'Temple Tuesday' Holy Tuesday, 15th April, by Fr Jack
‘Sir, we would see Jesus’. Those wonderful words of the Greeks to Phillip. There are some marvellous old pulpits with those words carved in the top to remind the preacher as s/he stands there what exactly they are there for! Marvellous words.
But that is a distraction from our Holy Week theme of ‘Women of the Passion’? Today’s Gospel has no women! Philip and Andrew etc. All men, of course. So how do they fit into this Holy Week’s theme of ‘Women of the Passion’? Maybe some of the Greeks were women, but we aren’t told. In fact this is not a ‘problem’.
Because, partly, it is good to notice the absence of women in this Gospel passage, like so many Gospel passages. And yet we know that it was women who bankrolled Jesus’ ministry - St Luke tells us that. And we know that some of Jesus’ most loved and closest friends were women - all the Evangelists tell us that. And this week of all weeks, we know that it will be the women, who with St John (who writes today’s Gospel) wait with Jesus at the end, on stinking, horrific Golgotha, when all others have fled. And it will be them, who meet Him Risen, because they are there, there because of love, which keeps them there, when the men have run away.
And there’s even something of that in today’s Gospel, despite the lack of women’s names and voices. Because today’s Gospel speaks of the cost of life. The grain of wheat that rends itself, gives itself away in order to give life. This agricultural image of Jesus death and resurrection, is one that these men don’t seem to understand.
Not all women experience childbirth of course, (and parking the fact that it is ridiculous for me to speak about this, having absolutely no knowledge or understanding of this subject!), but there is something of that spirit, of the pain and cost of a woman’s body in this image Christ lays before us today.
The cross is a kind of birth. It is new life, the New Life, for all creation, but at such cost. Just as TS Eliot’s Magi in his poem, wonder if Christ’s birth at Bethlehem was indeed a birth or a death. So this death is the most awful imaginable, and a kind of birth.
I heard a sermon once in which the preacher, a priest and an academic, who happened also to be a woman said ‘who but the Blessed Virgin Mary really knows the cost of saying what the priest says at every Eucharist when s/he lifts up the host before Holy Communion: ’Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Blessed are those who are called to his supper’. She knows what that cost Him, and she gave Him the flesh and blood, the life which He gives away. The seed dying in the ground.
The cost of life.
The tomb in which Mary and the other Myrrh-bearers lay Him is, by God’s grace, by the unstoppable power of His life and love, become a womb in which the new and eternal life of the whole universe is brought to birth. Jesus the first fruits of this new life, we and all things, who will follow after Him.
It’s all there. It’s all there. And it is Good News, but we cannot turn our eyes away from how much it costs. Our Lady Mary and the others did no turn away, and nor must we.
Footnote: Mthr Esther Brazil