Sermon for Holy Tuesday

This is the text of the sermon preached by our Pastoral Assistant on Tuesday in Holy Week at the 7.30pm Mass and Address.

‘It is not enough for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel; I will make you the light of the nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’

    Fear is a powerful theme of Holy Week; whether it is the politically inept Pilate’s fear of the crowd, the fear of Herod in the face of a silent Jesus, the Sanhedrin’s fear of Jesus expressed in their manipulation of the truth, or the fear of the disciples in the face of the apparent failure of Jesus’ mission and their desire to preserve their own lives.

In our gospel reading today, fear and confusion abide.  The disciples are encountering our Lord in a very different way from his previous actions, particularly when compared to the events of Palm Sunday.  Jesus is no longer a triumphant king, rather he is a servant. This chapter opens with our Lord washing the disciples’ feet and comes to its climax with the account of the Last Supper which we will hear about and re-live on Thursday night.

But our Lord is not just a servant, our Lord is a suffering and troubled servant; at the beginning of the passage we are told that Jesus is troubled in spirit.  And this troubled spirit clearly causes some consternation for the disciples who are confused by his actions.  The words of Jesus “Truly, truly I say to you, one of you will betray me” sets off a reaction among the disciples which shows that they are, to an extent, no longer moving in the same world as Jesus. They are uncertain of whom he spoke, indeed, they are so confused that they ask the Beloved Disciple what Jesus is talking about. But this confusion is shown to be universal; even the Beloved Disciple is not aware of what Jesus is talking about. Even after Jesus has shared the morsel of bread with his betrayer ignorance, confusion, and misunderstanding continue.  The overall feelings of fear in the Passion narrative all begin to escalate during this chapter.

People understand Holy Week in many different ways. For some it is a time when they go to church a little more often and feel sorry for Jesus, more still will go to the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Easter Day without witnessing the life and death moments in between. Still for others, I suspect for you people here most of all, it is a genuinely engaging time when we come to understand something of the extent of God’s love in the face of complete human fear and despair.

Holy Week teaches us that we must overcome our detachment, a detachment which makes the Cross a mere symbol. Like the disciples in the gospel, we too have to experience fear. We have to experience a form of brokenness. And, just as was the case with the disciples,  this feeling of brokenness is usually a sign that our own defences, our own ideas of self reliance are tumbling down around about us.

Unless we identify with the actions of the disciples of Jesus, we have not begun to understand Holy Week.  Those who have encountered despair can best appreciate victory. Only the dead can appreciate resurrection, and all Christians must confront and experience the darkness as we move along the road to our own death.  One thing which is most striking and yet most incidental of this account is found in verse thirty. Immediately after Judas leaves the room to betray Jesus, the author tells the reader that night had fallen. Darkness had begun to gather. And we, like the disciples, and indeed like Jesus Himself, have to enter into this darkness of Holy Week, the gloom of Gethsemane, the cloud and darkness of Good Friday, the pitch black of the tomb. In this darkness, we cannot see, except by relying on Christ, who in the darkness becomes our true light. It is only by being in the darkness that we can come to understand Christ as the light; it is only by standing beneath the cross that we can understand its saving power. It is by entering the dark, standing beneath the cross, that we come to understand that the heart of our faith and discipleship is our reliance on Christ’s light.

This is most obviously expressed in the first reading.  Jesus, who the words of the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading foretell, becomes the servant in whom the Lord is glorified. It was, as the Prophet says, not enough for Jesus to simply bring back Jacob, to gather Israel, Jesus’ mission is not simply limited to Israel anymore. It is universal.

“I will make you the light of the nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

This is a salvation which reaches out. “Disciples always have and always will display ignorance, fail Jesus, deny him. Some may even betray him in an outrageous and public way. But Jesus’ never-failing love for such disciples reveals the uniqueness of Salvation.” Even the most hated person in the gospels, in Christian tradition, Judas, is allowed to share in the Last Supper, the first Eucharist. This is what our Salvation means; this is what it means to love totally, completely.

This is a universal Salvation which is proclaimed to islands and remotest coasts. This is a salvation which is truly glorified, not in the pomp of Palm Sunday, but in the darkness of fear and despair. This is the salvation which comes to us as a single flame proclaimed out of the darkness of Easter night.

If we are to be true to our calling as Christians, we cannot shy away from the dark places of our lives – and there is none darker than the death of Jesus. We cannot be transformed or liberated other than at the foot of the Cross, and neither can those to whom we seek to show Christ. To ignore this week of all weeks is to collude with the tendency of the world to run away from pain and fear altogether.  As Christian’s we have to offer the Cross again and again to the most harrowing aspects of peoples’ lives. By sharing in the darkness and fear of the disciples, we can truly be said to be people who understand the power of the cross to speak to human pain, and as the only cure for the world’s sickness.