April 11, 2006
Irony
Holy Week, rather like Holy Orders, is one of those peculiarly unnecessary phrases that begs the truth. When the Word became flesh, all of God’s creation was affirmed as holy, that is, for what it had always been, and for us eventually to discover through the aegis of the Word that this was so.
Of course, we need the cyclic liturgical year to remind us and the critical liturgical event to equip and enable our memories to appreciate these things. But when God created us, that is, imagined us into spiritual being with the vocation to become human, there became an abundance of holiness to go around.
It is said by those in the know that Christian faith is ironic, not heroic, and being so makes considerable demand on our imagination. The delightful tale of our Lord’s riding into Jerusalem on a jackass is of the most profound kind of comic irony which exposes our pretense and our foolishness and which shows us the figure of the eiron, the understated person who appears to be less than he or she is. He would soon meet Pilate, the hero, the larger-than-life figure who appears to be more than the human condition will bear: the champion, the pompous fool. Mrs Pontius Pilate knew, of course, and so did Jesus.
It is good then that we embrace this week as Holy, so long as we don’t get carried away with ourselves and start asking questions like “What is truth?” whose answers are often too ironic to understand, save through the imaginative icon of faith.
(With many thanks to Charles Rice, “Eikon and Eiron: Faith as Imagination,” St Luke’s Journal of Theology, Vol 32.4, September 1989, pp 249-256)