By Sister Christine Schenk

When we entered the Lenten season, who among us would have imagined celebrating Holy Week and Easter amid so much death and suffering?

Having experienced the mystery and agony of this most sacred of seasons, we are also witnessing—now in real time—the mystery and agony of Earth’s peoples.

Some are gasping and fighting for each breath. Some are grieving the loss of loved ones, spirited away to die in isolation.

Some are exhausted doctors, nurses, and first responders wondering where they will ever find strength to see this pandemic through.

Some are government officials—governors, mayors, congressional representatives, and public health experts seeking to calm a terrified citizenry and diminish the havoc wreaked by a vicious virus that does not discriminate.

Others are scientists, inventors, and drug and equipment manufacturers working to find and/ or produce desperately needed curative medicines and machines.

Still others shelter at home,  educating their children, caring for their elders, and wondering how to pay looming bills with no money coming in.

How are we, who believe in God’s great love, called to enter into a time the like of which we have never experienced?

Where IS God’s great love in this?

Is it possible to comprehend the paradox of Jesus’ own witness during this excruciating time?

It is painful to be powerless in the face of  great suffering.

For this reason, I would like to reflect briefly on the experience of Jesus’s women disciples during the week of suffering we just experienced.  They were powerless, but their witness points to a reality even deeper than our overwhelmingly painful present.

Gospel accounts in Mark and Matthew tell of a special meal held in Bethany at the home of Simon the leper two days before Passover (Matt 26: 1-14; Mark 14:1-9).  Both passages say the religious leaders were seeking to arrest and kill Jesus. In this context, an unnamed woman approaches him with an alabaster flask of expensive ointment and anoints his head.

Immediately the other (presumably male) disciples reproach her and complain that the ointment was wasted and could have been sold “for a large sum” and given to the poor.

Yet, I wonder if the real reason for their complaint lies elsewhere.

This unnamed woman understands Jesus’s messianic destiny more deeply than the others.  In the Hebrew tradition, prophets are the ones who anoint kings—as Samuel had anointed David to succeed Saul as king of Israel (1 Sam. 16). The word “messiah” means literally “the anointed one. ”

This woman’s silent act of prophecy affirms that Jesus is the one all Israel has been expecting—the Messiah—who will save them from oppression.

Jesus, at least, appreciates her action:   “Let her alone; why do you trouble her?” he asks.  “She has done a beautiful thing to me . . .  She has done what she could . . . and truly I say to you wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Jesus knows he is about to die, and so does the unnamed woman. It must have comforted him deeply that like him, she saw beyond impending suffering and affirmed  the profound reality of a saving, if pain-filled grace. A grace that—against all odds—ultimately frees believers from the power of evil.

Though powerless, the anointing woman witnesses to a saving reality that transcends our present pain.

“She has done what she could,” says Jesus.  “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”

Where are we being invited to “do what we can?”  What beautiful thing reflects our solidarity with our suffering world?

Perhaps we are like the “many women” who Palm Sunday’s gospel says, “watch from a distance,” silently accompanying Jesus through an unimaginably painful death (Matt 27:55).

Like the women at a distance, we too are powerless.

We are powerless as we watch the powerlessness  of a crucified  Messiah—and as we watch a crucified world during this pandemic.

We offer what small comfort we can … the comfort of our presence, our sorrow, our lament, and our prayer.

Matthew’s passion narrative tells us that Jesus cried out his sense of desolation and abandonment, “My God my God, why have you deserted me?”

What is less well known is that Jesus is praying the first line of Psalm 22  which continues

“. . . Yet, Holy One, . . . in you our ancestors put their trust, they trusted, and you rescued them; they called to you for help and they were saved, they never trusted you in vain.”

It is good to pray Psalm 22 when we are angry, abandoned, and hopeless as many of us are feeling right now.

Jesus found comfort in naming his sense of being abandoned by God. But then he placed his trust in God’s power to save.

A dear friend once told me to never look at the cross without also seeing the resurrection. So, when we contemplate Jesus’ suffering on the cross—we begin to fathom the mysterious reality of evil and death — but we also come to a deeper reality – God’s power to save.

Now is a time to remember that our world is one — and our Jesus is suffering in it.

Now is a time to trust in God’s pain-filled power to save.

During a season of Resurrection that still feels like Good Friday, where are we invited to “do what we can”?

What beautiful act reflects our own solidarity with a suffering world?

 

About the Author

Sister Christine Schenk has worked as a nurse midwife to low-income families, a community organizer, a writer, and the founding director of an international church reform organization, FutureChurch. Currently she writes an award-winning column “Simply Spirit” for the National Catholic Reporter.

Her recent book Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity (Fortress, 2017) was awarded first place in History by the Catholic Press Association.