Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s word of response to God provides a chilling and yet intriguing commentary on the heart of The Passion According to St. Mark. At the heart of the Passion, we have the most notorious and most difficult word of Christ from the Cross, the only word from the Cross that Mark and Matthew, too, pass on to us. It is the word that troubles us most and grieves our hearts, as it should. “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.” “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is heart-breaking.
At once a question, it is one of the dozen or so Aramaic phrases in the New Testament and yet it is actually a transliterated quote from the Psalms, from Psalm 22. The only word of the Crucified Christ in two of the canonical gospels, it must give us pause to consider and weigh its import and message. How is this word according to thy word? And yet, how can it be understood in any other way? It captures precisely if indeed somewhat terrifyingly the meaning of Christ’s Passion. He has entered into the land of the darkness of human hearts, of our refusal and denial of God himself. The statement of the Psalmist is testimony to the sense of being bereft and abandoned; in a way, this is the true reality and result of sin. That we don’t see it is because of our own weakness and blindness; paradoxically, because of our own sinfulness. Christ sees it and names it from within the experience of the moment, the moment of utter estrangement and remove from the Father. But note, not from God.
