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

The Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week recalls and completes the Epistle reading for Passion Sunday from Hebrews 9. It centers our attention on Christ’s Passion as the “forgiveness of sins” through “the shedding of his blood” in the sacrifice of himself.. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,” and “now, once for all, at the end of time, he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” It offers a way of understanding theologically just what it means to say that “Christ is the Mediator of the new covenant, [and] that by means of death” so that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” This theological understanding is complemented by the Passion according to St. Luke, read today and tomorrow.

Luke, in Dante’s famous phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This, wonderfully illustrated in The Beginning of the Passion According to St. Luke. Luke, helps us to feel something of the meaning of Christ’s Passion psychologically, emotionally, and personally, and what it means for us. In other words, Luke gives us a sense of the inner struggles, turmoil and dynamic of the Passion in Christ himself in the movement towards the Cross.

Luke shows what is at work in the forces of evil that seek to kill Jesus especially with respect to the intentions of the chief priests and scribes and the role of Judas in Christ’s betrayal. Satan, Luke tells us, “entered into Judas” who conspires with the chief priests and captains to betray Jesus unto them. Satan is the tempter, the devil, who as a created being is good but exists in denial of his own being. He is, as Augustine nicely puts it, “an evil good”. He shows us the radical nature of evil as the contradiction and negation of the good upon which it utterly depends, the evil to which we concede so easily.

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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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