A Homily for Palm Sunday 2024
What exactly is it that she did that we are called to do in remembrance of her?
In Mark’s Passion Narrative, which we hear this Palm Sunday, the evangelist includes a vignette about a woman, unnamed and certainly unexpected, and definitely unwelcomed, who arrives at Simon the Leper’s house in Bethany with “an alabaster jar of perfumed oil, costly genuine spikenard.” And what exactly did she do? “She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on [Jesus’] head.” And that is what we are called to do in remembrance of her.
So does this mean we all go about busting up expensive perfume bottles? I suggest, rather, what we are called to do in remembrance of her, is to break the hard-shelled alabaster of our own illusions of separation and isolation and pour ourselves out into the world. Like a rich perfume or a costly spikenard, we are to pour out what inside dwells, as the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins once wrote: “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying what I do is me: for that I came.”
Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum is really an exercise in memory. But here I don’t mean a simple calling to mind or a swapping of stories about the past. We are called to re-member as in, gather up all the scattered, dissipated senses of our so-called fractured selves, and make real now once again this woman’s bold-breaking gesture. To break the well-guarded and overly defended frontiers of our own cut-off selves and pour out generously the richness of that being indoors that in each one of us dwells.
You see, this woman “knew by heart.” She knew Jesus by heart. Meaning she just didn’t know about him she knew him. And he knew her by heart. So she could brazenly walk into a space where she was not welcomed or wanted and she could brazenly break an expensive bottle and waste an even more expensive perfume, because she re-membered. She knew herself. She knew Jesus. She was known by Jesus. And therefore, unlike the surly crowd around her, she knew exactly what the situation needed: it needed HER! It needed her to be herself and to give herself away. Her breaking of the bottle was the breaking of a bondage both self and other-imposed. She mirrors what Jesus is about to do for all of us on the cross… breaking the bondage of sin and death once for all and for ALL. So she might rise fully realized in Christ.
That’s what we are called to do in remembrance of her!
But, as Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum soberly reminds us, we shouldn’t expect to be praised or rewarded for such bold and brash acts of breaking. Notice the people who surround Jesus and this woman. The chief priests and the scribes, held up in their cold-eyed distant observing of Jesus, seeking to arrest him by treachery. Or even the disciples who are “infuriated with her” and protest. They all unfortunately did not know where they were, who they were, who Jesus was and what the situation demanded. They choose to stay in their safe, though artificial, sense of isolation, so they could observe from afar, pass judgement and by no means get their own hands or feet dirty in the process.
The woman, on the other hand, “knew by heart,” meaning, she knew herself, she knew Jesus, so she knew exactly what to do. It wasn’t just a breaking of a bottle it was the breaking of a stubbornly solid and false facade that we all hide behind as it is easier to observe than participate, it is easier to stay at a distance from what is actually going on or from who I am actually called to be. The risk of participation requires the risk of total self-gift. Which in turn brings the truth of who I am to the light.
Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum is by its nature an exercise in memory. A call to remember, as in the Greek term “anamnesis”: to make a past event become present now. And that means to break the expensive alabaster facades we all hide behind and pour out the richness of our very selves upon Christ… that is, upon his people.
To know by heart is to first remember and then realize and then rise. This unnamed woman re-membered and so she didn’t keep that treasure, that is herself, behind locked doors but she realized (made it real) by giving it away and, by that, she rose to the truth of who she is in Christ. She only had herself to give, she knew that, and so she boldly gave it away and, in the process, discovered who she was. The fact that we do not know her name doesn’t matter… she knew. And if we do what she did in remembrance of her… we’ll know too.
Chiaroscuro Spirituality 