Novus Motus Oxoniensis

Mary brought in a pound of very costly ointment, pure nard, and with it anointed the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her hair; the house was full of the scent of the ointment.

LET ME BEGIN this evening by asking you all a question: when was the last time something extraordinary and unexpected happened to you? If not yourself then someone you know, and something you saw. Take a moment to recall it, shut your eyes, picture it in your mind, feel the emotions, smell the smells, relive it. In a similar way we should find it both strange and surprising to be confronted with this picture from this evening’s gospel. Jesus, throughout his earthly ministry, has shown particular care for the poor, the needy, and the outcast, they have been fed by the disciples at their own expense and healed and welcomed by Jesus: they see the kingdom of God in their midst. They are to be loved and cared for by us as Christians.

And so, the picture of a lavish expense, of a reckless generosity, strikes us as odd. It goes against the grain, it’s almost as though there’s something wrong here. We should be alert to the fact that something important is happening in the gospel account. Mary’s anointing of Jesus is done in preparation for his burial, after his suffering and death on the cross, before he is laid in a stranger’s tomb. Straight after his triumphant entry into Jerusalem the day before, on a donkey just like his mother on the way to Bethlehem, or the Holy Family going into exile in Egypt, Our Lord’s mind and heart are set on the events of Good Friday – and this is exactly where our hearts and minds should be too. The King of the Jews will reign triumphantly from the Cross: as both priest and victim, the Lamb of God (who will be sacrificed upon the altar of the cross to bring about the true Passover of God’s people). He is prepared for his death and burial with the same substance which was burnt upon the altar of incense in the temple, symbolising the fact that Christ’s service, suffering, and death will be a fragrant offering to God the Almighty Father.

The cost of the ointment which Mary used was (in rough terms) a year’s wages for an agricultural labourer. Taking something worth ten or twelve thousand pounds in today’s money to anoint someone’s feet is an act of reckless generosity. As such, it points towards the outpouring of God’s love upon his world – it shows us the lengths to which God in Christ is willing to go to save and heal a world wounded by Sin – nothing is too costly, no expense is spared for the love of us, sinful humanity. These days of holy week are unique, and the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross is a singular event, whose effects are felt through time.

To reinforce the importance of the events leading up to our Lord’s passion and the passion itself, this week we find ourselves reading with the Church a number of portions of the book of the prophet Isaiah and in particular, those sections known as the four servant songs. In these the prophet describes the persecution, suffering and death of the servant of the Lord. The church has always seen these passages of Scripture as pointing toward Jesus, his suffering and death. His passion is prefigured in these prophetic utterances. We see in the events of this week a rollercoaster of emotion, which starts with a triumphant entry into the Messiah into Jerusalem only to end in trial, torture, and death.

In this evening’s first reading we see the silence of our Lord before the high priest and before Pilate, it is a picture of someone filled with God’s spirit, the chosen one in whom God delights. The events of the passion will show us both what God’s love and God’s justice are. What this will bring about is the healing of the nations: the opening of the eyes of the blind, the freeing of captive humanity from the prison of sin, from the darkness of our dungeon into the new light and life of Easter. That such wonderful things should be inaugurated by an act which mirrors God’s reckless and overflowing generosity is not that surprising at all.

It also teaches us that our human response to God in worship should likewise be extravagant, mirroring God’s response to us. Our worship should be costly in terms of time and effort and expense. We should try to give our best in every sense, solely for the glory of God, and to mark things out as a special, extraordinary, not of this world. As we gather around the altar to be fed by the Lord with his body and blood, we partake in the one, perfect, sufficient sacrifice of Calvary, made ever-present on the altars of God’s church. We are nourished and transformed by God’s saving love. So then, as we walk in our Lord’s footsteps, let us pray that he will nourish as in both word and sacrament, perfecting our human nature by his grace, and enabling us to live his risen life in thought and word and deed that the world may believe

‘For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.’

 It is far too easy to see the church in a negative way. We can be characterised as strange, quaint, and out of touch. It suits people to see us as opposed to certain things. We are prescriptive, we limit people’s freedom, and failing to practice what we preach, we can be written off as hypocrites, with no right to proclaim objective truth, to offer the world a moral framework, within which to live its life; to offer the world an alternative paradigm, a new way of living and of being through which to have life, and have life in all its fullness.

This morning’s gospel reminds us of the fundamental truth that God loves us. In the incarnation Jesus comes among us as a poor helpless baby, laid to rest in the rough wood of an animals’ feeding trough. He is cared for through the love of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who in her love, service, and obedience, stands as the model for all Christians. She is the first Christian, the greatest, a pattern for us to imitate, and a foreshadowing of our great mother the church.

Upon the rough wood of the cross, Jesus will suffer and die for us. His mother, Mary, stands by and watches and weeps. As the church we too should watch and weep for the wounds of sin and division which still scar Christ’s body. We should do all that we can to live God’s life of sacrificial self giving love: living lives of light, which shine in the darkness. The salvation and eternal life which Christ offers freely to all, comes through the church, which we enter in baptism, where we are nourished in word and are sacrament, given food for the journey, strengthened and taught, to live his risen life, to share in the joys of Easter.

God cares so much about the world and its people that he takes flesh, and lives a life of love, amidst the messiness of humanity, to show us how to live lives filled with love, life in all its fullness. Not to condemn the world but to offer it a way of being. God has made us for himself , and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. The spiritual needs and searching which characterise people in the world around us, can be satisfied in God and in God alone, through the church.

We can rejoice, and relax our Lenten discipline for a little while to give thanks for the wonderful gift of God’s love in our lives, in the church, and for the world. But we also need to trust God, to listen to what he says through Scripture, to be fed by him, and to live lives in accordance with his will and purpose, together, as a family, as a community of love, cared for and supported by our mother, the church. And in so doing we look to our Lady as mother of our Lord and mother of the church, as a pattern for love and obedience, as a model for all mothers: loving and tender, putting the needs of others before self, self-giving, sacrificial, and open to both joy and pain.

This, as any mother can tell you, is not easy, it’s difficult, really hard, but its rewards are likewise great. So let us, as we continue our Lenten journey towards the cross, where God shows his love for us most fully and completely, giving his body to be broken and his blood be shed for us, a sacrifice which will be made present here today under the outward forms of bread and wine, to strengthen us to live the risen life of Easter, to offer the world and alternative to selfishness, to self-centredness, to the sin which continues to separate us from God, in a self-giving love of mothers, and of our mother the church. That we may join the Angels in our song of love and praise to the Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit, to whom bw ascribed as is right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever

TITUS 1:7–11, 2:1–8
– 28.viii.10 –
PREACHED AT VESPERS OF THE PATRONAL FESTIVAL OF S. AIDAN’S NEW PARKS, LEICESTER

It is fair to say that, of late, Celtic Christianity has been all the rage – with its ‘Wild Goose liturgy’ tear-and-share Eucharists, gazing into water, plenty of pebble-rubbing, and thinly-disguised nature-worship and a touchy-feely approach to the Christian faith which perhaps taps into the emotional side of the British which has been repressed by the stiff upper-lip approach.

If, however, such an understanding is allowed to go unchallenged, it will only serve to perpetuate a misunderstanding which does a great service to the life and witness of saints such as Aidan. These Celtic saints were serious, hard-working men, who took their inspiration from the first monastic communities founded in Egypt, whose leading lights were the Desert Fathers and whose lives and sayings are recorded by John Cassian and others. What we are dealing with are people, above all else, seeking to love God and their neighbour in thought, word and deed, living out the heart of the Gospel in their life and example. It is far too easy to engage in a superficial reading of them which fails to do justice to their lives of Christian service, but this will not do.

A salutary example can be found in the life of S. Aidan. A mission from the Celtic Church to the people of Northumbria had failed and it is Aidan who identifies correctly the reason why it failed. At a conference convened to discuss the failure of the mission, Aidan sets his colleagues straight: ‘Brothers, it seems to me that you were too severe on your ignorant hearers. You should have followed the practice of the apostles … and gradually nourished them with the word of God until they were … able to follow the loftier precepts of Christ’. In other words, Aidan saw clearly the need to meet people half-way, even when one is in the right, which is exactly what our Lord did.

In meeting people where they are, and bringing them to faith gradually, nourishing them first on the milk of human kindness before moving on to the more solid food of the Gospel, we see in Aidan a Christ-like gentleness combined with a zeal that the Good News of Christ will take root in the hearts and in the minds and in the lives of those to whom he is ministering. Aidan is sincere and serious, as Paul advises Titus to be, but he is, above all else, not overbearing, lording it over his brethren, or those whom he is seeking to convert. Rather, in patience and humility, which flow from the love of God and neighbour, his life and example speak of Christian charity lived out in a way which is infectious, to which people cannot fail to be attracted.

This, then, is the challenge to all of us here today – all the baptised people of God need to follow the example of Aidan in gentleness and love, aware of our sins and shortcomings and deeply penitent for them, yet firmly resolved to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel in our own lives. This is a demanding undertaking, one which needs to be grounded in prayer, in waiting on God, in letting him form us. It needs the comfort and strength of the Sacraments where Christ is truly present. We need to be nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ, fed in our minds, in our souls, and in our bodies, to have strength for the journey, for the task which Christ calls us to do in His name and for His glory.

This, then, is the true teaching which Aidan embodies and lives out. It stands in stark contrast to the error of touchy-feely liberalism, of a wishy-washy perversion of Christianity: the dangerous nonsense of Paul’s letter, which damages the Gospel with its laxity just like the harshness which Aidan opposed.

Aidan’s message and example, however, can be trusted as it is rooted in the example and doctrine of Christ and the Apostles – touchstones to which the Church must cling, lest it fall into error. We need then to be sincere and serious, as Paul advises Titus, since the commission to preach the Gospel by word and deed is a serious business for all Christians. We need to be sincere, as anything false or hypocritical damages the Church and the message which it proclaims. We also need to be serious, as it is our compassion, gentleness and humility, which make us truly Christ-like and our proclamation authentic. But for our doing the work of God to bear fruit, we need above else to pray for patience and perseverance. Only if we keep going can the good news of Christ flourish in our own lives and in those whom we seek to bring to new life in Christ, Such an undertaking takes time, and just as Aidan was prepared to live and preach in a way which would win out in the long run, so we too have to be prepared to be willing to taking our time and persevere in the service of Christ.