Monday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Forgiveness as love in repentance is the signal note of Monday in Holy Week. We read the beginning of the Passion According to St. Mark today and its continuation tomorrow. The beginning of his Passion is framed by the outpouring of ointment of spikenard through the breaking open of an alabaster box and the outpouring of the tears of Peter. If that were not enough, this beginning of the Passion is embraced and enfolded into the meaning of the Office Lessons from Hosea 13 & 14 and from John 14.
Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its dominant theme, as the Revised Standard Version introduction to Hosea states, is “divine compassion and the love that will not let Israel go”. It proclaims “the gospel of redeeming love.” Hosea enacts the theme of the love that is forgiveness and restoration in spite of our false loves in idolatry and lust, in betrayal and foolishness. The 14th Chapter of John’s Gospel belongs to the farewell discourse of Jesus so-called which is really a discourse on the meaning of his Passion in terms of our abiding in the love of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit.
Forgiveness is at the heart of divine love. The unnamed woman who breaks the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and pours the oil on the head of Jesus acts out of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus makes known to us what is otherwise not known to us about her action. It is an act of forgiveness in love that is directly connected to his Passion and Death. Jesus makes this clear to those who were indignant about the waste of the ointment. “She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” He makes known what her action means which otherwise would not be known to us; an instance of our not knowing what she is doing.
Peter, at the end of Mark’s beginning of the Passion, hearing the cock crow for the second time, recalls what Jesus had said to him and thus his own betrayal of himself. It is a poignant awakening to his own not knowing the true meaning of what he has done. “Before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice.” In recalling these words of Jesus, “he thought thereon and wept.” Such are the tears of repentance. The tears of sorrow and contrition flow out of our hearts of betrayal and deceit when our hearts are convicted by the greater love of Christ.
The beginning of Mark’s account of the Passion is profoundly and strangely moving and contains all of the actions of our sin and folly but only to bring things to mind in us that, as the body of Christ, like the alabaster box of ointment is broken open, so too our hearts in repentance might be broken open and our tears flow forth in recognition of the love which suffers and dies for us. “Take with you words and return unto the Lord.” That return is love in forgiveness and forgiveness in love. “I have told you before it takes place,” Jesus says, “so that when it does take place you may believe.” That is to come to know what we did not fully know about what we do in all of the forms of our betrayal of God, our sins turning us away from God who turns to us in the forgiveness which is his love and who turns us to himself in love.
Such is the power of Christ’s first word from the Cross as underlying the motions of the Passion.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 14th, 2025