by CCW | 9 March 2009 10:00
The Rev David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon at St John’s Church, Port Williams[1], for Choral Evensong, Lent II, based on St Mark 14:27-52[2].
Last words are often the most compelling or at least in this case, perhaps, the most perplexing. Who was this young man “with nothing but a linen cloth about his body” and who ends up running away naked? It must seem odd in what is otherwise a most disturbing and deeply touching scene, the scene of Christ’s agony of prayer in Gethsemane, his betrayal by a kiss and his arrest. It is all part of the intensity of the drama of the Passion. But how odd!
And what are we to make of the story of God’s covenant promise to Noah juxtaposed with the story of the building of the Tower of Babel with its last words? “There the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
Throughout these Evensongs in Lent, we are being asked to explore certain foundational stories from The Book of Genesis and Exodus: the story of Noah and the flood, the story of God’s covenant with Noah and the story of the Tower of Babel; the story of Isaac and Rebekah; and the Exodus story of God’s plan to Moses about the deliverance of the people of Israel from Pharoah’s “bitter yoke.” These powerful narratives frame the reading of the entire story of the Passion of Christ according to St. Mark right down to the last word at the Cross, namely, the witness of the Centurion at the Crucifixion that “truly, this man was the Son of God.” Powerful readings, they demand and compel our attention.
And there’s the rub. They require our attention. Ours is the attention deficit culture, the age of endless distraction that reveals a constantly diminishing capacity to attend to any sustained narrative.
There is nothing more radical and more counter-culture than what we are engaged in this evening. Not only is choral evensong one of the great glories of Anglican Christianity, it is the counter to so much of “the culture of scattered minds,” to use Gabor Maté’s suggestive phrase, and is a critical aspect of the Christian witness in our age. The paradox is that our readings confront us with the scattering of the nations through the diversity of languages and the scattering of the fellowship of friends through acts of betrayal and fear. We are, I am afraid, running away naked from all that would enrich us spiritually and intellectually. Lost in the cyber-cave of flitting images, we are unaware of our poverty and nakedness. In this sense, our condition is far odder and far worse than the young man who “ran away naked.” I like to think that he knew not only his physical nakedness but also the nakedness of his soul in his fearful betrayal of Christ. I think that this is none other than St. Mark himself describing his own fear and his own betrayal of Christ.
This odd last word of our reading tonight has all of the hallmarks of St. Mark’s Gospel. Consider, for instance, its original ending. The earliest manuscripts of The Gospel according to St. Mark end at Chapter 16, verse 8, with the women fleeing from the empty tomb “for they were afraid.” This is probably Mark’s last word. The further verses, nine through twenty of that chapter are, of course, part of the canonical and authoritative Gospel as the Church has received it. I am not arguing for the taking of any scissors to the Scriptures whatsoever! That is the way of Marcion, one of the earliest heretics whose novel approach to making sense of the hard readings of Scripture was to get rid of most of the Old Testament and large parts of the New Testament, too. He took to heart the common temptation of students when it comes to the hard work of translating, namely, “when in doubt, leave it out”! Or in his case, what I don’t like, cut! Delete! Empty recycle bin!
The same tendency, however, remains, I fear, in our all-too-selective approach to the Scriptures driven by the optic of accommodation. God has to accommodate himself to us.
He has, of course, already. That is, after all, one of the insights of the great revealed religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are all religions of the Word. They all demand attention to the Word, whether it is the TANAKH (the Hebrew Scriptures), or the Christian Bible containing the Old and the New Testaments, or the Islamic Qu’ran. And while there are profound and important differences about the Word and the understanding of the Word, there is an equally profound point of connection and similarity with respect to the general idea of revelation. Something is made known and communicated about God and about our humanity.
The story of God’s covenant with Noah is the story of the first covenant between God and our humanity. It follows upon God’s clean-up mission of the mess that we make of the world. The flood is more than merely some catastrophic event or events that have exercised a hold on the minds of many ancient cultures. Adam and Kerri can tell you all about Utnapishtim and the flood story in a work far more ancient than Genesis, namely, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The flood and the ensuing covenant in Genesis shows the divine commitment to the created order; it contrasts completely with the uncertainties of the ancient Sumerian culture as well as the uncertainties of contemporary physics about the origins of the universe considered in material terms. The religious wisdom here is one shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims; it is the wisdom and insight that despite human sin, this is fundamentally the world which God has created. It reveals the mind of the maker and only as such can it be understood. The story of the covenant with Noah is the wonderful assertion of that understanding and a wonderful argument for a world which is far more complex than what we realize. This goes a long ways to countering our contemporary fearfulness about, well, everything.
The accompanying story of the Tower of Babel explains the diversity of the languages of the world; our humanity is united only in its pride and hubris, in its sin. The tower is our attempt to reach the heavens on the strength of our presumption and power. That is to betray the limits of the created order and to deny the Creator. These are the same themes signaled in the story of the temptations of Israel in the wilderness and in the dramatic story of the temptations of Christ. There is no wisdom without humility and power without wisdom is destructive folly. Our humanity can only find its unity in God; not in presuming that we are God. These important lessons belong to the great revealed religions of the Word.
Christ’s agony in Gethsemane and his ensuing betrayal and arrest are a further illustration of divine grace and human sin. Sin and love are the great lessons, the “two vast, spacious things” that we most need to know, as George Herbert puts it in his poem called The Agonie.
“Who would know sin … who would know love?” he asks. His answer is to direct us to the story of Christ’s Passion, and to take us to Gethsemane and to Calvary. There we are to contemplate the power of sin and the greater power of God’s grace. God’s covenant with our humanity is greater than human sin. In a way, we are being asked to think about the real meaning of sin in order to grasp the deeper meaning of God’s love. It is precisely this dialectic of sin and love that should compel us to a better stewardship of the created world. It is precisely this dialectic of sin and love that should compel us to a more compassionate and principled toleration of one another. We discover our human dignity in God’s embrace of our humanity. Sometimes the lessons are hard.
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
Herbert has in mind the agony in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Christ’s agony of prayer is about his attention to the will of the Father in the face of human weakness and sin. Yet, it is wanted that we feel something of the agony that sin occasions but, even more, it is wanted that we learn the love of God that sets all loves in order. That means continuing on the journey until we come to the Cross. There we will behold the triumph of love over sin.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
Mark, I suggest, has made the confession of his betrayal of Christ the occasion of our learning the love of Christ. It means that we have to confront the nakedness of our own understanding. It means attending more thoughtfully to the Word.
Fr. David Curry
St. John’s, Port Williams
Choral Evensong, Lent II, March 8th, 2009
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