Author: CCW

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word of response to God provides a chilling and yet intriguing commentary on the heart of The Passion According to St. Mark. At the heart of the Passion, we have the most notorious and most difficult word of Christ from the Cross, the only word from the Cross that Mark and Matthew, too, pass on to us. It is the word that troubles us most and grieves our hearts, as it should. “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.”  “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is heart-breaking.

At once a question, it is one of the dozen or so Aramaic phrases in the New Testament and yet it is actually a transliterated quote from the Psalms, from Psalm 22. The only word of the Crucified Christ in two of the canonical gospels, it must give us pause to consider and weigh its import and message. How is this word according to thy word? And yet, how can it be understood in any other way? It captures precisely if indeed somewhat terrifyingly the meaning of Christ’s Passion. He has entered into the land of the darkness of human hearts, of our refusal and denial of God himself. The statement of the Psalmist is testimony to the sense of being bereft and abandoned; in a way, this is the true reality and result of sin. That we don’t see it is because of our own weakness and blindness; paradoxically, because of our own sinfulness. Christ sees it and names it from within the experience of the moment, the moment of utter estrangement and remove from the Father. But note, not from God.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word to God frames our reflections upon Christ’s Passion  this Holy Week. The accounts of the Passion are read in their fullness from all four Gospels during this week. On Monday in Holy Week we begin The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Mark and conclude his account of the Passion on Tuesday.

The beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark is framed by the story of a woman having a box of ointment of spikenard which is broken open and used to anoint Jesus’ head and by the story of Peter’s weeping upon the realization that he has betrayed Jesus. In a way, the tears of Peter and the outpouring of the spikenard signal the only good things that we can say about our humanity on this day. For in between lies all of the deceit and folly, compromise and violence, miscarriage of justice and forms of convenience, not to mention betrayal, that belong to the untruth and darkness of our human hearts. Not a pretty picture, we must say. The thoughts of many hearts are indeed revealed to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word in response to God’s word to her through the angel Gabriel provides the interpretative principle for our Holy Week pilgrimage. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the lesson from Isaiah (Is. 52.13-53 end) presents us with the picture of the suffering servant. At once, Israel, in the discovery of her vocation “to be a light to lighten the gentiles”, a vocation to be God’s chosen people for all people precisely through the experience of suffering, the image of the suffering servant is understandably transferred to Christ in his passion. Jesus, we might say, is the suffering servant. And in Luke’s memorable phrase, “all the people hung upon his words” (Lk. 19.48). There is something captivating and compelling about the spectacle of Christ’s passion. It has precisely to do with the way in which the images of the Jewish Passover are transformed into something new and strange.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, with the accounts of Matthew and Luke about Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the growing sense of foreboding and unease about what this will mean. The Passover is the great Jewish celebration of the liberation of the children of the Hebrews from Pharaoh’s oppressive yoke in Egypt. At Morning Prayer on Palm Sunday, we are reminded of the Passover of the first-born, that striking illustration of the divine power that discerns the first-born of man and beast, passing over only the first-born of the Hebrews, “that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel” (Exodus 11. 7). This week will challenge us about ourselves, about our inmost selves, about the commitments and principles that define us and defeat us. “A sword shall pierce through your own soul, also”, Simeon had said to Mary upon the occasion of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk. 2.35). The intention of Holy Week is to reveal the thoughts of our hearts to us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Palm Sunday is a day of striking contrasts conveyed through conflicting words. Our words are in contradiction with our hearts. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the most intense and disturbing spectacle, dare I say, that we shall ever see, all the world’s holocausts, genocides, slaughters, and wickednesses notwithstanding. You see, Palm Sunday is for us, in all of the confusions and contradictions of the western democratic societies which we inhabit, the most alarming counter-cultural spectacle that we shall ever face. It is not new, of course. Sadly, it has been cheapened by our familiar customs, perhaps, as if it were a mere cultural phenomenon. As if we are simply going through the motions of ‘we have always done this’ without thinking for half-a-second just what this week we call Holy Week really means.

On the other hand, the willful retreat by so many from the life and witness of the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks volumes about a message that you have not received though it has been completely before you. It has nothing to do with the sad and pathetic banalities of our criticisms and complaints about one another, the various and mean defenses and accusations that we hurl at one another to avoid ourselves and the picture of ourselves which Palm Sunday presents and which is revealed more fully in Holy Week which Palm Sunday inaugurates.

No. Holy Week provides the picture, year in and year out, of a very profound truth about ourselves and one which we do everything in our power to avoid. We don’t want to see this picture of ourselves but, truth be spoken, you and I are in utter contradiction with ourselves, you and I in ourselves are hell. And only this week, at least in the meaning of this week, can offer us something more than the hell of ourselves. But, paradoxically, it may seem, only by going through the hell of ourselves in the pageant of Christ’s passion for us. Only through our seeing the forms of hell in ourselves can we begin to understand the joy of human redemption. Holy Week bids us contemplate the contradictions and confusions of our hearts and minds.

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