“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.
This passage is complemented by the end of the beginning of the Passion in Mark with the tears of Peter in his discovery of his threefold betrayal of Christ “before the cock crow twice,” as Mark has it. “And when he thought thereon, he wept.”
Breaking open the alabaster box. Breaking open the heart of Peter in the discovery of his betrayal of Christ. Broken box, broken heart. But even more, the breaking open of the alabaster box portends the breaking open of the body of Christ in the crucifixion. It is not only our hearts that are broken. Christ in his body is broken for us as well.
It is Jesus who makes clear the significance of the breaking open of the alabaster box. “She has come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying,” Jesus says. In other words her sacrificial gesture of “the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious,” anticipates and participates in Christ’s Passion which is for the whole world. “She hath wrought a good work on me,” Jesus says, “for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.” This challenges us about our view of the poor. Our concern for the poor must be rooted in God’s love for them and not in our presumption to fix the economic and social conditions of our broken world. They need to be gathered into the redemptive sacrifice of Christ for the whole world.
The act of the woman reveals the deeper meaning of the Passion and the nature of our participation in it. What the woman has done “shall be preached throughout the whole world,” Jesus says. For “this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.” What she has done shall not be despised. It is the action of one who is broken-hearted in her sacrifice to God. And so, too, with the tears of Peter. He confronts himself in the moment of his betrayal of Christ. “And when he thought thereon, he wept.” Such are the sacrifices to God of the broken-hearted in their awareness of themselves as broken.
The breaking open of the box as well as the tears of Peter belong to the idea of Christ’s sacrifice and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. Sorrow and contrition are the forms of the flowing out of divine love in us.
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, 2021