Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
“Thou art the man”
Nathan’s words to David seek to convict his conscience about his sins. So, too, the accounts of the Passion present a compelling picture of our humanity in all of its sin and disarray, in all of the confusions of our incomplete loves. At the center is Jesus in his encounter with us. The Passion according to St. Mark begins with the encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman “in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, and as he sat at meat,” as Mark tellingly notes. It begins with Jesus in the company of the afflicted; in short, with us in our afflictions. As Isaiah puts it in the lesson, “in all their affliction he was afflicted.”
The unnamed woman – identified by John as Mary of Bethany and later in the commentary tradition as Mary Magdalene – breaks open an “alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and pours its contents on his head. She anoints him. Why? Is she acknowledging him as the Messiah, the anointed one of God? Her action excites indignation, anger and division as if she has done something wrong. Jesus responds “let her alone; why trouble ye her? 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 hath done what she could; she is come to aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He names his death, his embrace of the realities of human sin. Yet he acknowledges the good in her action even as he convicts our consciences about our neglect of the sufferings of one another. Her act belongs to one of the acts of corporal mercy with respect to the burying of the dead. Her act, too, is an act of sacrifice, an act of love towards Jesus.
“The poor you have with you always” does not mean our neglect of them. Jesus is challenging us about whether we make any effort to do good towards those in need. There is no illusion that we can solve all the problems of inequality and poverty and suffering in our world but there is no mistaking the idea of an obligation to do whatever we can. This goes to the logic of Christ as “the mediator of the new covenant” and so to the meaning of his passion as the ultimate reconciliation and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity. It means encountering ourselves in our dealings with one another. No sooner does Jesus say that what “she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her,” then Judas Iscariot goes to the chief priests to betray him unto them.
What unfolds is Mark’s account of the supper in the Upper Room where Jesus says to his disciples that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me.” It excites a questioning on the part of each. “Is it I? Is it I?” It is the point of the accounts of the Passion to excite in us self-examination about the ways in which we have betrayed the truth and goodness of God in one way or another. Jesus takes bread and takes the cup; he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover. It signals the sacramental ways in which we participate in his Passion. “This is my body.” “This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many.”
