“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”
“No-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”. This is one of the earliest credal statements from within the Scriptures themselves. It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures – out of such words as these – and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. And such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts, … I would not have you ignorant”, says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts…” and he goes on to list some of them. But they are gifts which arise out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”.
The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am”, as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I am who I am” – is opened to view and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.
This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.
Something of this underlies the strong scene in today’s Gospel with St. Luke’s account of Christ’s cleansing the temple. What is it about really, except a recalling of the true purpose of the Temple, a reminder to us of the true purpose of this holy place? This is to be the place where we attend to the high things of God, to the things which Jesus wants us to know. This is to be a place of teaching. This is to be a place of our abiding in the love of God revealed and proclaimed.
What stands in the way is our preoccupation with our own immediate, economic, material and sensual concerns, our wills as over and against God’s will. There is the constant temptation and tendency to want to use the things of God and the places of God for ourselves, for our own ends and purposes, for the projects of our own devisings. We forget that we have an end in God and that such things must fall under the rule of his will and purpose without which they are nothing and nothing worth. When we forget that, then our projects are deadly and destructive “because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation”. We so easily become the thieves of God’s grace – forgetful of the gifts and the giver.
There are, of course, our fears and worries about, well everything and nothing. It is a fearful and anxious age, I think, perhaps because we look for certainties where they certainly can’t be found, namely, in the affairs of our world and day.
But what are these really about? They are about our expectations, our hopes. There is something positive even in our fears and worries. What are we really looking for? What are we hoping for? Our hopes belong to Christian hope, to the hope of heaven which gives holy shape to our desires. Hope is the antidote to despair and despair is the denial of desire.
Despair is one of the great and debilitating diseases of modernity for which there is no remedy apart from hope. Our Christian hope looks to what God wants for us and that is always something more and something better than what we can either desire or deserve. Yet God wants us to want what he wants for us. He wants us, as it were, “to ask [for] such things as shall please [him]”, as today’s Collect puts it. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. It is the meaning and the struggle of our lives in faith. It belongs to the purpose of this holy place, to awaken us to a delight in God, to a critical awareness of his presence in our lives.
Now at this point, you may be wondering what does all this have to do with the text, “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart”? It is simply this. On August 15th, 1998 I officially began my ministry among you. August 16th was the first time I preached in this pulpit. Near the front of the Prayer Book you will find a calendar for each month with a number of days and dates that span the centuries from the New Testament days to the twentieth century. It presents really a kind of pageant of Christian faith. It reminds us of the continuum of the faith. We are surrounded by just such a wonderful cloud of witnesses. And sometimes there is reference to some aspect or other of the life of Christ and, in relation to Christ, reference to Mary. On page xi, you will find the month of August and for the fifteenth day, you will find “The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary”. No year is given. By all accounts, it must seem a curious phrase. What does it mean?
It refers to the death of Mary but in the context of our Christian hope in the resurrection. It is a euphemism, a biblical way of speaking about death, about our resting in Jesus. The Falling Asleep, The Dormition or The Assumption are all various titles for the Church’s celebration of Mary’s death. I might add that, in Acadian times, this side of the Pisiquid, what we now call the Avon River, was known as La Paroisse de l’Assomption, even as Falmouth was La Paroisse de Sainte Famille.
The Scriptures, of course, tell us nothing about the death of Mary per se but this feast is derived from what the Scriptures teach us about Mary and about our hope. What is redemption but the taking up of all things into God? We have an end in God and that hope is understood to be realised in Mary, that where Christ is, there she is, even as Christ has prayed for us, “that where I am, there ye may be also.” He comes to us through her and so we to him through her. That hope is not just “pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by.” It is also here and now. It shapes our lives.
Mary, too, is the temple of God, the “habitaculum dei,” the dwelling place of God where “immensity [is] cloyster’d in thy dear womb” (John Donne) and she reminds us of the quality of our being with Christ through waiting upon the words of Christ. The Church is profoundly Marian in keeping the words of Christ and pondering them, letting their weight sink into us and take shape within us.
And so the feast together with today’s propers recalls us to our hope and our purpose, to the quality of our being together in the body of Christ and in this holy place to his glory and in the hope of heaven. With Mary we learn to ponder the words that “no-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”, the same Spirit which overshadowed her who gave birth to God with us. These are things about which we should not be ignorant.
“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor,
August 16th, 2009
8:00am