A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
Find today’s readings here.
“He said to them,
‘Have you never read what David did
when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?
How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest
and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat,
and shared it with his companions?’
Then he said to them,
‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’”
At first glance, this selection from the Gospel of Mark might seem discordant with the Memorial of St. Agnes of Rome, which the church celebrates today. Born into a noble Roman family and raised as a Christian during the persecutions of the emperor Diocletian, Agnes was martyred at the age of thirteen for refusing, in the name of Christian purity, to accept a suitor. She is often venerated as an exemplar of Christian virginity and moral immaculacy, a model of unwavering obedience to God’s law.
But then, in the Gospel passage from Mark, we see Jesus taking a rather rebellious tack in response to the Pharisees, who rebuke his disciples for gathering grain on the Sabbath: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath,” he says. Jesus pushes back against the Pharisees’ fundamentalist dogma, elevating the moral imperative to serve the needy over simply “following the rules.” Far better to feed the hungry and contravene the letter of religious law than to scrupulously adhere to it while hardening one’s heart to people in need. Is this in contradiction with the lesson of Agnes’s martyrdom?
Not in the least.
While the church’s emphasis on Agnes’s steadfast resolve to maintain her purity (with a particular focus on purity in a sexual sense) might strike some readers as rather old-fashioned, her resistance to brutal external pressure to deny God is in fact of a piece with Jesus’ injunction in the Gospel.
In both Agnes’s story and this passage from Mark, the church is reminding us to keep our hearts trained on the north star of our faith: Christ, and Christlike love. In each case—Agnes resisting Roman society’s pressure to abjure her faith and take a suitor on the one hand, David breaking Abiathar’s rules and sharing bread with his hungry companions on the other—we are bidden to obey a moral law of love, over and against prevailing social conventions that contradict it. Agnes’s obedience was to a law higher than that of the emperor; Jesus’ command, by the same token, was to follow a law higher than that of the Pharisees.
We can certainly learn from Agnes’s example in refusing to cede an inch of her values to appease a malevolent earthly power. Agnes stayed true to her God-given sense of right and wrong even unto death, unmoved by the dominant culture’s coercion. Jesus asks us to do the same, and to defy any authorities that seek to turn us away from the path of Christlike love—even when those authorities cloak themselves in religious garments. Some authority figures and strains of culture that claim to act in God’s name emulate the harsh cruelty of the Roman Empire instead, persecuting the vulnerable and closing their ears to the cry of the poor. Will we have the strength and courage of Agnes to stand up to them?
