laudable Practice

The doctrine of the cross is therefore a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity; and we hold it to be no less indispensable now, than it was in St. Paul's time, that every minister of the Gospel should be able to say with truth, We preach Christ crucified.  The words are those of Charles James Blomfield in a Good Friday sermon during the 1820s, when he was vicar of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London and (from 1824-28) Bishop of Chichester. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor. This, in other words, was most definitively an Old High sermon - an Old High sermon proclaiming Christ Crucified as "a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity", contrary to the oft repeated misrepre...

Praying the Litany on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, week by week, is a practical, enriching discipline which can gather up all of life in prayer before the Triune God. It has a blessed prosaic quality, week by week ensuring that we pray for those whom we might forget or, in some cases, prefer not to pray for.  In Holy Week, while the text (thankfully) does not change, particular petitions of the Litany take on an added emphasis, compelling our attention, drawing us more deeply into the mysteries of this week and unfolding their meaning. O God the Father of heaven ... O God the Son, Redeemer of the world ... O God the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son: have mercy upon us miserable sinners. We begin, as we do each time the Litany is prayed, by invoking the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. From the outset, then, the Litany brings us to recognise the truth that the savings events of Holy Week are the work of the Holy Trinity, for us and for our salvation. He...

At the Parish Eucharist, Palm Sunday 2024 Mark 15:5 “But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed.” That was a long Gospel reading. Last Sunday’s Gospel reading for the feast of Saint Patrick had a mere 143 words. Today’s Gospel reading has 883 words, six times as long, a full chapter from Saint Mark’s Gospel [1]. And so Holy Week begins.  It is a week traditionally marked by much longer readings from the Scriptures.  We also have additional ceremonies that take place in our services in Holy Week. Today, as we have seen, we have had the blessing of palms. On Maundy Thursday evening, with our parish church darkened, the altar is solemnly stripped ahead of Good Friday. Each day is marked by services and special readings from the Scriptures. There are many deeply evocative hymns for Holy Week, which we are singing today and will be singing throughout this week. Across the Christian traditions, our services also tend to be longer. For example, the Good Friday liturgy...

Jesus was led out of the gates of Jerusalem, that he might become the sacrifice for persons without the pale, even for all the world. And the daughters of Jerusalem followed him with pious tears till they came to Calvary; a place difficult in the ascent, eminent and apt for the publication of shame, a bill of death and dead bones, polluted and impure; and there beheld him stripped naked who clothes the fields with flowers, and all the world with robes, and the whole globe with the canopy of heaven; and so dressed, that now every circumstance was a triumph. By his disgrace he trampled upon our pride; by his poverty and nakedness he triumphed over our covetousness and love of riches; and by his pains chastised the delicacies of our flesh, and broke in pieces the fetters of concupiscence. For as soon as Adam was clothed, he quitted Paradise; and Jesus was made naked, that he might bring us in again ... And now behold the priest and the sacrifice of all the world laid upon the altar of the...

He entered into the world with all the circumstances of poverty.  He had a star to illustrate his birth; but a stable for his bedchamber, and a manger for his cradle. The angels sang hymns when he was born: but he was cold and cried, uneasy and unprovided. He lived long in the trade of a carpenter; he, by whom God  made the world, had, in his first years, the business of a mean and ignoble trade. He did good wherever he went; and almost wherever he went was abused. He deserved heaven for his obedience, but found a cross in his way thither: and if ever any man had reason to expect fair usages from God, and to be dandled in the lap of ease, softness, and a prosperous fortune, he it was only that could deserve that, or any thing that can be good. But, after he had chosen to live a life of virtue, of poverty, and labour, he entered into a state of death; whose shame and trouble were great enough to pay for the sins of the whole world.   And I shall choose to express this...

For after that Christ had done all this by the direct actions of his Priestly Office, of sacrificing himself for us, he hath also done very many things for us which are also the fruits of his first love and prosecutions of our redemption.  I will not instance in the strange arts of mercy that our Lord uses to bring us to live holy lives;  things are so ordered, and so great a value set upon our souls since they are the images of God, and redeemed by the Blood of the holy Lamb, that the salvation of our souls is reckoned as a part of Christ's reward, a part of the glorification of his humanity. Every sinner that repents causes joy to Christ, and the joy is so great that it runs over and wets the fair brows and beauteous locks of Cherubims and Seraphims, and all the Angels have a part of that banquet; Then it is that our blessed Lord feels the fruits of his holy death, the acceptation of his holy sacrifice, the graciousness of his person, the return of his prayers. For all that ...

And now begins that great triumph in which the holy Jesus was pleased to exalt his office, and to abase his person. He rode, like a poor man, upon an ass, a beast of burden, and the lowest value; and yet it was not his own; and in that equipage he received the acclamations due to a mighty Prince, to the Son of the eternal King: telling us, that the smallness of fortune, and the rudeness of exterior habiliments, and a rough wall, are sometimes the outsides of a great glory; and that, when God means to glorify or do honour to a person, he need no help from secular advantages. He bides great riches in renunciation of the world, and makes great honour breathe forth from the clouds of humility, and victory to arise from yielding and the modesty of departing from our interest, and peace to be the reward of him that suffers all the hostilities of men and devils: for Jesus, in this great humility of his, gives a great probation that he was the Messias, and the King of Sion; because no othe...

From  A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year , Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for Good Friday.  Here Pott appears to make reference to the custom of not celebrating the holy Sacrament on Good Friday, regarding this as a means of emphasising the commemoration of the Lord's sacrifice, for "our humble sacrifices of praise" (a reference to the Prayer of Oblation) are "not in addition to the one great sacrifice". And thus we offer eucharistic praise and thanksgivings -  "our bounden and perpetual duty" (again, echoing the Prayer Book Holy Communion) -  on Easter Day,  amidst "the joy and triumph of our Redeemer's resurrection": In a word, the whole history of our Redeemer's passion, this day recited in our ears, sets forth, at how great a price that violation of the sacred law and righteous government of God, and that fatal injury done to the n...

Cranmer's decision to use the pre-Reformation post-communion prayer for the Annunciation as the collect of the feast bequeathed to Anglicans a prayer of great theological richness.  This post-communion prayer came to the pre-Reformation Latin rites from the 8th century Gregorian Sacramentary .  It was a prayer which shaped over centuries how Latin Christians had celebrated the Annunciation. In using it as the collect for the feast in the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer no doubt was attracted by how the emphasis on grace reflected his Reformed theological agenda: "We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts".  It is the grace of God which is the cause of the Blessed Virgin's fiat .  This also points to Augustine's insight: Yes, of course, holy Mary did the will of the Father. And therefore it means more for Mary to have been a disciple of Christ than to have been the mother of Christ. It means more for her, an altogether greater blessing, to have been ...

On 23rd January, the parish in which I serve celebrated its monthly Choral Evensong and anticipated Candlemas with music, readings, and prayers from today's feast.  The liturgical purist in me was, of course, somewhat sceptical when the suggestion was first made.  It was, however, a very meaningful way - on a dark, cold January evening - to emphasise the significance to the Epiphany season of the feast of the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. It became, in a way, an Evensong of Our Lady during Epiphanytide, with the Magnificat (Stanford in G) and the anthem, 'When to the temple Mary went', beautifully celebrating the role of the Blessed Virgin.  This was a fitting recognition of the Marian dimension of Epiphanytide in the traditional one year Eucharistic lectionary. The Blessed Virgin is found in the Gospel readings for the Epiphany, the First Sunday after the Epiphany (the finding in the Temple), and the Second Sunday after the Epiphany (the Miracle at Cana). Epipha...

Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany - John 12:1. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David - Matthew 21:9. After two days was the feast of the passover, and of the unleavened bread - Mark 14:1. And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, This Is The King Of The Jews - Luke 23:38. And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments, and rested the sabbath day according to the commandmen t - Luke 23:56. There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand - John 19:42. In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre - Matthew 28:1. ... that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me - Luke 24:44. The Church's proclamation of the...

From a 1670  Good Friday sermon  by Matthew Hole, at the cathedral church of Saint Peter, Exeter.  Hole provides an example of the piety which could surround Good Friday in Restoration Anglicanism: He wore a Crown of Thorns, only that we might wear a Crown of Gold; and those drops of blood which his enemies drew from him, are turn'd into so many pearls to bestud and adorn ours; that scarlet Robe which the Jews put on him, dy'd as it were in his own blood, serves to hide our shame, and to cover for us a multitude of sins; that bitter Cup, which he drunk off to the very dregs, is our Nectar, and a glorious Potion of immortality; the Vinegar and Gall, which made him to faint, is become our most reviving Cordial; his Cross, the cursed instrument of his death, is to us a Tree of life, which bears no other fruit than that of knowledge and eternal happiness; his agonies are our triumphs, and his bloody sweat the most Sovereign Balsam to cure our wounds; the Spear that pierc'd ou...

From a 1677 Good Friday sermon by Isaac Barrow (described by Spellman as Latitudinarian divine), indicative of how the Cross,  the mystery of the atonement, and our need of redemption was proclaimed in Restoration Anglicanism.  We might also note Barrow contrasting the Lord's Passion with the classical virtues of the Stoics, culturally influential in Restoration England.   Thus did our Blessed Saviour endure the cross, despising the shame; despising the shame, that is not simply disregarding it, or (with a Stoical haughtiness, with a Cynical immodesty, with a stupid carelessness) slighting it as no evil; but not eschewing it, or not rating it for so great an evil, that to decline it he would neglect the prosecution of his great and glorious designs. There is innate to man an aversation and abhorrency from disgraceful abuse, no less strong, then are the like antipathies to pain; whence cruel mockings and scourgings are coupled as ingredients of the sore persecutions...