Month: March 2018

“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.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Which word? “Hosanna” or “crucify”? Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, a week in which we immerse ourselves, especially in the classical Anglican understanding, in all four Gospel accounts of the Passion. These are further complemented by important and intriguing lessons and epistles as well as by the Office Readings of this week. To attend to these readings is to fulfill the Marian definition: “be it unto me according to thy word.”

Today is Palm Sunday but in a kind of providential wonder it is also The Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; though the celebration of that feast is deferred until after Easter on April 10th. As Luther notes, “Mary does not want us to come to her but through her to Jesus.” For over a millennium and a half, March 25th marked the beginning of the year, a year which is constructed entirely around the story of Christ: his coming to us, his going from us; his being with us. Aspects of that sensibility are readily apparent. We call the ninth month of the year, September which actually means the seventh month; the tenth month, October, means the eighth month; the eleventh month, November, means the ninth month; the twelfth month, December, means the ten month. All of this makes sense when you realise the significance of March 25th as The Feast of the Annunciation and therefore as marking the very beginning of the Incarnation of Christ. Nine months from today will be Christmas.

The Angel Gabriel’s salutation to Mary and her active acquiescence to the will of God as the God-bearer, or Theotokos, marks the radical moment of the Incarnation. Her Annunciation is his conception, humanly speaking, in her womb. That it seems to contradict the natural order of things is precisely the point. God is the God of nature but that does not tie him down to nature; in his sovereign freedom he acts in other ways not to destroy nature but to perfect nature. In a way, there is nothing more fitting than the concurrence of Mary’s Annunciation with Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

Through Mary’s ‘yes’ to God at the Annunciation, Christ has “tak[en] to himself our flesh, and by his incarnation [has made] it his own flesh ha[ving] now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us” (Hooker). Without that understanding, Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection are utterly meaningless, a gruesome tale of cruelty and wickedness but of no redemptive truth or value. In a way, the whole history of the development of the Canon of the Scriptures and the Creeds, the whole history of the Church, arises from pondering on the mystery of Christ’s Passion and seeing in it the utter goodness of God and his will for our humanity.

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