The Operative Words of Holy Week

In today’s Gospel, when Lazarus’ and Martha’s sister Mary “took a liter of costly perfumed oil

made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair,” her gesture of love was made in silence. Nonetheless “the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.”  The cutting remarks of Judas, by contrast, divide the house and fill it with a different odor:  “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?”  Judas’ heart is divided, “because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions.”  He is ultimately deaf to the Lord’s correction, because a short time later he too will touch the body of Jesus with a silent gesture---the kiss of betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

From yesterday’s reading of St. Luke’s account of the Passion, we learn that Judas’ evil action had immediate and infectious consequences:  “His disciples realized what was about to happen, and they asked, ‘Lord, shall we strike with a sword?’  And one of them struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear.  But Jesus said in reply, ‘Stop, no more of this!’  Then he touched the servant’s ear and healed him.”  Violence is, in a sense, both the result of spiritual deafness and the cause of the further spread of it. At the Easter Vigil later this week, the catechumens who have prepared for Baptism will have their ears touched and Christ’s efficacious words pronounced over them:  “Ephphatha”---“Be opened!”.  But to reach this point, the Lord must open our ears to receive all of the graces of Holy Week, including the painful and difficult ones.

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the operation on my temporomandibular joints was performed, so to speak, from the outside in.  The surgeon made an incision along the cartilage of my ears to gain access to the interior of my jaw.  Many times over the past two months I have looked at the surgical photos taken of that procedure like I look at holy cards:  These images remind me in the most strikingly vivid (because somatically literal!) way how good and necessary it is for my ears to have been radically opened.  Dr. Piper was deeply knowledgeable, technically very refined, minimally invasive, and utterly decisive about (1) where he cut, (2) exactly what his salutary purpose was, and (3) even how best to repair the temporary damage caused by his healing art.  So it is---super-eminently---with Christ.

I cannot help but think of the starkly opposed yet tragically similar gestures of Judas’ kiss and Peter’s sword.  Both are botched surgeries.  Judas perversely makes of an expression of love its very severing, like a renegade doctor who would betray his profession by plotting to instrumentalize the patient and maliciously cause harm.  Peter, by comparison, wields the tools of evangelical operation clumsily, like a well intentioned physician who has not adequately appropriated the best practices of medical training---thus using the wrong means to the desired outcome---and in the process causes complications.  The Lord Jesus suffers “patiently” the wrongheaded interventions of both the good and the evil, in no small part to train us future generations in the salvific arts of the Divine Charity.

Today is March 25 [2013], ordinarily celebrated in the Church as the Solemnity of the Annunciation.  Because the date this year falls during Holy Week, its observance is transferred to April 8, the first day after the ending of the Easter Octave.  But we can, for all that, ask the Lord to grant us the hearing aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s receptive ears.  At the announcement of the Angel Gabriel which she did not at first understand, Our Lady--- full of grace and with consummate contemplation in action---inclined forward with her whole being to inquire:  “How can this be?”

How, Lord Jesus, can the days of this particular Holy Week be for our salvation?  What is the surgical procedure we must understand---and the recovery protocol we must follow---for the coordinated healing of our mouths (what we say) through our ears (how we listen) to form those gestures of love which permeate the whole House of Your Church and reach even to the ends of the world You have come to save?  As the Priests of our Diocese gather around Bishop Rhoades this evening at the Chrism Mass at St. Matthew Cathedral to renew our vows and share in the blessing of the Holy Oils, may these sanctifying gestures bear the fragrant form of the sacrificial service of Mary of Bethany and the all-sufficiently receptive grace of Mary of Nazareth:  May it be done unto us, O Christ, according to Your word.