Monday in Holy Week • 11 April 2022

Monday in Holy Week
 • 11 April 2022

Year after year after year I return to these familiar readings, now very much old friends*. For the third year in a row, I am not reflecting on these readings in the context of the Holy Eucharist. For the third year in a row, these reflections have no audience. It is just the written text and me. For the foreseeable future, that is how it shall be. 

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As much as I love the reading from Isaiah, increasingly even now I am aware of the dangers of successionism, that is, reading a Christian interpretation into the original Hebrew text. God’s servant, as described in Isaiah 42, is not a foreshadowing of Jesus but, rather, the prophet, or Cyrus, or even the Israelite nation itself. According to The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, ‘The term, “servant,” in most other passages in chapters 40-66 clearly refers to the nation Israel or to the faithful within Israel, and that is the most likely explanation here as well.… [T]his text looks forward to the ideal world in which justice will reign and the covenant between Israel and God will be observed perfectly.’** So, as cherished as our connection with the ‘suffering servant,’ interpreted to be Jesus, might be, we must let go of it. We will again hear from Isaiah tomorrow and on Wednesday and we must bear these comments in mind.

And, as dear to my heart is the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair is to my heart (having anointed a dying person’s feet, but not wiping them dry with my hair), I am going to lay this one aside for this year, as well.

So, the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews remains. 

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This year, in the context in which we find ourselves, the final phrase of the final verse of the pericope calls my attention: ‘So you may not grow weary or lose heart.’

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews lays out in front of us all these amazing people—’patriarchs, [matriarchs], prophets and heroes of the old covenant.’ Unfortunately, with another tip of the hat toward successionism, these commended people fall short (‘though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect’). In this day and age, when we recognise how interconnected we are; how much God’s love extends to ALL (as Desmond Tutu would proclaim with his arms extended wide), can we set aside the idea that if you are not Christian, you are not complete? As our Jewish brothers and sisters prepare to celebrate Passover, which begins this Saturday evening, might we find ways to embrace everyone’s faith?

Yes, Jesus is the ‘pioneer and perfecter of our faith,’ the Christian expression of a belief in God. And, yes, Jesus ‘endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.’ Yes, we can celebrate that fact that lies at the centre of our Christian faith. But may we never disparage our Jewish and Muslim (and any other expression of faith) brothers and sisters, who believe in God, too.

All of us seek an assurance that things cannot get worse, that evil and sin will not have the last word. As the news points out tonight that Russian troops are gathering on the eastern border of Ukraine for a ‘major assault on the east’ of Ukraine and more and more news comes out from Bucha; as radical Buddhist members of the Burmese Army have seized a Roman Catholic church and are holding people hostage; as COVID-19 still won’t let go of us, as we worry about the price of basic goods, there is plenty to cause us to lose hope. 

That is where our faith comes into play, where we can look beyond it all to God, so that we may not grow weary or lose heart. The race we run now is exhausting, there are mountains beyond mountains (as the Haitian saying goes), but ultimately, we will arrive in a place of comfort. This is not to say that we accept passively the wrongs and challenges in this world; no, we are to fight for justice and mercy. But, we can take heart that when our time comes, there is a place prepared for us at the Table of Life, where our feet will be anointed, the house filled with nard, and where Jesus will join us.

* I continue to use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer lectionary.
** The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 848-49.