March 29, Monday in Holy Week

Isaiah 42:1-9

Weeks are supposed to start on Sundays, or so I have been told. But, we all know differently. Monday is the beginning of the real week, and Friday the end. This why we say, “Oh, Lord, another Monday” and “Thank God it’s Friday.” I guess the reason we feel this way is that our work, whatever it is, defines our lives. So, most parking meters and signs read, “Monday to Friday.”

Now we come to Holy Week, and to Monday of Holy Week. If we choose to “do” Holy Week this year, this must be the beginning. The Palm Sunday Passion covered the whole week, but the events of the week start here. For many of us, observing this week means maybe coming to the Maundy Thursday foot washing and Eucharist, and, if we are at home or can get away during lunch, coming to some part of the Good Friday liturgy. For far fewer, there might be a Tenebrae service on Wednesday night, but Monday or Tuesday? Little is offered in our churches.

It needs saying right away: Holy Week is not just about how any of us, or the Church, for that matter, observes it. Holy Week is a day by day rehearsal of the events that preceded and led to the betrayal and death of Jesus and that awful time after his death and before his resurrection, when no one knew what was going to happen. It might all be over, ended by a callous and ambitious provincial Roman governor, who valued the Peace of Rome above all else.

Holy Week, at least on the surface, is a very harsh week. Not much that is lovely happens – just awful, cruel things, day after day. Small wonder that many today, and for years in the past, just skip over it and opt for the joy of Easter. Certainly, this is what the culture around us does.

Early Christianity referred to itself as “The Way.” If it is a “way,” a journey, a movement, we must walk it if we want it to make any sense or want it to change us. So they reached back into the Hebrew Scriptures to find a foundation for the things that happened during this week. And we, centuries later, also rehearse the events of that last week to try to find understanding and, more important, to participate in the events that are now our story.

On this Monday, we reach back to the first of the so-called Servant Songs of Second Isaiah in search of meaning. Near the end of a devastating exile in Babylon, torn from the promised homeland and the Temple, Isaiah rallies his fellow exiles with poetry about their new vocation. They will be God’s chosen servant who will bring justice to the nations of the earth. And even given whatever feelings may have been stirred up by their sufferings, they will carry out this vocation with faithfulness and gentleness: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” Upheld by confidence in God’s call, they will be confident that they are carrying out God’s will for the whole world. They will be privileged to bring out those imprisoned in darkness.

Just think about all those who think they will never see justice and those in so many places who have abandoned all hope of ever again seeing the light. Much later, Jesus responded to these very Scriptures and began the Galilean ministry that ultimately led him to Jerusalem. Centuries later, we, the Church, are summoned by the Servant Songs to the same tasks.

And early in that last week of Jesus’ life, as he reclined at dinner in someone’s house in Bethany, the village of Mary and Martha and Lazarus their brother, now raised from the dead, he found his feet being anointed with very costly nard by Mary. Judas Iscariot, who was present at the table, asked, resentfully, why the money spent on this ointment had not been better spent on the poor.

Jesus startled his fellow guests by testily answering, “Leave her alone. She bought it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” While Mary had bought this expensive ointment to anoint Jesus body after his death (she knew how it would end), she was overcome with gratitude and chose to anoint him while he was still alive.

This poignant lavishing of love in the face of an impending and awful end continues to be rehearsed even today. And it lifts our hearts even as they are being swept into sadness.

The whole week takes us deeply into the cruel ambiguities of serving a just and loving God in an unjust and willfully uncomprehending world – but nowhere more than on this Monday, with its proclamation of a new vocation, and the story of the response it can bring when faithfully lived.

The Rev. Phillip Cato