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.
They express something of the inexpressible meaning of Christ’s suffering that belongs to his coming to do the will of him who sent him. The suffering is something experienced in the body but in ways far beyond our comprehension. In a similar sense, we both know and do not know what one another actually feels in their souls and bodies. There is a sense in which all suffering is at once universal and individual. How much more so in Christ who wills to bear in his perfect humanity what belongs to the conditions of our fallen humanity? This only heightens the intensity of his cry of dereliction that voices the dark, dark reality of human sin as the denial of the truth of God. This word shows the intensity of his being pierced for us in the meaning of our sins and his love for us.
But us? We see the darkness, as it were, and we hear the insults, mockery, and betrayals of justice and compassion. But even more we see and hear Christ Crucified in the extremities of suffering. We see and hear ourselves in the shouts and words hurled against him. Holy Week reminds us that we are all part of the mob, all part of the betrayals of justice and human feeling; all implicated in the mess of our inhumanity.
Yet there remains a lingering sense that, perhaps, there is something more to this person suffering on the Cross, and, by extension, more to us. Mistaking his words, “Eloi, Eloi,” one person “that stood by” thought that he was calling upon Elijah and so gave Jesus a sponge full of vinegar to drink, wondering “whether Elijah will come to take him down.” It is an interesting moment that immediately precedes Jesus “crying with a loud voice and giving up his spirit”. He dies and at that moment “the veil of the temple,” Mark tells us, “was rent in twain from the top to the bottom,” symbolic of the betrayal of God’s covenant with Israel in the death of Christ. This is an important spiritual point about Jesus in relation to Israel, to Jesus as the suffering servant in the totality of suffering that belongs to Israel’s vocation “as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” But the temple is in Jerusalem, in the city, some distance from Calvary.
All these things reveal aspects of the disorders and confusions of our fallen humanity to ourselves; in short, they pierce us in beholding the one who is pierced and cries out in his experience of suffering and in the agony of the aloneness of his suffering. Yet Mark ends his account with the witness of the centurion, a Roman soldier, not an Israelite. He beholds Christ crucified – after all he can know nothing about the rending of the veil of the temple in Jerusalem. “He saw that he so cried out, and gave up his spirit.” In seeing Christ pierced and crying out in his agony, the centurion is moved in his spirit and says, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” This is faith born out of the spectacle of suffering.
He has been pierced or moved inwardly to see in the body and words of Christ a greater truth. To see in his crucified humanity the truth of Christ as the Son of God; in short, to be pierced by love to see love. Surely that is the purpose of Holy Tuesday for us as well.
“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2026