Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
Holy Monday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
“In all their affliction he was afflicted,” Isaiah says, words which have shaped the Christian understanding of Christ’s Passion and its life of prayer. Consider the following prayer (BCP, p.54) and see how it builds on Isaiah and the logic of the Passion.
Almighty God, who art afflicted in the afflictions of thy people: Regard with thy tender compassion those in anxiety and distress; bear their sorrows, and their cares, supply all their manifold needs; and help both them and us to put our whole trust and confidence in thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Passion of Christ is only possible through the Incarnation, God made man in Jesus Christ. His sufferings, by a kind of metaphorical transposition, are known in God; technically or theologically, this is the communicatio idiomatum, the interchange of the properties of divine and human without compromise to the distinctive integrity of each. God in himself is “without body, parts, or passions” (Art I. Thirty-nine Articles). “God is love,” as John teaches. That divine love transcends all the limited forms of human love but rather than negating them seeks their perfection and truth as found in him. This is the work of the Passion. It is, I think, the meaning of our being pierced in contemplating what Christ wills to suffer for us. It is illustrated in the moving scenes of The Beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark on Monday in Holy Week.
It begins with the scene of an unnamed woman breaking “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard,” a precious and expensive aromatic and amber essential oil derived from a mid-Asian plant of the honeysuckle family. “She brake the box, and poured it on his head,” Mark tells us. Alabaster is a translucent stone often used in carvings particularly of the human form. The breaking of the box, Austin Farrer notes, suggests the breaking open of the body of Christ from which his blood is outpoured. Here the breaking of the alabaster box serves as the anointing of Jesus: a moving image of an extravagance of love outpoured by the woman who sees something precious and holy in Christ. Yet her action excites the opposite: indignation, resentment, and complaint about wasting the ointment which “might have been sold for more than three hundred pieces of silver, and have been given to the poor.” In short, “they murmured against her.”
