Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
“One thing is needful”
Jesus’s word in Bethany highlights the necessity of contemplation. Holy Week is about our contemplation of the Passion of Christ as revealed in all four Gospels. Tonight we complete our reading and contemplation of the Passion according to St. Mark. What is the one thing needful here?
Certainly, there is the unfolding of the different forms of human sin and betrayal; Pilate’s betrayal of justice because he was “willing to content the people”; the mockery and abuse of Jesus at the hands of the Praetorian guard; his being crucified between two thieves; his being “railed on” by those who passed by and by the chief priests. It is not a pretty picture. It is altogether about human cruelty and abuse. That is the meaning of Christ as the “Suffering Servant” as the lessons from Isaiah both at Mattins and at Mass make clear and the meaning of Christ as “the righteous man” who is inconvenient to us in our wickedness as the evening lesson from The Wisdom of Solomon shows; Christ is the righteous one who suffers our unrighteousness. And yet, as the lessons from John’s Gospel at Morning and Evening Prayer also make clear, Christ is the vine in whom we live and abide, abiding in his love for the Father. His crucifixion shows us the radical meaning of love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. Jesus goes on to say something quite radical and profound. “You are my friends”, he says, “if you do what I command you”.
His love is proclaimed in the face of our betrayals of that love. What he bears, we too shall have to bear, namely, the hatred of the world. Christian persecution both active and passive is a feature of our witness and increasingly so in our post-Christian world. “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you”. “And all this they will do to you”, he says, “on my account, because they do not know him who sent me”. They do not know the Father and so they do not know the Son. But the Spirit of the Father and the Son will bear witness to the Son and so too we are to be witnesses “because you have been with me from the beginning”. At issue for us is about being with Christ faithfully. It is about abiding in his love even in the face of the enmities and hatreds of the world. And in a way we are given to see two moments in Mark’s account of the Passion here that have to do with what belongs to our contemplation of the Passion as witnesses and participants in the Passion.
