Category: Sermons

“One thing is needful”

Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia! The one thing needful is the proclamation of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, “early when it was yet dark,” John tells us. She “seeth the stone taken away.” And so it begins. She runs to tell the others, apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, as the Fathers put it. She says “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple” that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” He is not there. Who has taken him? Who are ‘they’ that “have taken [him] away”? Confronting something that counters her expectation, she suspects a conspiracy, it seems. Don’t we all? Simon Peter and “that other disciple” run and see. They, too, find only an empty tomb. And so it continues. It is the Resurrection. An intriguing and perhaps interesting idea?

Perhaps we feel the same way that the British travel writer, Alexander Kinglake, felt about seeing churches in England and wanting to inscribe upon their lintels the caveat, “interesting, if true.” Is that where we are with the Resurrection, “interesting, if true”?

If so, why are we here? Because the idea of the Resurrection has a strong hold on us, the hold of truth. It has changed the world, quite literally, one would have to say, and that, at least, is true historically speaking from the standpoint of social, political and cultural developments. The rise and spread of Christianity, its struggles and contests, first, with Jewish and ancient pagan culture, Greek and Roman, then, its conflicts and disputes with Islam, as well as its internal debates and arguments between east and west, Greek and Latin, Catholic and Protestant, and, then, with the rise of modernity and even modern science with all of its ambiguities and uncertainties that comprise our post-modern experience; how could one possibly think to explain any of that story apart from the Resurrection? It is the central defining truth of the Christian Faith, whether one believes it or not. That much can and must be said and cannot be gainsaid whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Christian or atheist in terms of our cultural history. We are here because we cannot not think it, even if our world and culture has forgotten and rejected it.

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“One thing is needful”

We do not just meet at the tomb of Christ on Holy Saturday to mourn and honour his death and the meaning of human redemption. We also meet expectantly, waiting upon God and his gracious acts. In a way, it is the radical meaning of our lives in faith. It is always about waiting upon God and finding the truth of our being and doing in him. Nowhere, perhaps, is that more joyously and wondrously seen than at the great Vigil of Easter.

The mystery of Easter is the triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness, of grace over sin. God’s great second act is the Resurrection, a second creation that overcomes the waywardness of our sins. Out of sin and evil, God creates a greater good. It is Christ’s Resurrection, the fruit of his Passion. It changes everything. The one thing needful is to rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection.

The great Paschal Praeconium exults in the wonder of the Resurrection. An ancient hymn and prayer, probably going back to the fifth century, sometimes attributed to Augustine, sometimes to Ambrose, it rejoices in the triumph of God’s grace and goodness over all sin and evil. It is sung in the light of the Easter Candle, itself symbolic of the Resurrection of Christ and of his life and light in us. The Paschal Praeconium is the great Easter Proclamation. What is that proclamation? “Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!” “The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia, Alleluia!” What does it mean? Joy, an unsurpassing joy borne out of our griefs and sorrows, not just for what we have suffered but for what we do and have done. We celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death whereby we are united to God. “O night, wherein heaven and earth are joined, and mankind partaketh with the Godhead”. The love that creates now recreates. Nothing can hold back the power of the goodness of God who acts out of his own love and gathers all things into his love.

Creation and Redemption are closely joined. We forget that at our peril. And so the prophecies of the Vigil remind us of the significant moments from the story of creation through the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage to the Law and the prophets that contribute to our understanding of Christ’s Passion and that compel us to contemplate the wonder of his Resurrection. Nothing signals more profoundly the true nature of our humanity. We are more than our sins and our sufferings, more than our dying and our deaths. We are made for God. Thus the Resurrection is the greatest possible affirmation of human personality and individuality, the greatest possible affirmation of our souls and bodies as belonging to our spiritual identity in Christ. We are more though not less than our physical bodies. Our whole being finds its truth in Christ and his Resurrection.

That is why the Vigil entails the renewal of our baptismal vows. We are reminded of our essential spiritual identity in Christ which is realised through his Death and Resurrection and through our being incorporated into his Death and Resurrection. Only so can we be in Christ and Christ in us. We live not for ourselves but for Christ and for Christ in one another. It is ultimately what we celebrate in the great Mass of Easter. Christ, we learn from Mary in Bethany, is the one thing needful. To attend to his grace for us in our deepest joy.

“One thing is needful”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2016

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“One thing is needful”

There is a certain quality of peace and quiet about Holy Saturday. All of the fuss and bother, all of the rage and spite, all of the agony and pain of the preceding days is past and gone. Christ is dead and buried. We meet at the tomb of Christ. Why? What is the one thing needful? To contemplate the meaning of Christ’s death.

The point is that his death and therefore all deaths are not meaningless. His suffering on the cross and therefore our sufferings too are not meaningless. Something has been accomplished. “It is finished”, he says, in John’s Gospel before “bow[ing] his head and [giving] up his spirit”. What has been accomplished? What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man. All that belongs to human redemption.

What does that mean? It means that there is something more than the reality of our separation from God that accounts for suffering and death. God has done something in and through the humanity of Christ. There is atonement. The scriptures constantly call our attention to the idea of Christ dying for us. And through the eyes of John our attention is constantly drawn to his dying for us as belonging to his living for the Father. “I have come to do the will of him who sent me”. What is that will? To achieve our peace. To overcome our sin. To open us out to more than death.

The idea of reconciliation requires the recognition of separation. Sin and suffering, sin and death are all interconnected. We suffer as a result of our own sins. We suffer because of the sins of others. We suffer because it is the condition of our humanity. In the humanity of Christ, God suffers for us to redeem us. What is that redemption? The revelation of the absolute goodness of God which is far greater than all and any form of evil. Holy Week reveals to us the absolute goodness of God which seeks our good out of the very nature of the divine goodness itself. What Holy Saturday shows us is the fullest extent of the divine will to be reconciled with his sinful creation.

As with everything about Holy Week, we are meant to learn this. The Passion of Christ is about his sufferings for us. In some sense, his sufferings are our sufferings as a result of our separation from the truth and goodness of God. All sin is about that separation. The cross is the overcoming of it. It establishes a kind of peace and harmony, a restoration of Paradise, if you will. Something of its fuller meaning is signalled in the readings at Morning Prayer that illumine the Epistle and Gospel for Holy Saturday. Together they recall us to the creedal doctrine of the Descent into Hell.

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“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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