Author: CCW

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.

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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

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“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. It is the beginning of one long liturgy which ends with Easter. In one sense we begin with joy and end in joy, yet there is a great difference. For between that beginning and ending is the spectacle of all our betrayals concentrated for us in the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and fullness as proclaimed in the reading of all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). But what kind of spectacle? One in which we are both actors and those who acted upon but in both senses through all of our disarray and disorder and in all of our folly and sin.

We cannot come to the greater joy of Easter without beholding ourselves as participants in the Passion of Christ, at once as those who cry “Hosanna” and those who then cry “Crucify”. And yet we are also those who going through the rigour of Holy Week may learn what the Centurion learned in contemplating the full meaning of sin and evil; as the end of the Passion According to St. Matthew puts it: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The point of Holy Week is that we are more than spectators, more than those who merely look on and then pass by, indifferent to what we behold and indifferent to everything else. We are the spectacle, meaning that we are what we behold. And only so can we be in Christ. It means beholding all that belongs to the contradictions in all our souls . We are in this story and in every way.

We go from joy and gladness to sadness and sorrow and then from sadness and sorrow to joy and gladness but with a greater intensity of both. While the beginning and ending of Holy Week seem to be the same they are not. There is a profound difference from the Hosannas with which we greet Jesus coming as King to Jerusalem and the cries of Alleluia at Easter. The difference lies in the spectacle of human sin and wickedness which this week unfolds in all of its dramatic intensity. “Your sorrow shall be turned to joy,” Jesus says. Only through the spectacle of sin and sorrow can we come to the joy and gladness of Easter.

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