Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week
Tuesday in Holy Week: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
Two of the four so-called Servant Songs from Isaiah are read on this day, the one as the first lesson at Morning Prayer and the other as the lesson at Mass. The First Servant Song emphasizes the idea of covenant, the covenant between God and us. Israel is the suffering servant who is given “as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” and in whom is enlightenment and freedom from the darkness of the various prisons of our lives. As covenant, it signals the divine commitment and will for our good.
The lesson at Mass is the Third Servant Song and points to the idea of bearing with suffering and shame that is inflicted upon him, something which the Fourth Servant Song read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday highlighted ever so graphically in the image of the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,” who “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” and, even more, whom we see “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted, wounded for our transgressions”. All these passages help to illuminate our understanding of the Passion of Christ.
But the Continuation of Mark’s Passion along with the First Lesson at Evening Prayer from Wisdom points us to the ugliest and the most vicious of the deadly sins, envy. Pilate “knew that the chief priests had delivered [Jesus] for envy.” Wisdom, too, reflects brilliantly on the destructive evil of envy. It is a hatred of the good, a hatred of what we know to be the good in another but refuse to acknowledge. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man for he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions.” But as Wisdom so clearly indicates “they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them.” We contradict the truth of our own being as created for “incorruption and made in the image of God’s own eternity.” How? “Through the devil’s envy death hath entered the world.” It is at once a resentment at what we know in some sense as being the good and the true and our rejection or refusal of exactly what we know. In short, we both know and do not know what we do.
This emphasis in the readings on envy is instructive and helps us to grasp Paul’s point that “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do,” an image of the human condition in our fallenness. Envy is its most vicious and destructive form, an active denial of a good which is glimpsed and known in another.
