Readings:
Isaiah 43:16-21;
Psalm 126;
Philippians 3:4b-14;
John 12:1-8

Collect:
Gracious Father,
you gave up your Son out of love for the world:
lead us to ponder the mysteries of his passion,
that we may know eternal peace
through the shedding of our Saviour’s blood,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Reflection

This Sunday, the week before Palm Sunday, is known as Passion Sunday. It is the point in Lent when we, like Jesus, turn towards Jerusalem, towards the events of Holy Week and Easter, as we prepare to remember again the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

‘Passion’ is a word which has a double meaning. It can mean ‘love’ – and evokes a particular kind of all-consuming love, whether that is romantic love, or devotion to a particular person or ideal. We might be passionate about a cause.

But ‘passion’ also means ‘suffering’. It comes from the Latin ‘patio’, meaning ‘to suffer’. This is the kind of passion we mean when we refer to the Passion of Christ. In times gone by, churches used to put on passion plays – theatrical depictions of the suffering of Jesus. 

Both kinds of passion – love and suffering – turn up in this week’s gospel reading, the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet. This is a story which occurs differently in each of the gospels, but here in John’s telling it is Jesus’ friend Mary of Bethany who does the anointing – someone with whom he has a close personal relationship – and it is done in the context of a meal with friends. 

This is a wildly extravagant gesture of love, a passionate gesture. Not only the pouring out of such expensive perfume, but also Mary’s willingness to make herself so vulnerable, are testament to a passionate love for Jesus. 

But they are testament too to the suffering which is to come – which by this point is just around the corner. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” says Jesus. But here is Mary pouring out her perfume and her love, not at the day of Jesus’ burial, but as a prophetic anointing which points to the suffering he is about to endure. 

As we look ahead to Holy Week too, we see the meeting of these two kinds of passion – love and suffering – in the familiar story of Jesus’ Passion. It is familiar to us now, but imagine (or remember, if you can) the shocking power of that story on first encountering it. That outrageous combination of suffering and love. It is no wonder Paul speaks of the cross as a ‘scandal’ (1 Corinthians 1.23). 

As the hymn-writer Isaac Watts puts it in ‘When I Survey the Wonderous Cross’:

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

I pray that this Holy Week we will all encounter afresh the depth of passion – both in the sense of suffering and of love – with which Jesus acts for our salvation and the salvation of the whole creation.

Ruth Harley