Holy (Fig) Monday by Fr Jack

Holy Week 2026 sermon series

Holy Week and our day to day life now:

The events of salvation,
the font of Grace,
the sacramental life of the Church today.

Readings:
Hebrews 9.11-15
The Gospel according to St John 12.1-11

Mary anoints Jesus’ feet, oil and Ordination.

Today's Mary is something of a mystery. Here in St John’s account she is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Elsewhere, named as a sinful woman in St Luke’s Gospel (7.36-50), she is often presumed to be St Mary Magdalene. In Ss Mark (14.3-9) and Matthew (26.6-13) she is simply an unnamed woman. There are so many Marys in the New Testament it is not altogether straightforward to work out who is who.

What is straightforward is that she loves Jesus.

She lavishes this gift on Him. The oil is her sorrow, her powerful desire for healing and reconciliation. The oil is her worship and love for God in Christ. St John tells us it was worth three hundred denarii, three hundred day’s wages for a Roman Solider, almost a year’s income.

Jesus is being anointed as a sign of his looming death, too of course.

Oil was very expensive. It is a luxury. That’s why lovingly anointing corpses after death is also such a statement of care, of lavishing value on the person who has died, and such respect for their bodies. As the Myrrhbearers, those wonderful women, will come to do for Jesus

All this is the sermon preached by Mary today. This moment with Jesus allows St John to tell us about Jesus’ divinity, his coming death, but also God’s view of the value of every part of creation, His love for our bodies, and our bodies’ love for God in bringing our whole selves to worship. God doesn’t just meet us in our minds, thoughts or words on a page, but also in our bodies. We worship God with all of us. Our hair, and oil, and hands, like Mary.

The first of the sacraments that form the pillars holding up our journey through Holy Week this year, and through life, is (as it happens) ordination. We heard of Jesus, our Great High Priest, and the character of His priesthood in the Epistle to the Hebrews today (9.11-15). Since the first days of the Christian Way of being, the apostles and the bishops who succeeded them laid hands with prayer and sent out ministers, sharing Christ’s priesthood. First episkopos ἐπίσκοπος, bishops. Then diάkonos διάκονος, deacons, were required. Then finally as the church grew, the bishops needed local stand-ins in the form of presbyteros πρεσβύτερος, priests.

Deacons, priests and bishops are anointed for their ministry, and hands are laid on them. This touch, this physical way of praying, and this physical family tree in the human beings, the bodies, who have embodied this ministry and held these roles stretches across time and space, right back to The Twelve (e.g. Apostlic Age: 2nd Timothy 1.6 and Acts 8.17). We call it apostolic succession. This great tidal wave, family tree, root system of bodies, touch and prayer and the Holy Spirit. Connecting Jesus and the Twelve and the Church today. It is itself a mark of how God uses the physical reality of our matter, and how God loves creation, through creation. Its true of all sacraments, but in a special way ordination is indicative of this fundamental reality.

The lavish expense of oil poured on priestly hands, so that those hands can lavish blessing on God’s people, lavish holy food on God’s flock.

Here, like Mary with her anointing oil, you and I pour out our love, as small and fragile and misdirected as it may be. She wipes his feet with her hair. We bring our hair too - some of us have had hands laid on our hair and heads for this particular ministry. But all of us hear Jesus say ‘even every hair on your head has been counted’ (St Luke 12.7). Unworthy as we are, we come, and Jesus has already rushed to meet us, and in us, in the reality of our bodies and lives, to bring His love and life to us and to the world He loves. We come just as we are, knowing that God’s love and grace will meets us there.

Aaron

By George Herbert

                Holiness on the head,

         Light and perfections on the breast,

Harmonious bells below, raising the dead

         To lead them unto life and rest:

                Thus are true Aarons drest.

                Profaneness in my head,

         Defects and darkness in my breast,

A noise of passions ringing me for dead

         Unto a place where is no rest:

                Poor priest, thus am I drest.

                Only another head

         I have, another heart and breast,

Another music, making live, not dead,

         Without whom I could have no rest:

                In him I am well drest.

                Christ is my only head,

         My alone-only heart and breast,

My only music, striking me ev'n dead,

         That to the old man I may rest,

                And be in him new-drest.

                So, holy in my head,

         Perfect and light in my dear breast,

My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead,

         But lives in me while I do rest),

                Come people; Aaron's drest.