Year: 2019

Behold the handmaid of the Lord;  be it unto me according to thy word.

This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.

“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.

With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.

What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.

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“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

I like to think of today’s Gospel as the gospel of despair and one which speaks rather directly to the forms of darkness, death, and despair in the contemporary culture of nihilism. But how can that be good news? Because the nihilisms. the sense of empty nothingness, cynicism, discontent, and despair which pervades our culture and day are named, on the one hand, and overcome, on the other hand. The first is easy to see; the second has become somewhat obscured in the Gospel though it is signaled in the Epistle, “Ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light”. What do I mean by somewhat obscured in the gospel?

The last words that you heard in this morning’s gospel were “and the last state of that man is worse than the first”. This follows after an account of the folly and vanity of evil as being like a house divided against itself, the soul in self-contradiction. We hear of the finger-grace of Christ by which the devils are cast out of our souls. But if we do not attend to that strong teaching then we find ourselves not with God in Christ but against God in Christ and discover that we are in the obscene company of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself”. Evil begets evil when we ignore and deny the goodness of God. As such “the last state of that man is worse than the first”. But that is not actually the real end of the reading. It goes on to say: “And it came to pass as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lift up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck. But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Unfortunately, since 1962 in Canada, the last two verses which provide the necessary counter and overcoming of despair have been left out.

Yet they provide a much more fitting conclusion to the encounter and scene and reveal more fully the counter to our despair which arises from the idolatry of our own autonomy. Thinking ourselves to be light we can only discover our own darkness. Paradoxically, to know the darkness of our hearts presupposes the greater light of God’s goodness. To name the darkness is already to be more than the darkness; the darkness is made manifest by the light.

The contradictions of our culture are great, the forms of folly and despair undeniable. In presupposing our own self-sufficiency we can only discover our failings and our sins. That is actually the good news because only then are we open to hear precisely what God seeks for us. The “devices and desires of our own hearts” can only lead to despair. If we think, as we do, that we are entitled to certain things, if we think that we are owed pleasure and security, as we do, and if we think that we deserve certain things, as we do, then we deceive ourselves. We presume too much. Here in this gospel we confront an image of our self-deception. We call God’s goodness in Christ evil. He casts out devils and we accuse him of being a devil. The contradiction is obvious as Jesus shows. Evil is nothing, a privation of all that exists and is good and true, yet we grant to it a substantiality, a quality of ‘thingness’, which it does not and cannot have. The evil lies in us.

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Commemoration of Benedict & Cranmer: King’s College, Halifax, March 21st, 2019

Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.

Little dogs. “Dogs bear  the burden of revelation”, Colin Dayan notes (With Dogs on the Edge of Life). They are the bridge between man and nature, between man and God yet dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and hardly ever in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and that dogs licked the blood of Jezebel. Hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Jewish Scriptures is to say they are worthless; in short, an insult. And in the New Testament, such as in Revelation and Philippians we are told to “beware of the dogs… the evil doers”. Dogs, it seems, are evil.

Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10) to criticize the watchmen of Israel, the leaders who do not protect and care for their people. A thousand years later, Gregory the Great would turn that phrase completely on its head to speak of dogs that bark against “the foxes and the wolves”, the heretics, in order to protect “the sheep”, the faithful. Preaching as barking! Now there’s a thought!

Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths.

There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol for the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners” but not “to establish any doctrine”, as Cranmer put it in the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. As Homer beautifully puts it,“Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.

In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care, of fidelity and fellowship, and as such something which belongs to the formative nature of Benedictine monasticism which shaped Europe and beyond. And then there is this gospel story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.

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