Madonna - Prayer and Spirituality for Today's Christian

THE OINTMENT AND THE VINEGAR
Passion Sunday

Peter Steele SJ

Countless times, since artists have tried to represent the passion and death of the Lord, they have found in the gospel text what we might call eloquent items. We can see many of these picked up in any version of the Stations of the Cross.

There is the cross itself, of course, and there are the crown of thorns, the scarlet cloak, the swords, the rod, the nails, and the rest. Each of these things—all of them long gone to dust, I suppose—bespeaks human violence and hostility: but also, in the context of this most special of stories, each of them also bespeaks the tenacious love of the God who is also a man, of a man who is also God.

In the same spirit, let me point to two ‘eloquent items’. They are, from near the beginning of the story, the aromatic spikenard ointment: and, from near the end, the vinegar on a sponge, held up to the crucified Christ.

One thing we can say for sure about the woman’s pouring this luxurious and refreshing perfume over Jesus eating dinner is that she did not have to do it. He could have got by without it: it had presumably never happened to him before, and never would again: he did not need it: nobody, in the strict sense, needs such a thing.

But even as I say this, I think of a great moment in Shakespeare’s King Lear when that deprived king, being told that he doesn’t actually need a retinue of followers, says, ‘O reason not the need! … /Allow not nature more than nature needs,/Man’s life is cheap
as beast’s’. Lear’s judgement about many things is astray, but this one he has right. In a sense we do need more than we ‘need’: we are hungry for the lavish: we yearn, and we were made to yearn, for amplitude, for prodigality.

I think it was the American writer Eric Hoffer who said that nobody has ever been loved as we all long to be loved. He was wrong about the absence of the loving, but right about the presence of the longing. We are all after being loved extravagantly—being loved up to death and beyond—and we are insatiable until we are assured that the longing is vindicated.

The perfume poured over the Jesus who is, after all, there to get a meal he does need, stands for the divine lavishness which brought him, as a man, into being at all, as it brought you and me and all the world into being—and does so each moment. It stands for the passionate enthusiasm of God our creator for each of us, and for us all.

And at the same time it is the most appropriate of salutes to the Christ who is, himself, unstinting in his devotion both to that loving Father and to each of us. ‘Sweets to the sweet’ has sometimes been a saying: ‘lavishness to the lavish One’ might be a saying for that moment.

And that is what sets the terms of reference for what we call the ‘Passion’ of our Lord. That ‘Passion’ is an undergoing, like the ‘passion’ of a patient in a hospital: but it is his passion for us, and for our good—for both our healing and our flourishing—that takes him into that undergoing.

It is a bitter business, as the gospel reminds us, starkly. Near the end of it all, one of the execution squad holds up a spongeful of vinegar to him: and whether this is just another taunt, or is meant as some kind of relief, the bitterness of the stuff can remind us all of how actual, how immediate and unavoidable and invasive, all of the man’s suffering is. We know, most of us, what it is to be hurt deeply, in body or in spirit or in both. When we think of that, we are thinking of the vinegary pain of Christ himself. It was real: it was his: and it killed him.

It would be fruitless, and it might be degraded, for us to think only of that pain—or in fact of any pain. It would also be selfish, and it might be callous, for us to turn abruptly from the suffering person. But unless, in thought and prayer, we confront the vinegar of suffering with the perfumed ointment of lavishness, not only are we missing the essential truth about God and about his living and loving Son Jesus, we are also giving the last word to that nexus of fear, hostility and calculation which got him into his lethal predicament at all.

Holy Week does, after all and true enough, appeal to us to be changed. It asks us not to stand to arms against one another, in thought, word or deed. It asks us to forgo some at least of our resentments. It asks us to have a moratorium, if only for a few days, on the quarrel we are all inclined to have with God, who has had the bad taste to make us as we are and to give us what we have, and not arranged things otherwise.

Holy Week, like all the other weeks, will bring us a ration of distresses, a reek of vinegar. But the worst vinegar of all, a self-administered vinegar, is to give up grateful hope in the God of the lavish. The poet Coleridge said that we should be ‘obstinate in resurrection’; and whatever about poets, that is what God is.

THE OINTMENT AND THE VINEGAR Passion Sunday

Peter Steele SJ

THE OINTMENT AND THE VINEGAR
Passion Sunday