Seeing What Cannot Be Seen

The Woman with the Ointment and Judas Iscariot on Holy Wednesday of Holy Week

Photo by Arun Prakash on Unsplash

The Bridegroom Matins service on Wednesday of Holy Week almost speaks for itself. It is so beautiful that explanation feels almost intrusive. And yet, because the Church insists on pairing things, on holding contrasts together, this particular Bridegroom Matins presses us into attention.

There is a coupling the Church will not allow us to miss: Judas and the woman.

You see it most clearly in the Synaxarion: Judas on the one hand, the woman with the ointment on the other. The contrast sharpens even more when we hear the Hymn of Kassiane. The people at the table that night—the apostles, Judas included—did not have access to Kassiane’s hymn. They could not hear her words. They could not see what the Church now places directly before our eyes: the heart of the woman.

The hymn makes her interior life vivid. Almost painfully so. She is repenting. She is weeping. She knows what she is doing and why she is doing it. But no one else in the room can see that. Not really.

The Synaxarion tells us plainly and explicitly that Judas was enraged. The ointment, he insists, is being wasted. And what is remarkable is that the others follow him. The apostles take the bait. They repeat the same reasoning: “Why this waste?” They approach the moment logically. Too much so. They see only the value of the ointment, not the value of the heart that breaks it open.

For Judas, of course, the logic is a lie. He has been stealing all along. He does not care about the poor; he cares about himself. But the others do not know this. They stumble. The Gospel tells us as much. They miss the moment. And Jesus sees everything.

What the Synaxarion adds—a detail easy to overlook—is that Christ rebukes them not simply because they are wrong, but because they are humiliating her. Their reasoning, their insistence on being right, becomes a weapon. Christ intervenes to protect her from that.

This strikes me harder every year. How easily logic becomes cruel. How often truth, detached from love, becomes a bludgeon. We convince ourselves we are defending what is right, when what we are really doing is exposing someone to shame. We fail to perceive the heart of the matter and the heart of the person.

Then the Church gives us the second image. The woman breaks the jar. She pours it out. She anoints the Savior’s feet. And she is free.

Her hair is unbound—flowing freely—and the symbol is not subtle. She is no longer held. The guilt of her sins no longer owns her. Her possessions no longer own her either. Unlike the rich young ruler who walks away sorrowful because he has too much, she gives everything away without hesitation. The cost does not matter. The accounting does not matter. She is freed from greed. Freed from pride. Freed even from reputation.

The unbound hair? Women did not uncover their hair in public. Certainly not before men who were not their husbands. But here she is, entirely unguarded. What others think of her no longer concerns her. Only Christ does. She gives everything—and in doing so, she becomes free.

Judas, meanwhile, tightens his chains.

He is enslaved to his passions, enslaved to money, enslaved to the lie that he can manage his own innocence. And within days he will sell the One who could set him free for thirty pieces of silver. He will descend into both deaths: the physical death that follows soon after and the spiritual death of cutting himself off from Christ.

The Gospel reading for the service paints the contrast starkly. “Those who have eyes to see, let them see.” “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” And yet: seeing, they do not see; hearing, they do not hear. Judas hears everything and understands nothing. And he is not alone. The Pharisees, so committed to the idea that Jesus cannot be the Messiah—because He exposes the hollowness of what they have built—are willing to recruit false witnesses. Men of the Law persuade others to break the Law so that they may preserve their certainty.

Seeing, they cannot see. Hearing, they cannot hear.

And the harlot? She sees perfectly. She sees who He is. She sees what He is about to suffer. She sees what she herself needs. And so she weeps tears of compunction and gives them freely. Tears, ointment, hair, dignity—everything she has. The Church places this image before us because these are not ancient decisions. They are daily ones.

Will we pursue our passions, or will we repent? Will we weaponize logic, truth, and argument to get our way? Or, will we give everything to Christ? These choices confront us constantly, often in places far less dramatic than a Pharisee’s table but no less revealing.

And perhaps this matters especially for those who are more given to rational and logical and analytical thinking.

The Church does teach truth. That matters. She teaches us how to be in communion—with God, with our neighbors, with ourselves. But she does not teach only through propositions and arguments. She teaches through hymns, prayers, liturgies, icons, and images—pictures painted with words.

The truth does not merely inform us. It forms us.

Christianity is not just about information. It is not about saying the right things, in the right way, at any time. Don’t weaponize it. Our first thought should not be: What can I say to convince them?

We should spend more time doing this instead: more time weeping tears of compunction like the harlot, more time giving what we have to Christ, more time letting the Church form us as she has formed saints for two thousand years.

These are the choices before us, especially now, as we move toward Pascha.

And the Church, in her mercy, gives us this picture again—clear, piercing, beautiful.

May we have eyes to see it.

(Offered with gratitude to Fr. Thomas, on the day we sing the Hymn of Kassiane—one of the holiest moments of the year for me.)