Be it unto me according to thy word
The readings in Chapel in this last week of classes help to prepare us for the pageant of Word and Song in the Advent/Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols on Sunday and as well for next week’s exams. The lesson from John’s Gospel (Jn. 4. 46-53) in particular highlights an important feature of education. It is the idea of resonance, the sounding forth within us of the words coming towards us whether in Chapel, in the classroom, in the venues of sports or in our social interactions. In the teaching environment, you are taught various things, but what have you learned? What have you taken into yourself and made a part of you? Exams provide some indication.
“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils/…. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music,” Lorenzo says in a famous passage about the power of music in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is very much about what moves within us. In the play, the idea of musical harmony relates to the themes of justice and mercy, to what has resonance within us.
In John’s Gospel, an Official comes to Jesus in Capernaum seeking the healing of his son who is at the point of death. He beseeches Jesus to come down, to make a house call, as it were, to which Jesus replies in a kind of general criticism of human expectations which is really about our attempt to make God subject to us. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,” he says. The Official repeats his request to which Jesus then says, “Go thy way; thy son liveth.” The wonder of the story is captured in John’s simple phrase. “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke unto him and he went his way.” Christ’s word has resonance within him. In going down to his house, his servants meet him to tell him that his son lives. He learns that he was healed in the self-same hour that Jesus said, “Thy son liveth.” Truth has its resonance in us.
The Word of God of itself cannot be constrained to the ordinary limits of time and space as we saw last week both in the pageant of the Ten Commandments, as the universal ethical code of our humanity and as known by natural reason, and in the marvel of the Centurion’s “speak the word only.” At issue is the resonance of God’s Word in us. It is about what we have learned, about instruction alive and living in us. Catechism means instruction by means of question and answer. The word points to the echo effect that is the resonance of the teaching in us, a sounding forth of what has been received and grasped.
Perhaps nowhere does that idea reach its highest expression than in the figure of Mary, whom orthodox Christians call the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Mother of God, the Theotokos or God-bearer, to use the celebrated term that emerges in the thought of Eastern Orthodoxy and which reverberates and resounds in the Christian West. She is the source of Christ’s pure humanity essential to the idea of the Incarnation of God.
The Annunciation story read in the last two Chapel services of the term provides a fitting end to our intellectual journeyings and serves to catapult us into the wonder of the Advent/Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols. The Carol services are nothing less than the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in a dark world; all the more so, when we recall that the service was inaugurated in December 1918, over one hundred years ago, after the terrifying and heart-rending devastations of the First World War. How powerful and moving to hear this pageant of Word and Song signaling hope and peace, grace and redemption just after the “collective madness” of the world, to use Robertson Davies apt phrase about both the First and Second World Wars.
With Mary, the resonance of the Word in her takes on an even greater meaning. It is the resonance of God’s Word in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh. The Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, the beginning of his incarnate life made manifest in his holy birth at Bethlehem in the Christmas mystery. Mary’s ‘yes’ to God belongs to that possibility and its reality. Note that she hears. Note that she questions. Note that she commits. Her words become the resoudning and defining mantra of the Church and of every human soul in relation to the principle of all life and being. It can only be what Mary says. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
In Mary the resonance of God’s Word in us achieves its highest expression. It is about living what we hear and receive, about giving birth to that Word in us because of its resonance in our lives. Such is the joy and the peace of Christmas not only in its Christian sense but in the way it challenges us about the constant coming and eternal presence of God’s Word and Truth with us. Will that Word and Truth have its resonance in us? Such is the hope and prayer of any education worthy of the name signaled for all of us in the pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the mystery and the wonder of the Carol Services.
May God’s Word have its resonance in all of you this Christmastide.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy