Day: March 23, 2016

“One thing is needful”

Only Luke tells us about the scene in Bethany with Jesus and Martha and Mary. It is a powerful New Testament image which becomes an integral part of the interplay between activity and contemplation in the Christian understanding. It looks back to Old Testament stories such as Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob, who become symbols of the active and the contemplative life respectively. It looks back to the philosophical reflections of Plato and Aristotle about what constitutes the good life. Contemplation is the highest good. Why? Because in some sense we participate in the absolute goodness of God and honour that as absolute. We don’t try to use God for our ends and purposes or measure God according of our ends and purposes.

The paradox is that such an outlook alone redeems our activities. Why? Because they, too, are gathered into the goodness of God and become the forms of our participation in the life of God. Our activities are given an end with God. One thing is needful and that is about our life with God.

The Passion of Christ shows us our actions in disarray and disorder precisely because what has been ignored or denied is the orientation and direction of our actions to God. “Mary has chosen the good portion”, Jesus says which is not to say that the actions of Martha are simply worthless or bad; the problem lies in the attitude or approach. She is “anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, he says. Therein lies the problem. She lacks the focus of Mary who has chosen that good portion of “sitting and listening to the words of Jesus”. Only so can our activities begin to be part of his life in us. Through Mary, through the one thing needful, our actions and activities have purpose and meaning. Without Mary, without the one thing needful, everything is thrown into disarray and disorder.

Holy Week would have us contemplate the different forms of that disorder and disarray that belongs to us in our souls and in our communities. We read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week from the Passion according to St. Luke. The beginning of his Passion on the Wednesday of Holy Week is illumined by the readings from Numbers and Leviticus and by the sixteenth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel. Wednesday in Holy Week is also marked by the anticipatory service of Tenebrae, meaning shadows or darkness in which we pray the office of the Mattins of Maundy Thursday with the reading from Lamentations, where the lonely desolation of Jerusalem, abandoned and betrayed is now associated with Christ. Her words, the words of Jerusalem in disarray, will become the words of the crucified to us on Good Friday.

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“One thing is needful”

Wednesday in Holy Week marks the beginning of the reading of the Passion according to St. Luke. Once again, the story of Jesus’s encounter with Martha and Mary in Bethany, a story which Luke alone tells, contributes to our understanding of his account of the Passion. So too, do the readings at the Offices on this day, readings from Numbers and Leviticus and, of course, from John’s Gospel.

The lesson from Numbers is about the bronze serpent raised up by Moses at God’s command. The people of Israel, fractious and discontent in the wilderness, complain against God and Moses for what God has provided them. As punishment for their kevetching, they were afflicted with fiery serpents. They repent in a kind of way and ask Moses to intercede for them to God to save them from this death and affliction. The cure lies in looking upon their sin made objective before them in the form of the bronze serpent.

Serpents are an intriguing biblical image that takes us back to the story of the Fall, to the beguiling serpent of human reason turned against itself. “Did not God say?”, the serpent is imaged as asking, insinuating a half-truth for what we already know to be the whole truth even if we do know that we know. That ambiguity has troubled generations of generations of thinkers throughout all ages. We only come to know the truth as truth through our separation from it. The serpent is the image of our human reason as turned against itself and in so doing becoming aware, becoming self-conscious. It comes with a cost, of course. Paradise is lost and the serpent becomes, as John Donne puts it, “the creeping serpent” that crawls upon its belly in the dust. So too does our reason unless we learn to look up. Here in Numbers we see the nature of redemption at work through the transformation of images. The serpent is raised up so that whoever looks upon it is healed. John in his Gospel has Christ identify himself with this image directly. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life”.

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