Author: CCW

“One thing is needful”

And so it all begins. Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday. It begins with the cries of “Hosanna”. Where does it end? With the cries of “Crucify”? Yes and No. In a way, what we do today begins a pageant which only ends in Easter; ends and never ends with the greater cries of “Alleluia” but only through the agony of the crucifixion and on this day with our cries of “Let him be crucified”. The pageant of Holy Week concentrates the whole journey of the soul to God. Holy Week is really everything.

Have you ever thought or ever not thought that there is something terribly wrong about the world, politically and socially in which we live? I hear it all the time. Have you perhaps in a moment of reflection also wondered whether there isn’t something terribly wrong with you? Both reflections speak to the deeper meaning of human redemption wonderfully displayed in the rich fullness of Holy Week.

It is busy week, a week of spiritual intensity, of agony and ecstasy. And yet, as Jesus says to Martha in the house of Mary and Martha that is one of the scenes of Bethany, the place of the preparation for the Passion, “one thing is needful”. What is that one thing? It is the action of Mary, “sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to his word,” as Luke describes it. Holy Week is less about the busyness of Martha, “anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” and more about Mary who “hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,” Jesus says. The contemplation of Mary is the one thing needful. That and that alone redeems the busyness of Martha and the busyness of Holy Week for us. Without that good part, there is no real participation in the Passion which is the whole point of Holy Week.

For we are in the pageant of the Passion and in ways that will trouble us if we are properly attentive to what we see and hear. “Garde e escolta”. “Look and listen”, Virgil tells Dante in the garden at the top of Mount Purgatory. Look and listen to the pageant of revelation and redemption that unfolds before us. Only so, Dante suggests, can we be made “pure and prepared to leap up into the stars” of Paradise. Holy Week, beginning with the contrasts and contradictions of our souls presented to us on Palm Sunday, shows us what the poet, George Herbert, says are the “two vast spacious things” that few measure and ponder. What are those two vast spacious things? “Sin and love,” he says. To learn both means attending to the events of the Passion, to the agony in Gethsemane and to the agony of the Cross.

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This is the fourth of four Lenten addresses on the theme Contemplation, Activity and Resurrection in the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”
The Anointing: Love in Repentance and Mercy

Bethany is the place of the preparation for the Passion of Christ. The cross, in some sense, is already present at Bethany.

The Passion is present in the anointing of Christ. The Passion appears in all of the Gospels but appropriately with some differences in emphasis and detail. Yet even the differences serve to highlight the essential purpose of the anointing which is to point us to the Passion. Here is the anointing of the King who will reign from the cross wearing a crown of thorns. Here is the anointing of the Lord who forgives all our sins upon the cross in his love for us in his love for the Father. Here is the anointing of the Lord who bears all our sins even unto the abyss of death and the grave of burial.

The anointing presents the Passion in the theme of love in repentance and mercy. It shows our love for God and God’s love for us. Luke tells of a woman who was a sinner. She is identified as such. We are all sinners but we are not all willing to be identified as such. She comes into the house where Jesus was at table. She “brought an alabaster flask of ointment and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment”(Luke 7. 37,38). It is an extraordinary scene of great intensity.

This was not at Bethany in Luke’s account, yet it shares something of the same intensity of the passion anticipated in the anointing at Bethany in John’s Gospel. There “Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment” (John 12.3). The one is an act of love in repentance; the other an act of love in sympathy with his approaching passion. The one seeks repentance in love. The other attends in loving devotion to the meaning of repentance in the death of Christ. There is repentance and mercy.

Repentance is an act of love born out of the sense of the mercy of God. It proceeds from a sense of God’s goodness. You can’t seek forgiveness unless you acknowledge your sins. You can’t acknowledge your sins unless you acknowledge the truth of the goodness of God against which you have sinned. To confess one’s sins is to confess God. You acknowledge your end and purpose in him. The very goodness of God prompts us to confess. “The goodness of God leadeth to repentance”.

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This is the third of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The first is posted here and the second here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.

Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12^th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)

Address # 3

Rembrandt’s painting is called The Return of the Prodigal Son. Henri Nouwen’s book bears the same title, The Return of the Prodigal Son, but provides as a subtitle, “A Story of Homecoming”. The missing indefinite or definite article before homecoming is telling. Why? Because the parable is very explicit. “A certain man had two sons.” There is more than one leaving and therefore the possibility of more than one homecoming. In some sense the parable is universal; it is about the homecoming of our humanity which is, in some sense, too, about our abiding in the compassionate love of the Father as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Lenten sermons on Qui habitat, (Psalm 91, Psalm 90 in the Vulgate) suggest. “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide under the protection of the God of heaven.”

Two sons. We forget that the dynamic of the story is not just with respect to the younger son but also includes the elder son. Such is the subtlety and complexity of the parable, the commentary tradition upon it, and Rembrandt’s painting, itself a kind of commentary. And in very intriguing ways.

Rembrandt’s painting focuses, to be sure, on the return of the prodigal son but that is not the actual center of the painting. The iconic scene of the son’s embrace by the Father is off-center, to the left in the painting, actually. To the right is the elder son, his face illumined, like the scene of the embrace of Father and younger son, but the center of the painting is the space between the Father’s embrace of the younger son, and the stern and critical gaze, it is fair to say, of the elder son. Unlike the prodigal son, ironically, the face of the elder son and brother is visible.

The parable is really the parable of two lost sons as Nouwen suggests. In this he is hardly unique. Among the more intriguing interpretations of the parable are those that deal with the elder son. It seems that you don’t have to go away to be lost. The distance between the Father’s embrace of the younger son and the elder brother’s gaze is most telling.

As a parable of the lost and the found, a parable of human redemption, it has to deal with the more complex and less explicit dynamics of the elder son, too. He is the one who stayed, it seems, the one who was a faithful son, it seems, the one who never envisioned being freed of the Father at all, it seems, altogether unlike the younger son. And yet, he, too, is a lost son and in ways that are almost more disturbing and more disquieting. The commentary tradition finds ways to consider the elder son in relation to the younger son and reflects, although often rather obliquely, in my view, on the rich seam of biblical narrative that deals precisely with sibling rivalry. Nothing could be more a salient feature of the Pentateuch and beyond. What is The Book of Genesis but a recurring refrain of sibling rivalry and tension, of brother against brother? Cain and Abel, Abram and Laban, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers? “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says to Cain. The blood of brothers, a theme recently explored by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Not in God’s Name.

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This is the second of three addresses that Fr. David Curry presented at the 2016 Lenten Quiet Day on 12 March 2016. The first is posted here and the third here. Audio files will be posted in the next day or two.

Into the Hands of the Father
The Prodigal Son: Rembrandt’s Painting and Henri Nouwen’s Reflections
Lenten Quiet Day sponsored by the PBSC NS/PEI
Saturday, March 12^th, 2016
(Fr. David Curry)

Address # 2

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew’s familiar words illumine the nature of the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the way of the cross, the way of self-denial and sacrifice, the way that belongs to all of the many forms of Christian witness. One of the martyrs of the Christian Church, St. Perpetua, who died in the third century, is reported to have said in the face of her impending death that “another lives in me.” It captures at once the meaning of Christian witness and life. The words of Matthew’s Gospel and Perpetua’s martyrdom serve, perhaps, as a kind of commentary upon the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting is itself a kind of commentary on the parable and its significance with respect to the over-arching themes of repentance and reconciliation, themes which are specific as well to the season of Lent. Self-denial and suffering are features of Lent that draw us into the mystery of Christ’s passion, into the mystery of human redemption accomplished through the reconciliation between God and Man in Jesus Christ. The parable in the rich commentary tradition speaks to those themes explicitly.

We do not read the Scriptures in a vacuum. We read them as belonging to an interpretative community. The Parable of the Prodigal Son has been read liturgically at certain times of the Christian year in the different ecclesiastical traditions of the wider Church. It is read in our Canadian Anglican tradition at Morning Prayer in Year One of the two-year cycle of Office readings on The Second Sunday in Lent, for instance. In the traditions of the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, there is the Sunday of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the pre-Lenten season which gives high prominence to this parable as preparing us for Great Lent.

The consequence is that there is a rich commentary tradition among what are commonly called the Fathers of the Church, meaning the Patristic period, comprising roughly the first six centuries of the Christian faith. Archbishop Chrysostomos, a contemporary Orthodox archbishop, notes that Henri Nouwen’s meditation on the Prodigal Son by way of Rembrandt’s painting reflects the patristic understanding of the parable even if there are no explicit references to the commentary tradition of the Fathers in Nouwen’s book. Our endeavor will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

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