Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Again which word? And which word will be the word of comfort to us on Monday in Holy Week? Yet, Hosea bids us “take with you words and return to the Lord.” “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.” So we are being turned but only to confront our afflictions; our sufferings are born in him. “In all their affliction [our] he was afflicted,” Isaiah proclaims. “In his love, and in his pity, he redeemed them.”
Such is the power of love even in the face of our unloveliness. From the intensive reading of St. Matthew’s Passion on Palm Sunday, we turn to The Passion According to St. Mark on the Monday and the Tuesday of Holy Week. It begins with “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious”, broken open by a silent and unnamed woman and the ointment poured out upon his head. It ends with the tears of Peter confronting his betrayal of Christ. And in between? The spectacles of betrayal beginning with the Last Supper, the agony of Gethsemane, the kiss of Judas and his being taken captive and the interrogation at the hands of the high priest. All pretty intense.
All our noisy, busyness, and bother circle around the quiet steadfastness of Christ which stands in stark contrast to the discord and disarray of our human emotions. In one way or another our animosities and interests are all directed at Christ. Only the broken alabaster box of ointment and the tears of Peter remind us of love learned and expressed through our encounter with Christ. The unnamed woman’s act is spoken against by others, thinking it a waste of the ointment, to which Christ memorably replies. “She hath wrought a good work on me: for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; but me ye have not always. … she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” And the tears, too, are tears of repentance and that is a great good.
