Month: March 2026

Holy Tuesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The lesson read at Communion on Tuesday in Holy Week is the third of the four so-called Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah. It is the only one read in the eucharistic readings this week. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the fourth of the Servant Songs was read (Isaiah 52.13- 53.end). In today’s office of Morning Prayer, the first of Servant Songs, Isaiah, 42. 1-9, was read. The third song will be read again at Evening Prayer on Good Friday. In the Christian understanding, the suffering servant is both Israel collectively speaking and the unity of all human suffering concentrated in the person of Christ. The songs belong to the revealing of “the thoughts of many hearts” and thus to our being pierced in our souls.

The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark depicts the trial of Christ at the hands of Pilate who gives in to the wishes of the people who seek his crucifixion. We hear again the cries of “crucify” even though Pilate knows that the chief priests of Israel “have moved the people” against Jesus. He has him scourged or beaten and delivered to be crucified. It is a betrayal of human justice in the name of convenience and complicity with the mob, a betrayal of truth and human compassion. Such is the madness of crowds.

What follows are the indignities of being mocked by the Roman soldiers before being led out to be crucified. Simon, a Cyrenian, is compelled by them “to bear his cross.” Not freely and willingly but under compulsion. He is crucified and cruelly scorned and berated on the Cross by the people, by the chief priests and scribes. Their words of insult mock the idea of “Christ, the King of Israel,” even as the words of his accusation, “The King of the Jews,” are superscribed on the Cross. If all this were not enough to disturb us, “they that were crucified with him reviled him” too. We behold him whom we, in these aspects of our humanity, have betrayed and nailed to the Cross.

All this is what he suffers and suffers silently before Pilate and on the Cross. Mark then tells us that “there was darkness over the whole land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour,” something seen, as it were, that is symbolic of the darkness of men’s hearts. “At the ninth hour,” Mark, like Matthew, gives us Christ’s cry of dereliction. It is the only word from the Cross in their accounts of the Passion. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, interpreted as “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These words from Psalm 22 cry out simply to God and not, as in Luke, to God as Father.

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“And a sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

And so it begins and ends, in the ending that never ends. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week yet looks to the end or purpose of the journey in Christ’s Resurrection but only through the Cross and Passion of Christ. It is really a week-long liturgy. We greet Christ as he enters Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna”. But our cries of rejoicing quickly turn to shouts of “Let him be crucified”. Yet the shouts of violence give place to sorrow and sadness. Are we to be left simply in the sorrows of our hearts? Or does sorrow or contrition lead to the possibilities of repentance? Holy Week takes us from the cries of rejoicing to the sorrows of our hearts but then to the glorious songs of Alleluias. Such is the pageant and wonder of Holy Week, if we have the hearts and minds to think and feel; in short, to be pierced.

It has been my custom to take a Scriptural passage as the matrix for all our Holy Week and Easter meditations. Simeon’s prophecy, which we heard at Candlemas, anticipates the Passion and its meaning. He says to Mary, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;” then to her he says, that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary, as the Annunciation this past week shows, is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As Augustine teaches, she is the symbol of the Church. Her vocation is the vocation of our humanity in its purity and truth: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That means our complete attention to all of the words of the Passion as indicated in Simeon’s prophecy. Only so can we feel the thought of the deep meaning of Christ’s Passion; in an image it means being pierced.

There are, the poet George Herbert says, “two vast spacious things” that we are meant to learn and contemplate, “yet few there are that sound them.” What are they? “Sinne and Love”. The challenge of Holy Week for us is to sound the depths of sin and love in our own hearts as revealed through Christ’s Passion. Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the spectacle of the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. We are bidden to contemplate the dialectical motions, the to-and-fro of our hearts, in going from joy to sorrow and then to glory. Hosanna, Crucify, Alleluia.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s response to the divine will announced to her by the Angel Gabriel is the epitome of the Christian Faith, a firm but emphatic “yes” to God through whom God becomes human. It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ or Christ apart from Mary. She is “the pure source of his pure humanity” (Irenaeus) as ordained from before the foundation of the world; in other words, divinely ordered. She is, in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Council of Ephesus (451), Theotokos, “the Mother of God.” What that means goes to the heart of the understanding of Christ’s Incarnation.

The Annunciation is the moment in time of Christ’s conception. He is made man through “the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, according to his manhood”, his “human nature (κατα την ανθροποτητα),” just as Christ is the eternal Son “begotten of his Father according to his Godhead” (κατα την θεοτητα) (Chalcedonian Definition). She is not the mother of the Godhead, the source of divinity, the maker of God, as it were, for that would negate humanity itself. Mary as Theotokos, literally God-bearer, belongs to the gathering into unity of all of the images about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity understood in their mutual integrity and revealed to us in Christ. Mary is the chosen vessel of his becoming human and incarnate, that is to say, in the flesh, while remaining absolutely and eternally God. The maker of God to us, it could be said, in ways that belong only to poetic licence.

The emphasis on Mary as Virgin and Mother is the witness of Scripture and Creed to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and the Trinity; the two are inseparable. Mary plays an essential role in the economy of salvation and in the life of prayer. Her “yes” to God is the inverse and the overcoming of the sin of Adam and Eve. Ave is, as the Fathers note, the reverse of Eve. But she is not passive or unengaged in the work of human redemption. She “conceived by the Holy Ghost”, as the Apostles’ Creed states, yet, in Luke’s account, the Angel clearly says “thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son,” echoing the lesson from Isaiah. She conceived but without the aid of a man. She did not simply receive like a passive vessel, a mere conduit. She is an active agent in the work of human redemption that looks back to creation itself as spoken into existence by God. What comes from God to her is actively embraced and engaged by her. In her “yes” is the proto-evangelium of Genesis fulfilled, a prophecy of the hope and longing for redemption that “her seed shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” even as he “shall bruise his heel,”a reference to Christ and his Passion. Nor is this some sort of gnostic deception, a matter of her and our being deceived. Her Annunciation is non recipiet et non decipiet sed concipiet, as Andrewes summarizes.

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