Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
“All the people hung upon his words”
It isn’t really a very pretty picture. There is very little good that can be said about our humanity in The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark. We are forced to contemplate the hideous realities of human sin in a variety of forms ranging from the miscarriage of justice by Pilate, giving into the machinations of the chief priests who manipulate the crowd, to the mockery of Christ by the soldiers in the Praetorium and, then, to the cruelty of his Crucifixion, reviled at once by those who looked on and even by the two thieves who were crucified with him. Perhaps, Simon the Cyrenian might serve as the only counter to this negative picture of ourselves but even he has to be compelled to bear Christ’s cross to the place of crucifixion. This stands in stark contrast to Christ’s freely willing our redemption.
In this picture of Christ we behold the spectacle of the ultimate good and righteous man whose very goodness is the occasion of our rage and spite as the lesson from Wisdom suggests. Yet, as Isaiah indicates in the Matins’ lesson, “this is my servant, my chosen … in whom my soul delights,” the one who “bring[s] forth justice to the nations,” the one who is “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” the one who “open[s] the eyes of the blind” and “brings out prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison.”
Here in the continuation of Mark’s Passion, we see the meaning of another one of the servant songs from Isaiah, the meaning of Christ as the one who wills to bear all of the injustices of our sinfulness, the one who gives his “back to the smiters” and who “hid not [his] face from shame and spitting.” We hang upon the words of Scripture which present the unvarnished picture of human cruelty and meanness, on the one hand, and the picture of the suffering Christ, on the other hand. Nowhere is that image of the suffering of Christ more disturbingly presented to us than in the horrifying cry of dereliction. “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?”
