Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
“What mean ye by this service?”
This question, which frames our reflections during Holy Week, takes on a disturbing quality of intensity on Tuesday in Holy Week. Why? Because it is not a pretty picture of ourselves at all. What is our service in the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark? Well, it is simply more and more of the ugly spectacle of betrayal and hatred, of mockery and violence.
“What mean ye by this service?” What we see and hear is Pontius Pilate’s unwilling and unjust surrender of Jesus to the will of the crowd, being “willing to content the people.” That is itself an indictment of human justice. What we see and hear is the motivating principle that places Jesus in our hands. It is the “envy” of the Chief Priests. Envy is the most destructive of all the deadly sins. And the most ugly. It is about hatred. That theme, too, is more than amply explored in the First Lesson for Evening Prayer from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon and then even more directly stated in the Second Lesson from the Gospel according to St. John. “He who hates me hates my Father also.”
And that is all part of the spectacle of this holy week. What is on display is the human capacity to hate the good or to be more specific and more horrific, to hate God. Ultimately, our hatred of God is what is visited upon Jesus. This is the darkness at the heart of the Passion.
