Service, sacrifice, sanctity

All Saints’, Dorval
Lent V, Year C
April 6, 2025

The altar of repose, 2024

Service. Sacrifice. Sanctity.

These are the three concepts that kept coming to mind as I re-read this week’s Gospel passage.

Mary serves Jesus by anointing him – thus setting the example that he will follow just a few days later when he washes his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.

She sacrifices an extravagant amount of spectacularly valuable perfume (we perhaps shouldn’t inquire too closely into where it came from), and perhaps she sacrifices some of her dignity as well; she risks looking like an excitable, emotional, irrational woman; she risks, in fact, exactly the kind of rebuke that Judas in fact gives her.

But she creates an atmosphere of sanctity, of sacredness. The perfume, intended for and associated with the holy purpose of anointing the dead for burial, fills the room with its fragrance. This description echoes passages like Isaiah 6 – where the temple fills with smoke as the prophet sees a vision of God – and Acts 2 – where the room fills with a mighty wind as the Spirit descends on the disciples. Mary’s action creates a feeling of palpable holiness.

When Judas issues his rebuke, he does so in bad faith, but he’s not entirely wrong. He, too, could invoke these three concepts: service, sacrifice, sacredness. He could claim that the truest service is to those who are in need, and that we should sacrifice our luxuries for that purpose, and that sanctity is found in helping the poor and not in extravagant ritual gestures.

Say it with me: it’s a both/and, not an either/or. And Jesus repeatedly goes out of his way to defend Mary of Bethany’s right to be as emotional and dramatic – as “extra,” as the kids say – as she pleases. This too is a way to offer praise and honour to God.

As we move into Holy Week, we find ourselves presented with a push and pull between the sanctity of austerity and the sanctity of extravagance. Both are valid! Some communities keep everything very plain and simple, and some are the opposite. But usually, the power of Holy Week comes from a mix of both: of the contrast between decorating the altar and then stripping it.

When I was a kid, my family went to Good Friday services at the local Anglo-Catholic parish. At the time, they abstained from using the organ during Lent, so all the singing was a cappella; and their nineteenth-century Gothic sanctuary, while still full of carved wood and gold leaf, had been stripped of its altar hangings and other decorations. Yet they still wore sumptuous black vestments, and halfway through the service they all processed to the side chapel to retrieve the Reserved Sacrament, did a quick-change into red vestments, and returned with the body and blood of Jesus carried under a special cloth called a “humeral veil” and preceded by clouds of incense.

The contrast between the sacredness of austerity and the sacredness of beauty can be deeply meaningful, as it emphasizes both the sorrows and the joy of this holy time, both Christ’s self-emptying in human form and his glorification as he journeys through death on our behalf. And all those themes are right there in the brief vignette of Mary anointing Jesus.

One beloved tradition of many Anglican parishes is the Maundy Thursday night watch. After the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, when we reenact the Last Supper even more explicitly and deliberately than usual, we strip the altar on which we have just made bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, emphatically and shockingly pivoting from the sanctity of adornment to the sanctity of austerity. We then carry the communion elements to a separate place where they are kept overnight so people can keep watch with them, staying awake in shifts (as the disciples proved themselves unable to do) so that Jesus is not abandoned during the fearful hours in the garden of Gethsemane and during his arrest and trial.

The way that the bread and wine are reserved can vary from a bare table in a dark room – the spirituality of austerity – to the most extravagant “garden of repose”, the spirituality of adornment. Here at All Saints’, our default had very much been the former: the chapel altar was stripped at the same time as the main altar, and the bread and wine were placed on its surface in stark simplicity.

I kept thinking, though, about the parish where I was a curate. There, in their jewel-like side chapel, the Altar Guild created a warm, colourful, fragrant oasis of flowers, icons, and incense, including bringing in multiple entire live trees in pots. It was an extraordinary experience to sit there gazing at God, present in bread and wine on the altar, and have all five senses filled with beauty.

And so last year, when we had the first youth retreat as part of the Maundy Thursday night watch, part of what we did together was to decorate the chapel. We moved in all the Easter flowers, we used garlands from the craft store, we assembled icons, we lit incense in the thurible that we had borrowed from the Cathedral for the Christmas pageant and never gotten around to returning. It was beautiful, and it gave appropriate honour to the sacred things that were reserved on the altar at the centre of the display.

Either way is valid. Either way can be an intense and compelling way to engage with the stories and the meaning of Holy Week. And I invite you to observe, starting a week from today, where in your Holy Week experience you find the sanctity of austerity, and where you find the sanctity of adornment. How do they compare and contrast? Which feels more effective? How else could it be done? What are you feeling, and why? And then tell me – I’m always interested to know whether worship is having the effect it’s intended to.

So, service, sacrifice, sanctity: it can mean keeping things simple and giving what we have to the poor, or it can mean making things beautiful and giving what we for the worship of God. Ideally, it should mean both.

And there’s one more context in which I want to explore this triad of service, sacrifice, sacredness: and that’s our upcoming bishop election.

We’ll be holding a Zoom Q&A the week before the election, but between Holy Week/Easter and the Lay Readers’ Retreat, this is actually my last chance to preach about it between now and the electoral Synod on May 3.

There have been a lot of rumours and a lot of coverage, including internationally, of our bishop election process, and I’m not going to go into the details of that here, though I’m happy to do so one-on-one or in the Zoom session. What I do want to say is that I’ve been in close contact with more than one of the people who resigned from the search committee in protest after the slate was finalized, and that one of the things that was so difficult for them was interacting with potential candidates who did not undertake the search process in a spirit of service, sacrifice, and sanctity.

Being a bishop is much more than being the CEO of a medium-sized nonprofit organization. It is a sacred role and a sacred charge, and it must be undertaken in a spirit of service and sacrifice, not out of ambition, in an attempt to increase one’s clout or to advance an agenda. That is certainly the basis upon which I will be casting my vote on May 3, and I hope that is true of the other delegates, both lay and clergy.

Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus’ feet in a gesture of extravagant adoration. Over the night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, we reserve Christ’s body and blood in the chapel with abundant love and adornment. And we pray that God will send us a leader who will approach Jesus with that same spirit of stunned gratitude at the sacredness that God has seen fit to embody among us, and will lead us in a spirit of service and sacrifice.

Amen.