by CCW | 25 March 2013 21:24
Holy Week is the spectacle of all our betrayals. In a way, all betrayal is an aspect of the archetype of all betrayal, the betrayal of Judas. It is the intimacy of a kiss that heightens the sense of the enormity of sin and its betrayal of the goodness of God.
We read the Passion of St. Mark on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. The Passion of St. Matthew has already been read on Palm Sunday. The beginning of the Passion of St. Mark is intriguing and to my mind, quite beautiful and compelling. The passage begins with the pouring out of the ointment of spikenard from the alabaster box upon the head of Jesus. It ends with the outpouring of the tears of Peter. In between are the various scenes of betrayal: Judas Iscariot going to the chief priests to betray him; Jesus’ at table with the twelve predicting that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me”; the falling asleep of the James and John and Simon Peter while Christ wrestles with the Father’s will in Gethsemane; the actual betrayal and capture of Christ; the false witnesses against Christ before the high priest and the council of the elders; and, of course, Peter’s threefold betrayal of Christ. Betrayals are us.
The frame of the story here is most instructive. What the unnamed woman has done is portrayed, too, as a kind of betrayal. Pouring out the ointment is seen as a waste “for it might have been sold for more than three hundred pieces of silver, and have been given to the poor.” Her anointing of Christ is seen as a betrayal of what is owed to the poor. We have obligations and duties, responsibilities and commitments to one another, to be sure, and especially towards the poor, but the point of the Gospel is not the eradication of poverty – an utopian dream – but to do always what you can, “for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.” There is more than money, dare I say, that the poor and, indeed, all of us need. The church must be more than another agency for worldly improvement.
That is what makes Jesus’ response here so intriguing. “But me ye have not always. She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” There will be a burying because there is death; a death we might say because, as Hosea suggests in this morning’s lesson about Israel, “when they had fed to the full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; [and] therefore they forgot me”! The Lord had delivered them from the land of Egypt and had known them in the wilderness, but in the land and time of plenty they had forgotten God. And there is a further point. It is our forgetfulness of God that results in both our material and spiritual neglect of one another and of the poor in our midst. In forgetting God we forget our humanity.
And so there is an anointing of his body aforehand to the burying. Already something of the divine will is quietly in action, an action that underlies the Passion. What is poured out here is connected to what will be poured out on the cross. He will pour out his life for us on the Cross; here his body is anointed aforetime in anticipation of his sacrifice. What is poured out here points us to what the redemptive sacrifice of Christ actually means. God makes something out of the betrayals of our hearts. God makes something good out of the darkness of human evil. We are meant to see this and be moved to repentance so that our tears are joined to the anointing sacrifice. We are convicted of the Judas within each of our hearts but only through the profounder realization that God provides a great good for us even in and through our evil. But only if we, like Peter, “call to mind the word that Jesus [says] unto [us].” For, then, as Hosea bids us this evening, we will have “take[n] with [us] words and return[ed] to the Lord.”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, 2013
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