Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
This Lenten mantra from Psalm 51, the great Penitential Psalm par excellence, provides the interpretative matrix for our Holy Week meditations on the Passion of Christ. In our Anglican tradition, we immerse ourselves in all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. It is intentionally intense. But why? To feel and know in ourselves our brokenness without which redemption is entirely meaningless.
The readings of Holy Week not only immerse us in the Passion; they intensify its force and feeling in us. We confront the sad and sorry spectacle of our humanity in its disorder and distress. We behold ourselves as sinners and thus as broken-hearted, as aware of our brokenness. For to know ourselves as sinners means contrition and confession. Contrition and brokenness are correlative terms. To be contrite is to be broken in our hearts. But what does it mean to say that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit? It means that only in our brokenness can we turn to God. In the discovery of our brokenness is the realization of our wholeness as found in God. It is our awareness of God without whom we cannot know our brokenness.
We do not presume in any righteousness or moral rectitude in and of ourselves by which to offer unto God anything. That would be presumptuous; a bit like offering a gift which actually honours ourselves more than the one to whom it is given. It is in our brokenness that God beholds us without despite. The recognition of our brokenness is our recognition of God and our turning to him alone. We have to be broken before we can be made whole.
Holy Week is about our being broken by beholding the spectacle of ourselves in the Passion of Christ. In being broken-hearted, our hearts are opened to view both to ourselves and to God.
Palm Sunday has already presented us with the beginnings of the spectacle of our brokenness in the Palm Gospel and in the reading of the Passion according to St. Matthew. On Monday in Holy Week we begin with the reading of the Passion according to St. Mark. Each account of the Passion has its own special voice and emphasis as well as its own creative expression. This beginning of the Passion in Mark’s Gospel is especially significant. It begins with the breaking of the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and the anointing of the head of Jesus by an unnamed woman. Her generous act is seen by others in Jesus’ company in the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany as an extravagant waste. Far more important to sell the ointment and give the proceeds to the poor, some said with “indignation within themselves” while murmuring against her. We should feel the weight of this perspective as well as seeing the problem. It is the failure to understand the radical meaning of the gesture and in our contemporary world it is the reduction of everything to the priority of the economic.
