Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
On the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week we read Mark’s account of the Passion. His account is both informed by and informs the lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer – the readings from Hosea 13 and 14 and the beginning of the continuous reading from starting with chapter fourteen of John’s Gospel which will ultimately bring us to his account of the Passion on Good Friday.
In other words, the lessons help our understanding of the different accounts of the Passion even as the Passion illumines the lessons. Think of how Hosea’s words convict us in the betrayals of our hearts. “Men kiss calves,” he says, referring to our easy idolatries, mistaking the works of our hands for God. “I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour. It was I who knew you in the wilderness,” and yet, “when they had fed to the full, and they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.” Such betrayals can only have consequences. “Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction?” words which Paul will re-echo in First Corinthians as belonging to the victory of the Resurrection. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But we have yet to see that. What is before our eyes are the betrayals of our hearts which cut us off from God. “Compassion is hid from my eyes,” Hosea will say of God if only to illustrate the strong sense of sin’s separation from truth and love.
These words give added force to the heart-felt cry of God for Israel to return to the Lord your God. How? “Take with you words,” Hosea has God say, “and return to the Lord.” Why? Because he has an insight into the nature of God, an insight into the nature of the good which is always greater than our evil. “I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely,” and where there was wilderness, there shall be a garden. “They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden.” These are wonderful words which can only shape our sense of looking upon him whom they have pierced. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things,” Hosea concludes. This is precisely the project of the Passion.
