Christ Church

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Feast of the Annunciation of Mary, more often than not, falls within the Lenten season. This year it coincides with Good Friday which it did as well in 1608 occasioning a marvelous poem by John Donne about that conjunction of themes: Christ’s coming to us through Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God and Christ’s going from us in his death at Calvary, “Th’ Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/(As in plaine Maps, the furthest West is East)/ Of the ‘Angels Ave,’ and Consummatum Est.”

Mary plays an altogether crucial role in the divine project for the renovation of our humanity, wounded and broken by sin, restored and renewed by grace. She is not only the Mother of God, the theotokos, as orthodox Christianity insists, the one through whom the Son of God becomes the Son of Man, she is also the one who “mothers each new grace” in us, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. She holds “high motherhood/towards all our ghostly good/ And plays in grace her part/About man’s beating heart.” Such words speak to our endeavours to ponder the mystery of Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. It is the Story of Homecoming, the homecoming which speaks to all our souls. At the heart of all homecomings is the love of the Father.

Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem, it means to ponder as well the mystery of the Mother of God, the one who embodies the very truth of our humanity considered simply in itself in relation to our life with God. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” Mary says. We behold her who says, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

The Father’s love embraces the returning son of repentance as well, as we shall see, the resentful son of duty. The Father’s love calls them both back to home. Yet, there can be no home without the Mother, too, I would suggest.

The preoccupations about gender have created a whole lot of sturm und drang for contemporary Christianity, especially the way the dignity of our humanity, as understood in the pageant of human redemption, has become dominated by the human rights agenda. Because the parable seems to be about a father and two sons, it might seem that mothers and daughters and women in general are somehow left out of the picture. This misses the point and overburdens the reading of Scripture with a contemporary concern which gets in the way of the profounder meaning and teaching of the parable which speaks intentionally to the whole of our humanity. The parable is not about rights and privileges so much as it is about the deeper justice of God which is love.

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“Lazarus, come out”

Passion Sunday marks the beginning of what I like to call deep Lent in reference to an older term, Passiontide, where already there begins to be a more intense focus on the meaning and purpose of Christ’s Passion. The Cross is veiled in Passiontide. Why? Because we see, as it were, but in “a glass darkly”. We are like the mother of Zebedee’s sons. We think that we know what we want but in truth we don’t. We enter into the Passion of Christ so that we may be called out of our ignorance and folly and into what God seeks for us, the redemption of our humanity in and through the Passion of Christ. Our Lenten meditations this year have been on the Scenes of Bethany, looking at the significance of Bethany in the pageant of Lent and now especially in terms of the Passion of Christ.

We go up to Jerusalem by way of Bethany. Luke names it as the place of departure for Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and the place of our Lord’s Ascension; the place, in fact, of the comings and goings of our salvation. Bethany presents, as well, the very character of our Christian lives in the forms of loving attention to God’s Word and Son and loving service in the Body of Christ. The work of Martha’s hands finds its true meaning in the collectedness of Mary’s heart.

John tells us that Bethany is the village of Mary and Martha; that Bethany is where Christ raised their brother Lazarus from the dead; and that Bethany is where Mary anointed Christ’s feet with the oil for his burying. The Passion and the Death of Christ, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ, and our life together in Christ are purposefully and profoundly signified in the scenes of Bethany. In short, Bethany plays the fugue of our salvation in the interplay of action and contemplation, in the counterpoint of Passion and Resurrection, the cross and the glory.

Bethany, quite simply, is the place of the preparation for the Passion. There we begin to see the point of the Passion. The point is the Resurrection in and through the Passion. The Resurrection is present in the Passion. Easter is not some sort of fairy tale ending to an otherwise tragic story, any more than our spiritual life is merely the icing on the cake of our everyday lives, something nice, perhaps, but not essential, an added dimension, an afterthought, as it were. No. It must be the essence of our lives if it is to be our life at all, the “one thing needful”.

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

What’s this? Have I got the wrong Sunday? Am I having a senior’s moment? Didn’t we have that Gospel story and text two Sundays ago? We did and no, I am not losing it – at least not any more than usual! It’s just that this text also speaks to our readings today. It illumines an interesting sacramental emphasis to the traditional Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays which culminates on this Sunday at the same time as today’s overtly sacramental Gospel reading catapults us ahead to Maundy Thursday, to the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, to Christ’s Last Supper. That event anticipates and inaugurates the sacramental life of the Church established through his sacrifice on the Cross.

The Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays anticipate the concentration of the Lenten journey in the events of Holy Week. There is, too, a sacramental focus to the readings which belongs to the form of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem” sacramentally, it seems to me, journeying in the wilderness and contending against temptation including the temptation to “turn stones into bread,” learning instead to live not “by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” as we heard on The First Sunday in Lent. Yet that is the basis for the sacraments, too. The Word of God made flesh takes bread, gives thanks and breaks it, saying “Take eat; this is my Body.” We are not to tempt God, to put him to the test, but to worship him and serve him. On The Second Sunday in Lent, we learn from the Canaanite woman precisely about the goodness of God in Jesus Christ through her incredible insight into how God provides for us through the struggles of our lives, learning through a kind of humility that even the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are enough to sustain us and to bring healing and salvation to our wounded and broken souls.

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