Sermon: Blessed Virgin Mary

Last Sunday I preached at Matins about authority.  ‘Where does true authority come from?’ I asked.  What experiences or practices might make us more authoritative people?  My very partial answer – based on a very quick reading of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians was that we grow in authority through looking at three realities in the eye: ourselves, God and death.  Paul seemed to do all three between writing and his first and his second letters to the Corinthians and so his authority developed as his writing became deeper and more honest – especially more honest about his own vulnerability.

I was challenged after the service by someone who wanted to know how I could say this. Her concern was not about looking ourselves in the eye or death in the eye, but looking God in the eye.  That was a very different matter for, ‘surely’, the person said, ‘if we look at God in the eye we will be frizzled’. It was an idiomatic allusion to the occasion when Moses on Mount Sinai said to the Lord, ‘show me your glory I pray’. To which he got the reply: ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name ’YHWH’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live’. (Exodus 33.20)

The thought that we cannot see God and live has been a powerful one in Jewish and Christian spirituality.  It is echoed in the gospel of John: ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1.18)  The insight that we cannot, have not and should not see God goes very deep and helps us get a sense of the infinite depth of God. 

But Ellie Wiesel, the Jewish writer whose wisdom comes from the experience o f the holocaust writes that the line about not being able to see God and live should be interpreted to mean’ you can not see God and live… as you did before’.  Weisel is talking about Jacob here and the night he spent wrestling or struggling with God. Although Jacob was not defeated it was a wounding encounter:  Jacob now limped because his hip was put out of joint. But that was not the only change: Jacob is now named Israel, he is not only wounded but given an new identity.  Jacob named the place Peniel, which means ‘face of God’ because as he put it, ‘I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’  (Genesis 32.31)

Seeing the face of God then, might not be impossible. However, if Jacob’s experience is anything to go by seeing God, even getting a glimpse of God is likely to leave us with a limp and new identity and a sense that everything has changed. 

We have already had one look at John’s gospel. But let’s pick it up later, because in chapter 14, Philip says, ‘Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied’. Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip and still, you do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.’ (John 14.8-9)

One of the reason that I was bold enough last week to speak of looking God in the eye as a necessary part of the journey towards true authority was because Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians speaks of the people of the new covenant having ‘unveiled faces’  and ‘seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror’ (2 Corinthians 3.18)  The mirror perhaps takes some of the burn out of the radiance but as we know from daily experience, when you look at a face in the mirror you can see the eyes clearly enough. Like Jacob-Israel, Paul understands that such glimpses are transforming. But Paul’s transformation is not so much instant and wounding as incremental and imitative, so he writes that: ‘[we] are being transformed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Corinthians 2 19). 

And in the book of Revelation there is the great vision of heaven with the river of the water of life, the tree of life with its twelve fruits and its leaves for the healing of the nations and, it goes on, ‘his servants shall worship him; they shall see his face’ (Revelation 22.3-4)

I hope this quick journey form Genesis to Revelation has not been too laboured.  The inaccessibility and danger of the face of God is a valid subject for spiritual questioning and theological reflection.  Certainly we should not be glib or cocky about our own vision of God, and definitely we should expect consequences, big and often difficult consequences, to flow from the slightest glimpse of God, never mind looking at God’s face or making eye-contact. 

Eye-contact with God! It is a scary thought, because it is when we make eye-contact that we observe and are observed, we are open and vulnerable. Not everyone can make eye-contact with other people. When people lack confidence it is hard to catch their eye.  When they feel guilty they avoid our gaze. And so we have learnt not to trust people with ‘shifty eyes’ and we have all perhaps been on the receiving end of the phrase ‘look at me when I am talking to you’ when we have thought that by looking away we might be able to ignore the person who is giving us a reprimand. 

 Having said all that, I should perhaps clarify that I am not talking literally here. God does not have eyes into which we can actually look. All this is a metaphorical way of talking about some fundamentals of Christian spirituality: vulnerability, truthfulness, openness to transformation, intimacy, woundedness and identity. 

All of which brings us round, neatly I hope, to the subject of this day, August 15^th when we celebrate and commemorate the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

We often see the face of Christ and the face of Mary together in Christian icons. The are various version of this but  I am thinking particularly here of the Eleousia icons in which the child Christ embraces his mother cheek to cheek, his little arm around her neck with one hand grasping her veil. It reflects a verse from the Song of Solomon: ‘his left had is beneath my head, and with his right hand he embraces me’. (Song of Solomon 2.6) In some of these icons the mother seems to be returning her son’s gaze. It is one thing for a mother to look into her baby’s eyes: this is natural enough. But icons are not portraits or photos. They are prayers, theology lessons and windows onto God all in one.  So when we see Mary staring into the eyes of the Christ child in an icon we should perhaps try to see the full significance.  Mary is representing humanity here. The child is the form of God.  The one embraces the other in mutual gaze and, if we think of the Mary’s song, the Magnificat, mutual magnification.  For Mary sings both that ‘my soul doth magnify the Lord’ and that ‘he that is mighty hath magnified me’. (Luke 1.46 and 49). Yet for all this amazingly audacious and transformative intimacy – no one is frizzled, no one dies.

Or rather, no one dies yet. 

Death comes, of course.  But it is the death not of the mother but of the son. And it is not the death of old age but the death of the cross; the kind of death that is terrifying not only for its physical agony but also for its exposure and its shame.  The cross allows for no modesty, no covering.  Some eyes may be averted but the thirteenth century Latin hymn, Stabat Mater, assures us that Mary’s will not be among them: ‘O those dim eyes never turning/from that wondrous suffering son’. And the fourth verse underlines the point:

For his people’s sins, in anguish,

There she saw the victim languish,

Bleed in torments, bleed and die:

Saw the Lord’s anointed taken

Saw her child in death forsaken,

Heard his last expiring cry. (New English Hymnal No 97)

Crucifixion involves being deliberately raised up to public gaze. To be crucified is to be seen to be suffering, to be vulnerable, to be physical and yet frail, to be human, all too human. 

In the crucifixion we have the reversal of the theology of Mount Sinai. And so it is not humanity is that is frizzled by face to face exposure with the Divine but God in Christ who is put to death. No wonder Matthew records that the veil of the temple was torn in two as Jesus died on the cross. Veils not longer serve any purpose. All is exposed. The story of Mary’s child who is God’s son comes to the moment of most profound and searing revelation when Jesus is subject to the gaze of all creation and when the work of God’s healing, forgiving love is at last accomplished in the death space which lies on the far side of desolation. 

Today, 15^th August is the day when many Christians will be celebrating the Assumption of Mary into heaven. To be honest this idea has never been of much help to me but it does fit extremely well with the pattern of reversal which I have been referring to in this sermon.  For while the old covenant said, ‘you cannot see God and live’ the new covenant might say, ‘you cannot live (in a true, full and profoundly new sense) unless you do see God’. And when you see God in the face of Christ with the immediacy and intensity that Mary beheld it in her son as child and young man, as saviour and as Lord, then maybe your quality of spiritual life is such that death has not only no sting but no meaning, no reality. Even the veil of mortality is torn apart.

Looked at in this way we can see Mary as our forerunner in the faith. She is not the new Eve, nor the new Abraham, but maybe she is the new Jacob for, like him, she saw God and lived, like him she was transformed and wounded, and like him her transformation was a turning point in salvation history. And if we are happy to call her the new Jacob we can take another step too – a step pregnant with danger and potential: for looked at in this way, Mary is the new Israel.

Mary embodies and represents a new openness to God and a new intimacy with God.  But the newness she embodies is not the fading newness which accompanied the giving of the law but a vision of the glory revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. This is the true, full, glory of God; the glory in which justice replaces sacrifice and where mercy and peace are the fruits of truthful living. It is a glory which humbles us but in that very humbling also exalts and elevates us. Mary, as new Israel, is the benchmark of the new relationship with God which is called, for short, ‘Christianity’. And maybe that’s why all generations call her blessed.