The Face of God

This homily is being posted a week early as I will be attending my annual continuing education at the Chautauqua Institution next Sunday. My compliments to David Bentley Hart and St John Chrysostom who inspired this homily and who would find some of their thoughts and artful wording reflected in it.

Scripture: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 16), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading recounts for us the tale of Mary and Martha, the contemplative and the active. Now, these should be familiar characters to us. Mary and Martha, along with their brother Lazarus, have a home in Bethany two miles east from Jerusalem. We know that when Jesus would come down to Jerusalem for the holidays, He would stay at their house.

Mary is likely Mary of Magdala, which means that this family grew up near Jesus’ hometown. That’s probably how He knows them. And they play a very important role during Holy Week. It is the death of Lazarus—and Jesus’ subsequent raising him, quite publicly, from his tomb—that triggers the frenzy of Palm Sunday and the plotting of Spy Wednesday. And it is Mary who pours out a jar of ridiculously expensive ointment upon Jesus to prepare His Body for burial, much to the outrage of Judas Iscariot.

We also know that, for whatever reason, Mary has something of a bad reputation. Jesus both cures her of demons and defends her in public. And when He rises from the grave on Easter Sunday, it is Mary of Magdala whom He sends out as His Apostle to the Apostles, the very first witness to the Resurrection of our Lord. So, while I am extrapolating from the text, it seems reasonable to assume that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are old friends of Jesus; that they are people of some means; and that they each have an important role to play in the Gospel story. Whenever they show up, we ought to pay close attention.

In today’s text, Jesus has come to visit Mary and Martha, as He was wont to do, and while Martha busies herself with frantic preparation, Mary sits, rapt with attention, to listen to the teachings of the great Rabbi. Soon Martha is fed up and calls her sister out. “Lord,” she snaps, addressing Jesus rather than Mary, “do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me!”

But Jesus, in His firm yet gentle way, responds: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Over the centuries, this story has often divided the faithful into two camps. Let’s call them the Mary Christians and the Martha Christians. The Mary Christians point to the value of the contemplative life, stepping away from the frenzy of modernity to focus on what’s truly important: the spiritual, the religious. Martha Christians remind us that those who don’t work don’t eat, and that spirituality can be found in a hard day’s labor and a job well done. The monks tend to side with Mary, and the Calvinists with Martha. But I think both may be missing the point.

Today Mary has found that for which all of humanity has always been searching: today Mary has found the face of God.

See, in the ancient world even the pagans knew that there was only One True God. Sure, they worshipped Zeus or Thor or Isis, but they knew that beyond all that, beyond the sun and moon and stars, there was some Great Mystery, some Great Father or Great Mother, in whom we all live and move and have our being. The pagan poets sing of this God, the pagan philosophers point to this God, and all they really wanted—all anybody has ever really wanted—was to see this God’s face, to know and to love and to touch the One True God who is beyond all things and in all things and from whom all things come.

And so they built statues. They built statues and put them in all the different temples of all their different gods. And these statues they viewed not simply as offerings to the divine but as a revelatory disclosure of the divine, so that maybe the goddess or god would be pleased to dwell in this statue down here on earth. They built false idols, not because they wanted to deny the God of Nature, but because they were desperate to meet Him, to know Him, to commune with Him. They wanted God to come down to earth. And so when He didn’t—when He remained beyond us—they made statues of God in their own image, and hoped, well, maybe this will be good enough. Maybe this will give us some glimpse of God.

Ironically, the most famous temple of the ancient world, the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, was the only great House of God without a statue, without an image at the center. The Holy of Holies in the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem Temple was empty, because the Hebrew God had forbidden any false images of Himself to be made. For how could lifeless stone convey the glory and transcendence of the One True God? No, Israel would have to wait until God in the fullness of time chose an image of Himself for Himself.

So then along comes Jesus, and flips all our notions of God on their heads. Here is Jesus, God in the flesh—God’s own chosen image, the visible Image of the invisible God—answering that deep and deeply human longing to see the face of God, to commune with the divine here on earth. Here at last God has come down—not in an image of stone and ivory and gold, not chiseled with the strength of Zeus or the beauty of Athena or the glory of Apollo—but shockingly, scandalously, outrageously, God has come down in the face of a crucified Jewish peasant, and thereby in the face of every neighbor who demands our love.

Christianity has both answered and upended our very pagan, very human, desire to see the face of God. For truly, whatever we expected God to look like, it wasn’t this Rabbi, this Galilean, this Jesus. Yet here He is, come to end the world and change the world and save the world. That’s what Mary is beginning to realize in today’s Gospel. That’s what Mary is beginning to see in the face of Jesus. And once you see the face of God on earth—what else is there to worry about, really? The dishes?

The Cross of Jesus Christ, my brothers and sisters, turns our world upside-down. God is not amongst the highest of the high atop Mt Olympus, but down here in the mud and the blood with the lowest of the low. We no longer seek God by reaching up to Heaven, but we must seek Him by reaching out to the poor; for if we reach out our hands to the poor we have already reached the summit of Heaven. The face of God has finally been revealed, and it is not some image of pagan perfection wrought upon flawless stone, but it is the face of the Muslim refugee, the face of the Middle Eastern Christian, the face of boys murdered in a night club for being gay and innocent men executed in the streets for the crime of driving while Black.

This isn’t a political thing, a liberal or a conservative thing, a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s a Christian thing, the message of the Cross, that God is found in the needy and the sick and the poor and the oppressed and the homeless and the suffering and the sinful. And we must run to them—run to them!—if we ever seek to find the face of Jesus Christ, the face of God on earth.

We are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing. Let us together choose the better part, for it will not be taken away from us.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.