Homily from Pre-Sanctified Liturgy on Holy Wednesday morning, 7533/2025 from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA.

The Gospel for Holy Wednesday: Matthew 26:6-16:

At the time, when Jesus was in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, there came unto Him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on His head as He sat at meat. But when His disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor.’ When Jesus perceived this, He said unto them, ‘Why trouble ye the woman? For she hath wrought a good work upon Me. For ye have the poor always with you, but Me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on My body, she did it for My burial. Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, which this woman hath done, be told as a memorial of her.’ Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests and said unto them, ‘What will ye give me if I will deliver Him unto you?’ And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.

+++

Holy Wednesday bids us remember the devotion of the sinful woman who anointed Jesus Christ prophetically with myrrh unto his burial while Judas betrayed him for money. This is why we fast on Wednesdays almost every week yearlong. The Apostle betrayed our Lord while the harlot rightly commemorated Him. She is memorialized always in the Gospel while Judas is anathematized rightly. Lord have mercy!

The Apostle Paul said the love of money is the root of all evil. Why? Because it focuses worldiness, the desire for a sustenance and sustainability apart from God, centered around our own will, self-assertion rather than self-emptying in Christ. Money is a product of the sons of Cain in their cities, and subsequently the tower of Babel and Babylon. Note that the Whore of Babylon in Revelation is driven by greed and gluttony, but the harlot who anointed Jesus was devotedly self-emptying herself in Him.

Holy Wednesday evening (Matins for Holy Thursday) became associated in our tradition with the washing of feet by the Bishop for this reason. For our Church leaders are not to follow Judas the lover of money, the fallen Apostle replicating Satan’s fall from heaven, but rather the humble woman who brought the best myrrh to her devotion for God, unlike Cain who did not bring the best with humble devotion, and like Judas ended complicit in murder and desiring an escape from a cursed life.

When we look at our money in the U.S. we can see Masonic symbols and, ironically, “In God we trust” on it. But Jesus said “render unto Ceasar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God what is of God.” Today society tries to mix the two in preparation for the reign of Anti-Christ.

The Orthodox writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned us that careerism in the West and the Soviet prison system shared one soul-defiling principle: The idea of surviving at any cost. This is why the love of money is so spiritually dangerous and why we are warned against it on Holy Wednesday in relation to Judas. The Orthodox writer Dostoevsky, an influence on Solzhenitsyn, said also that he began to live when he went to prison and became separated from careerism and learned Christian asceticism. Years later, when Dostoevsky visited London, at that time the largest city in the world, the head of a great empire, and supposed city of the future embodying the industrial revolution, he was shocked to find this supposedly great center of progress to be home at night to hordes of young often under-age prostitutes.

This showed how modern life tries to reduce everything to transactional exchange for a price, he wrote. Brothers and sisters, this continues today in all aspects of our lives and society, and even Route 15 right near us is known as a human-trafficking corridor.

The love of money runs deep. It is rooted in the Fall of Adam and Eve but also in modern times comes from the rejection of God that we see in the deluded belief in Darwinist evolution with its false ideas of self-centered progress, survival, and utopia. Carnivority came from the Fall and it is antidoted only by the Blood of the Lamb.

But today’s Gospel and Holy Wednesday, and our remembrance of it in Wednesday fasting, shows us the way.

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, the Life, as He told us. The harlot saw this and anointed Him with myrrh, toward His burial for us. But He rose again on the third day.

The poor you will always have with you, He taught. But He also taught that blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall see God. And that in helping the poor we are doing kindness to Him our God.

Let us with tears wipe His feet with our hair too, giving the finest for His burial this Holy Week, and rejecting the selfish sale of Judas.

For in the end, as Jesus also put it, where your treasure is, there will be your heart be also also.

The Wise Thief stole Paradise not from love of money, but for the love of Jesus Christ. Let us also, leaving behind love of money and false passions of self-assertion, say always with the Wise Thief, Remember me O Lord in Thy Kingdom. That is the golden standard of our Lord’s Kingdom, by which He gives us grace to love others more than ourselves, in Him. For His memory of us drives away all evil memories and pride and love of money that bedevil, as we immerse ourselves in how He remember us, for He is good and the lover of mankind, as Holy Week shows us.

Glory to God for all things!