Holy Monday – Christ of the Extreme Humility

The Orthodox Church today begins the Liturgical services for Holy Week, and on the first three days of Holy Week we venerate the icon ‘Christ of the Extreme Humility’, which shows Christ at the moment of His Passion, when He is taken down from the Cross. Everything about Him shows a man who is broken and destroyed. He is emaciated. He is bleeding from His side. His head is bowed limply. And yet there is an eerie beauty to this icon. The Christ who is rendered in this icon has a dignity that surpasses death. There is nothing written here that yet proclaims the Resurrection; only the composure of the face tells us that the final word has not yet been spoken. It is interesting that the same icon, called Άκρα Ταπείνωσις (Ákra Tapeínōsis, the ‘Man of Sorrows’) in Greek, is in the Russian tradition designated as Царь Славы (Tsar Slavy, the ‘King of Glory’). Two very different sides of the same icon are thus labelled upon it, but the effect is much the same. The glory of Christ and the utmost humiliation of the Man of Sorrows are one and the same.

It is exceedingly difficult not to draw these reflections on an icon of Christ’s death into a response to the deadly church bombings that claimed the lives of over two hundred Sri Lankan and expat believers (mostly Catholics) in low-income communities in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa yesterday – our Palm Sunday; their Easter. These bombings, the worst organised violence the country has seen since the civil war, were carefully planned and executed simultaneously across three cities as an action against the country’s minority Christian community, which has been there since the time of Saint Thomas in the first century. A number of media commentators have already begun to suggest that the violence is a continuation by other means of the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war. But for the Christians of that island nation – who had by and large been bystanders in a civil war along ethno-religious lines – the unspeakable shock of grief and death overshadowed a festival that was meant to be a celebration of joy and resurrection.

Sense cannot be made of this suffering, and to attempt to do so now – particularly along communalist or political lines – would be the very worst sort of patronisation, particularly for a community that has enough reason to worry without being coöpted into another stage of civil conflict. But perhaps sense should not be made of it. Perhaps it should not be rationalised. Did the Theotokos or Saint John, looking upon the One they had thought was about to become the promised Messiah and the Saviour of their people from domination by Rome, try to make sense of what they saw before the Cross? The Resurrection had not come yet. Could they have foreseen it? If they had so tried, what would have been their reward for so doing, but even further grief and pain? Did the other people who watched Christ in the last moments of His life try to make sense of what they saw? Did they fix their hopes of worldly glory upon it only to have them frustrated before their eyes, or their exultation in the death of a seditious troublemaker between two of His (supposed) fellow-banditti? In short: do we have any right to demand of the Sri Lankan Christians that they make sense of what has happened to them? Theories and theodicies are of no use to those who suffer, and the only ones who tend to offer them are those who don’t.

The Gospel, that is to say a book proclaiming itself to be news of an Imperial victory (for that was the contemporary meaning of the term εὐαγγέλιον in the Greek-speaking areas of classical Rome), is thus drenched not only in the ironies of imperial language for what is in fact a subversive and anti-imperial message, but in the sheer reality of the pain and grief and death that the mechanisms of empire and the mechanisms of worldly conflict can bring to bear on the human person. The Christians of Sri Lanka do not need to be told this. They are living that reality as we speak. They bear the same wounds that Christ bore. They are tormented with the same inward doubt and grief and bereavement of the One who cried out from the Cross, ‘‘Ēli, ‘Ēli, lămāna šabaqtany?’. On the other hand, we first-world Christians who speak from positions of comfort and affluence – I do wonder if we truly can understand this, save through the work and witness of radicals like Ched Myers (or Dorothy Day, or Mother Maria Skobtsova).

But even if it is not given to us to understand, we can still kneel and prostrate ourselves before Him Who bore, not only the violence of the world in wounds upon His body, but also the violence of temptations and the violence of the pain we bring upon ourselves. We can still kneel before Him Who was given up to be beaten and mocked and killed like a criminal. The whole of theodicy is there. We can weep alongside Jacob for his lost son; and we can still bear, insofar as our strength and development allow, our own crosses. Through the prayers of the Theotokos, O Saviour, save us!