by CCW | 30 March 2015 19:00
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.
The readings today from John’s Gospel belong to what is known as the farewell discourse of Jesus to his disciples. It focuses on the greater exodus of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. “I go,” Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you … that where I am, there ye may be also,” which leads Thomas to ask, “we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” This leads to the compelling words of Christ, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” and “no one comes to the Father, but by me.” This in turn leads to a discussion with Philip about Jesus and the Father, about the meaning of faith with which the chapter actually began – “ye believe in God, believe also in me.” In a way, the burden of Holy Week is exactly about our believing in the God who is crucified for us. But as Jesus says in John’s Gospel here, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Our believing is in accordance with the capacity of the believer to behold, to be sure, yet the burden of John’s account here is about the inner life of God opened out to us in Jesus who “will not leave [us] desolate” and who promises the coming of the Holy Spirit who “will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you,” especially the things of the Passion. Above all, as John makes clear, what we are learning is the love of the Son for the Father into which community of love we are being gathered. But only through the events of the Passion.
These readings help our understanding of the beginning of Mark’s account of the Passion. It begins in Bethany with the story of the silent woman who comes with “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious,” as Mark emphasizes, and who “brake the box, and poured it on his head.” It sparks a controversy. Some see her action as a waste of what might have been sold and given to the poor and so murmured against her. But Jesus says, “she has wrought a good work on me: for ye have the poor with you always … she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying … and throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.” The action which immediately follows his words is that Judas “went unto the chief priests to betray him.” Her good as named by Christ is the immediate occasion of betrayal.
The alabaster box is shattered just as Christ will be shattered and broken on the Cross. Mark’s beginning of the Passion continues with the Last Supper, itself the scene too of betrayal where Jesus says, “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me,” which initiates a round of inquiries, is it I? is it I? only to be told that it is “one of the twelve that dippeth with me in the dish.” Jesus speaks directly of his betrayal, the betrayal of friends, “yea, even mine own familiar friend, whom I trusted, /who did also eat of my bread, hath lift up his heel against me,” as Psalm 41 (vs. 9) so tellingly puts it. Mark proceeds to the scene at the mount of Olives where Jesus says “all ye shall be offended because of me this night” referring himself to the shepherd who will be smitten and the sheep scattered. Peter protests his loyalty, only to be told that before the cock crow twice that shalt deny me thrice. After Mark’s account of the agony in Gethsemane comes the violent capture of Christ and his being led away to the high priest, though not before one of the most intriguing little details in Mark’s Gospel.
At the time of the capture, “all forsook him and fled,” yet “there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.” What does it mean? Who is this young man who fled from them naked? We aren’t told. Is it perhaps, Mark himself, convicting himself of his own betrayal of Christ and indicating our nakedness in the uncovering of our betrayals?
What follows is Christ’s interrogation by “all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes” who “condemn him to be worthy of death” even though the only evidence is that of “many [who’ bare false witness and their witness agreed not together;” in short, a spectacle of the betrayal of human justice. He is further mocked and spitted upon and beaten.
But Mark’s beginning of the Passion ends with Peter’s threefold denial of Christ. Peter denies even knowing him at which point the cock crows and “Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him … and when he thought thereon, he wept.” Tears of compunction and contrition. Tears pour out of him. Why? Because he has been pierced with the awareness of his own betrayal of Christ. He is naked before the truth. And what about us?
Are we capable of being moved in our hearts? Only if we find ourselves in this story. The action of the woman is an act of repentance in love and anticipates Christ’s death and burial; the tears of Peter are about our awareness of our betrayals of love and truth despite our strongest assertions. The good of this day is about our hearts being moved to compunction for our sins and to love for him who goes to be pierced for us. Already with Peter we learn what it means to “look on him whom we have pierced” for here Christ is already pierced. As he says, “my soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death” but his prayer nonetheless remains, “take away this cup from me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt.” It is meaning of all prayer. “Thy will be done on earth even as it is in heaven.” The Passion shows us exactly what that means. If we have hearts, then they shall surely be pierced by sin and love. Something has to be poured out of us. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things.”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week 2015
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