Citizen Columns
Question
What is your favourite sacred text and why?
Answer
We all have our favorite passages, from the Bible or the Fathers, from the Liturgy or from the services of the Church year. What list would you come up with? Here’s my reply.
There are so many that are special to me, but if forced to choose I would say St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 1:18-2:2, ending with the thought that shaped Paul’s life: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”. Christian faith is all about paradoxes beyond our easy comprehension and this passage speaks about the wisdom and power that comes through foolishness and weakness. There is nothing expected here, for “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong…so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” Every natural religious and philosophical intuition is overturned by the Cross.
When I think about the words of this passage I cannot separate them from when they are read in the Orthodox Church, during the afternoon service of Holy Friday (Good Friday). The priests carry an almost life-sized icon of the dead Christ, and place Him in a symbolic tomb set up in the center of the church and surrounded with masses of flowers. As the clergy process and cense the tomb with clouds of incense, the choir quietly chants a hymn of lamentation in an ancient and haunting Bulgarian melody, whose words recount the tender way that Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus down from the cross, wrapped his body and placed it in the tomb. In those few moments, I feel as if all the world’s pain and sorrow is placed in the tomb at the same time.
I recall how my Russian grandmother and the elderly ladies of the parish would arrange the flowers with such devotion, and with tears, and it seemed to me that all their losses were gathered there—war, exile, poverty, sickness, death. But they understood something more, because it is only the weak, the suffering, the low and despised who can glimpse the wisdom of the cross.
With love in Christ,
Fr John
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