Arma Christi (II): Monday in Holy Week

Purse of the Arma Christi
Omne Bonum MS, British Library

John 12:1-11

The story of Judas makes us wonder. How could such a close companion of Jesus betray him, and why?

The Gospels however do not see it as quite such a puzzle. John’s account and Luke’s also do say that Satan entered into Judas, but this isn't so much an explanation as a description, a way of saying he acted with malice.

Some of the traditional artistic renderings of the instruments of the Passion, the Arma Christi, or arms of Christ, answer the question by including a money bag among the emblems of Jesus' suffering. Here at St Thomas’ one of the finely carved shields in the frame surrounding the Cross in the center of the great reredos, on the left just below the crossbar, depicts a set of coins lying around the purse from which they came.

Money. Money may not sound very much like a holy week theme, but to belong to the times of year rectors and churchwardens introduce stewardship or capital campaigns, or just when the Gospels present Jesus' challenging teaching during his ministry about the place of possessions in our lives.

Yet the Arma Christi depict what the Gospels also say quite clearly; that what led Judas astray, and hence what took Jesus to the cross, was money, or the love of it. Money is thus one of the instruments of the passion as surely as whip or lance or nails.

It is the nature of all these instruments, the symbols that represent the drama we relive in Holy Week, and of the passion itself, that they are ambiguous. Every item used to bring about the demise of Jesus is something that could be put to good purpose. The irony of the passion is that people and things made for good are employed to serve suffering, oppression, and death.

The power of money and its capacity to destroy relationships, interpersonal and international, hardly needs to be expanded on. The First Letter to Timothy (6: 10) famously observes that the love of money - not money itself though, to be clear - is the root of all evils.

Some of this eternal truth is on display in a new and unvarnished way in the public sphere now, as the traditional reticence to acknowledge venality in political leadership has now given way to a surprisingly unembarrassed approach to treating public service for personal more than for communal gain. Judas, we suspect, thought he knew something about the art of the deal too.

Yet the unedifying nature of contemporary political life is potentially a distraction as much as a concern. The leaders of most times and places would have dealt with Jesus as the Romans did, and have spent whatever they needed to for that end; but the question Judas' story raises is whether we betray or dispose of him too, and for what.

Matthew's Gospel gives us some more details of Judas' deal-making. Thirty pieces of silver, it says, thirty denarii which were the common silver coinage of the Romans, perhaps a few hundred dollars to us, were the price of Jesus' betrayal. There is another story in which Judas and money features and which we heard read this evening. Mary of Bethany the sister of Martha and of Lazarus anoints Jesus' feet with an expensive ointment that cost three hundred denarii, ten times the amount of Judas' paycheck - and it is not a coincidence I suspect that this extravagance is so obviously a multiple of the other figure.

Mary's jar of ointment itself features among some depictions of the instruments of the Passion. This is perhaps even more surprising than the presence of the coins or money bag. This object, the precious vessel, is a gift, a thing of beauty, and not a means of suffering. Yet it belongs among these Arma Christi because with it she too plays her part in this story; as Jesus says "She bought [the perfume] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial," interpreting this as an act of preparation for the end, and the tomb.

The story from this evening's Gospel confirms Judas' motive in a different context and with a different amount attached. Mary anoints Jesus' feet with an extravagant perfume and Judas objects. Why could this ointment, so lavishly employed to anoint Jesus before his burial, and worth 300 denarii, not have been spent on the poor, he claimed - while apparently seeing less a potential for charity than for self-enrichment.

Judas here takes the role of the sound financial manager. Mary this wasn't in budget; is your financial delegation really that high; was this expenditure aligned with our mission?

Of course more specifically he asks about the poor, and that question has bothered many readers since. The evangelist tells us he was insincere, and that this too was part of his own problematic relationship with money, but that does not erase the question: could not this ointment have been sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?

While Jesus defends her, it is Mary's choice that really matters; she was not donating to his discretionary fund, but making a gift entirely of her own initiative and that honored not just Jesus himself but the ointment for its own sake, not merely as a commodity but as that beauty, that fragrance, that experience of intimate compassion - not just its price. Judas proves to be the sort of person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Both the coins and the jar thus matter; Judas would merely have turned one into more of the other.

Judas' use of things is merely instrumental, using, as well as self-serving. Mary's concern is both humane and yet also recognizes the beauty of things in themselves - she enjoys it, as does Jesus and as the Gospel tells us "The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume."

We can, like Judas, treat not just money itself but other objects and other people as means to ends. And we can still betray or deny Jesus by using him. If we turn him into the supposed patron of life goals that are set without him, or claim his authority for material ends that do not reflect the nature of his love and his life, we sell him and ourselves short. We also miss the possibilities of what the good things we have and hold can achieve for ourselves in community, for the poor not least.

Yet these objects, the symbols of the Arma Christi, are offered to us not merely as a warning or rebuke but as signs of hope. What the Holy Week story depicts as instruments of chaos and suffering can ultimately be given back to us redeemed as a means of freedom and life.

We can also do what Mary did and engage with our world both in recognition of its beauty and in acknowledgement of its need. We will find in particular that the poor are his body now, which was what Jesus is hinting at in his rebuke of Judas. With every act of generosity, with money or with things of beauty, the Gospel is proclaimed as clearly as Mary anointing the feet of Jesus.