Category: Sermons

“One thing is needful”

The first last work of Christ in the cross is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” as we had opportunity to consider earlier today. It is a powerful word about the nature of forgiveness. Forgiveness does not ignore sin and judgement. It just doesn’t stop there because it shows us something of the infinite goodness of God even in the face of sin and evil. John, especially on Good Friday, helps us to see this in two ways.

First, there is the powerful story of the woman taken in adultery. She is hauled before Jesus as a way of putting him to the test about the strictures of the law which mandated the stoning of adulterers, a sad reality even in our own day, it seems. “Jesus,” John tells us, “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” It is the only time in the gospels that we are told Jesus wrote something. But we do not know what he wrote. We only know what John says he said. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The accusers “convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last.” There is only Jesus and the woman left. “When he lifted up himself … he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? To which she replied, “No man, Lord.” Jesus said to her ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more’”.

It convicts us at once of our judgements against one another and of the greater goodness of God which is there for us to live in again and again and always. “Go and sin no more”, Jesus says to her. There is more than the folly of our sins. Christ crucified convicts us of our folly but seeks our good. Christ crucified is the book of love written for us to read. Only as convicted in our own conscience can we learn the power of forgiveness. It means new life.

Secondly, there is the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Christ told in all of the Gospels. John shows us the deeper meaning of forgiveness in the way in which he restores Peter. In the third of the resurrection appearances to the disciples, Jesus asks Simon Peter three times, “Simon, son of John, lovest thou me…?” Each time he commands him to feed and tend his lambs and his sheep. Something good is made out of our sin and folly, even out of our ignorance. The tenderest and yet the most convicting word of the cross is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

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“One thing is needful”

Luke’s story about the encounter between Jesus and Mary and Martha in their house in Bethany seems to privilege contemplation and to discount active service. Maundy Thursday would seem to counter and contradict that story. For Maundy Thursday not only marks the beginning of the three great Holy Days of the Passion, the Triduum Sacrum but also sets before us the themes of service and sacrifice and the means of those concepts living in us. It might seem that the better part is the part of service as illustrated in the figure of Martha in total contrast to the idle leisure of Mary, sitting and listening and therefore doing nothing.

We are apt in our world and day to compliment Martha and condemn Mary. She is after all just sitting there, doing nothing, we might say. And yet, the one thing needful on Maundy Thursday is to attend in a thoughtful and prayerful way to the nature and purpose of the various activities in which we are involved. In other words, Mary’s contemplation is key to the redemption of Martha’s activity, to the entire task and business of commending everything into the hands of the Father, the very last word of Christ in Luke’s account of the crucifixion.

Maundy Thursday is an intensely busy day, liturgically and scripturally. There is, well, such a jumble of things all vying for our attention. It is easy to become distracted and to lose sight of the one thing needful. The one thing needful is to attend to the proper forms of our service and sacrifice. That means attending prayerfully in a Marian fashion to what Jesus says and does. It is a day of many ceremonies. It is called Maundy Thursday, the word “Maundy” being the englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning a command, a reference to Christ’s powerful words of commandment to us, words which we hear tonight at the Offertory. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”. Something of the nature of that love is seen in the various forms of service and sacrifice that belongs to Maundy Thursday.

There is the liturgical rite of the washing of the feet. There is the royal ritual of the almsgiving to the poor. There is the institution of the ritual and rite of the Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, all terms referring to Christ’s act in the Upper Room on the very night that he was betrayed which however understood constitute the central act of Christian worship. There is the custom and practice of stripping the altar and watching with Christ in Gethsemane. What, then, in all this busyness of service and sacrifice is the one thing needful? It is to attend to the radical meaning of these events on this evening.

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“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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“One thing is needful”

Jesus’s word in Bethany highlights the necessity of contemplation. Holy Week is about our contemplation of the Passion of Christ as revealed in all four Gospels. Tonight we complete our reading and contemplation of the Passion according to St. Mark. What is the one thing needful here?

Certainly, there is the unfolding of the different forms of human sin and betrayal; Pilate’s betrayal of justice because he was “willing to content the people”; the mockery and abuse of Jesus at the hands of the Praetorian guard; his being crucified between two thieves; his being “railed on” by those who passed by and by the chief priests. It is not a pretty picture. It is altogether about human cruelty and abuse. That is the meaning of Christ as the “Suffering Servant” as the lessons from Isaiah both at Mattins and at Mass make clear and the meaning of Christ as “the righteous man” who is inconvenient to us in our wickedness as the evening lesson from The Wisdom of Solomon shows; Christ is the righteous one who suffers our unrighteousness. And yet, as the lessons from John’s Gospel at Morning and Evening Prayer also make clear, Christ is the vine in whom we live and abide, abiding in his love for the Father. His crucifixion shows us the radical meaning of love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. Jesus goes on to say something quite radical and profound. “You are my friends”, he says, “if you do what I command you”.

His love is proclaimed in the face of our betrayals of that love. What he bears, we too shall have to bear, namely, the hatred of the world. Christian persecution both active and passive is a feature of our witness and increasingly so in our post-Christian world. “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you”. “And all this they will do to you”, he says, “on my account, because they do not know him who sent me”. They do not know the Father and so they do not know the Son. But the Spirit of the Father and the Son will bear witness to the Son and so too we are to be witnesses “because you have been with me from the beginning”. At issue for us is about being with Christ faithfully. It is about abiding in his love even in the face of the enmities and hatreds of the world. And in a way we are given to see two moments in Mark’s account of the Passion here that have to do with what belongs to our contemplation of the Passion as witnesses and participants in the Passion.

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“One thing is needful”

Jesus’ word to Martha about Mary speaks to our reality throughout Holy Week and Easter. It is about attending to the one thing needful. What is that? It is about “sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his word”. In the context of Holy Week it means seeing and hearing the accounts of the Passion and the other Scripture readings that help illumine the meaning of the Passion. Only by sitting and listening, seeing and hearing can we begin to learn things about ourselves and about the high and holy things of God.

It seems to me quite significant that at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout Holy Week, the second lessons are taken from the Gospel according to St. John and largely from what is known as the ‘farewell discourses’ of Jesus where he is explaining to them his going from them, at once into his passion and death but also into his resurrection and ascension, in other words into the hands of the Father, into the community of the Trinity. “I go to prepare a place for you”, Jesus says. What is that place? He is, he says, “the way, the truth and the life” and that is found in his love for the Father. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” Of course, that may not be easy to grasp so Jesus adds “or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Words and deeds that open us out to truth and life. These rich and paradoxical lessons reveal the dynamic of revelation and redemption.

The Resurrection forces into view a deeper reflection and understanding about the events of the Passion. In his going from them in this twofold sense, we are forced to remember and learn more deeply the meaning of our life with God. “In that day, you will know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you.” “The Holy Spirit”, he says, “whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

This is the condition of true peace. The peace that Christ brings is not as the world gives. It has entirely to do with his “going to the Father” which is the deeper meaning of the Passion without which the Resurrection makes no sense even as the Resurrection is essential for understanding the Passion.

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“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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