimed while he walked about doing good: ‘Whoever would be my disciple must take up his cross and follow me’ (Mt 16.24). It is symbolically manifest on Calvary when Mary, the Mother of the Lord, in whom the Church recognises an image of herself, stands at the foot of the cross. What she must have suffered there only mothers among us can know, humanly speaking. What her compassion meant in principle we learn from theology. It is underneath the cross, in wholehearted incorporation into Christ’s saving work, that the mission of the Church is enacted. When the Church blesses and consecrates, it is with the sign of the cross. Should she try to work otherwise, she would cut herself off from the tree of life and wither.
This is a message the world has always struggled to understand. The cross, as a pledge of transformative compassion, was scandalous already in apostolic times: that much is clear from St Paul’s letters. Nietzsche despised the cross as a denial of his notion of the Übermensch: we know what that led to. Recently a tradesman who these days has much to say about a lot, and has sophisticated broadcasting equipment, declared that empathy is the West’s Achilles heel which ought to be replaced by a digitally engendered prosthesis in steel. It cannot be stated too clearly that Christians must distance themselves from such drivel.
The world rejoiced by the cross is not a world of deals in which people, and peoples, are tradable; it is a world that inaugurates a new earth where a wounded God shall be all in all, and our nature will be renewed by grace. Sing, then, tongues of Christians of the triumph of the cross and of its price! Do not be brought off course by siren songs. Christ, our high priest, offers us the bread of life and the wine of gladness at the altar of the cross. Shall we then instead opt for a nourishment of trollish pebbles? No way. Amen.
Relief from the Cistercian abbey of Cardeña, showing St Bernard’s vision of the crucifixion.