Mass Readings: Tuesday of Holy Week

“And it was night”.  John’s recording that the sun had set when Judas left the Last Supper to betray Jesus is something more than a passing detail. John is making a spiritual and theological point. The darkness symbolizes sin and evil. As the Passion of our Lord unfolds it will appear as if the forces of evil are winning. The worst of humanity’s sinfulness will be on display. Judas’s greed and betrayal, Peter’s violence and denial, the disciple’s abonnement of Jesus, Pilot’s cowardliness, the crowd’s injustice, the solder’s cruelty and on and on. Amid all this sin, Jesus remains the calm and still point. Much like the eye of a tornado with all the rubbish and trash rotating around it.

After Judas departs, Jesus says “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him” Jesus the innocent Lamb of God will be sacrificed, not only for those sins which are on display at that moment but for all the sins that ever were and ever will be committed. Jesus the innocent one, will take sin unto himself and it will be nailed with him to the cross. In Jesus’s death, sin itself dies and is defeated. All that separates humanity from God is destroyed. As symbolized in Mark’s Gospel by the Temple’s sanctuary veil being torn in two.

During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we too feel the evil of the night. As Pope Francis said in his Urbi et Orbi reflection on March 27 of this year “Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives…. We find ourselves afraid and lost.” But then our Holy Father goes on to remind, “We have a hope: by his (Christ’s) cross we have been healed and embraced so that nothing and no one can separate us from his redeeming love.”  We who are members of Christ Body by virtue of our Baptism are one with him in the eye of this current storm and nothing can separate us from him.