Christ Church

Click here to listen to audio file of Service of Matins & Ante Communion for the Fourth Sunday after Easter.

“Behold, I make a covenant”

The lesson from Exodus recalls us to the Covenant that God makes with our humanity even in the midst of “a stiff-necked people”. It provides the ground for the marvel and wonder that is the further extension of that Covenant in the Resurrection. In the parade of readings today we see the wonder of God as essential life and what that means for us in our lives.

It is a challenge, of course, to read and think these readings particularly given the tendencies of a culture of many who are largely ‘unreaders’. If nothing else during the ups and downs of the pandemic, however, we might just learn to sit and think. ‘Don’t just do something, sit and think’ could be the most important lesson for us. It is ancient wisdom that contemplation is really the highest activity of our humanity. We need to ponder the wisdom that is more than knowledge and information and certainly more than the idolatry of the practical which so often consumes and destroys us. When ‘science’ becomes technology, science as knowledge is diminished and lost. Even more the philosophical wisdom that it presupposes is lost to view.

This is just to suggest that pondering these readings speaks profoundly to our current culture. It is, to use Jesus’ saying to Martha, the one thing necessary, unum necessarium, the better part that Mary has chosen. The Mary of the Martha and Mary story complements the Mary who is the mother of God, the Mary who sets the agenda and vocation of our humanity: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That captures in nutsche, in a nutshell, the underlying logic of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer in the patterns of reading that belong and have developed within that tradition.

So what do we see in the readings at Matins and Ante-Communion on the Fourth Sunday after Easter? The reading from Exodus presents the idea of the Covenant between God and Man written on two tablets of stone a second time. Why the second time? We are meant to recall our disobedience and betrayal of the Covenant of the Ten Commandments after they were initially given to us through Moses. That is the story of the golden calf, the story of our refusal to contemplate what is made known by God for our humanity. It led to Moses breaking the tablets of the Law because of our idolatry. We deny the universality and truth of the Law by turning to our immediate interests and concerns. The image of that betrayal is quite revealing. We make images of cows as the symbol of deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Why cows? Because they pulled the carts of the Israelites in the Exodus from Egypt. But a golden calf is simply a dead cow. This idolatry ignores and denies the active will of God moving in us that belongs to the deeper truth of the Exodus and which ultimately takes expression in the Ten Commandments; in short, the Covenant between God and man.

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“For they were afraid”

The Easter stories all show the overcoming of fear and uncertainty through the encounter with Christ’s Resurrection. Sorrow is transformed into joy. “Be not afraid” is the message of Easter in the second Gospel provided on Easter Day read from St. Mark (Mk. 16.1-8, BCP, p. 185). We have seen in various ways the process of dawning awareness in the disciples about the essential life of God that is greater than sin and evil, greater than darkness and death, whether it is Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning sorrow to the empty tomb or the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors as in a tomb or in the arresting and dynamic image of Christ the Good Shepherd. His laying down his life for the sheep is precisely about his going “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us, with us, and in us such that we need not fear “for thou art with me.” On the Third Sunday after Easter, we see the new birth of the Resurrection in us by way of the image of child-birth, the idea of sorrow and pain transformed into joy and delight.

Thus there is something rather fitting about the conjunction of the Feast of St. Mark with the Third Sunday after Easter today. Mark is the Easter saint par excellence. His feast day always falls within Eastertide. The Easter Gospel from Mark helps to explain today’s Gospel and Feast. “For they were afraid” complements “be ye not troubled.”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel According to St. Mark. Why? Because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel that we possess end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the Resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical Gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that those twelve verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his Gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

And yet, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is a powerful and poignant ending, and serves to highlight the doctrinal point about the Resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense. The Resurrection has captured the imaginations of the Gospel writers, such as St. Mark, and has compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels themselves could never have been written.

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