Mother of the Lord: Ark of the New Covenant

 Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on the fourth Sunday of Advent, 2021. Gospel: Luke 1.39-45

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In our gospel today we see a most beautiful scene. It combines energy and serenity. It is a thumbnail illustration of some really important aspects of the Christian spiritual life. Spiritual energy combined with spiritual serenity.

 

The energy is that of Mary who sets out with haste from her encounter with the archangel Gabriel to share this wonderful mystery! It is of John the Baptist, the child in his mother’s womb, who leaps for joy in the presence of Mary and her child! It is of Elizabeth who exclaims a loud cry of proclamation, and becomes the first to articulate that Mary is Mother of the Lord!

 

And what of the serenity? It is the serenity of Jesus Christ, the still centre of the presence of the Most High in a tumultuous world. This is the serenity of Jesus who sleeps in the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and embodies the peace, the Shalom, of God.

 

So where do we go with this gospel scene? What does it speak to us of our lives?

 

First it has to take us to Christ. He is the heart of this scene even though no action or utterance of his is described, merely his presence; that is enough.

 

The energy of the scene draws solely from Christ’s presence and serenity. This might help us see the need to pay attention to Christ, to orientate our lives to notice his presence in our midst and recognise those who bear his light and life.

 

That’s what Elizabeth and John saw. Elizabeth found herself overcome by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit which inspired her to ‘exclaim with a loud cry’, ‘Blessed are you, Mary, among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’. These Spirit given words, form the bedrock of the great and ancient prayer the Hail Mary, which combines the Archangel’s greeting and Elizabeth’s words: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’.

 

It’s Elizabeth, not a Pope or Church Council, who makes the first dogmatic statement of who Mary is: Mary is the mother of the Lord.

 

The unborn, yet totally spiritually attuned, John makes this recognition too. This clearly isn’t a run of the mill foetal kick. Elizabeth the pregnant mother knows it is more. She connects her child’s leap for joy with Mary’s arrival.

 

And this takes us into rich and fertile Biblical territory.

 

In the second book of Samuel there is an intriguing episode. The ark of the covenant was being taken from a town called Obed-edom to the city of David, Jerusalem. King David, the shepherd king (from Bethlehem, remember), offered sacrifices before the Ark and then ‘David danced before the LORD with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod (2 Samuel 6.14).

 

So what of the Ark and the linen ephod?

 

The Ark of the Covenant was the vessel, the box, effectively, that contained the stone tablets of the commandments, Aaron’s rod (a miraculous wooden staff) and manna from the wilderness, the bread shown to the people. For the Israelites the Ark contained the most holy of things, the presence of the Most High.

 

The linen ephod is the vestment, the robe, of the high priest. David was claiming priesthood. By heritage John the Baptist was a priest as was his father Zechariah.

 

Yet John knows that all that is contained in the Ark of the Covenant – Law, the wooden rod that buds, the Bread – everything in the Ark before which David danced is fulfilled in the true High Priest, Jesus Christ himself: John knows that Jesus is the New Covenant; John knows that just as the wood of Aaron’s rod budded into life, so the wood of the cross becomes the source of life and salvation; John knows that the Bread of Life is not the manna that goes stale, but Jesus Christ who calls men and women into abundant life.

 

Now if that is who Jesus is, the Holy Presence in the Ark, what, or rather who, is the Ark of the New Covenant?

 

The answer is Mary. This is an answer from the earliest times, for example St. Hippolytus (c. 170 - c. 236), who writes:

 

At that time, the Saviour coming from the Virgin, the Ark, brought forth His own Body into the world from that Ark, which was gilded with pure gold within by the Word, and without by the Holy Ghost.

 

Mary’s body is the bearer of the fulness of the presence of God. She is rightly the Ark of the New Covenant because within her body is the fullness of the Divine Presence, the Incarnate Lord.

 

Elizabeth knew that and declared it. John the Baptist knew that and danced before her and her unborn Son.

 

Where do we go with all this?

 

First, to acknowledge Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant and proclaim her ‘Mother of our Lord and God’ places us with Christians through the millennia, from Elizabeth and John onwards. What we say of Mary is always in relation to Christ. Devotion to Mary always takes us to Christ, in moments of salvation: his Incarnation; Christ’s miracles; his passion on the cross; his Resurrection; his Ascension; the descent of the Holy Spirit; the promise of heaven.

 

Secondly, it acknowledges the human body to be worthy of bearing Christ. Our culture seems intent on splitting human identity in two: the pure me, my spirit or mind, and the less than ideal me, my body, my physicality with all its limitations and distortions. There is a lot of talk today about being ‘body-affirming’: the Incarnation of Christ which is at the heart of the Christmas proclamation is body, mind and spirit together-affirming. Christ the redeems the whole person. That’s why our expression of faith is embodied. We don’t just think our way to salvation, we speak it, we enact it in acts of devotion and service to God and neighbour.

 

Finally, we find Christ to be at the heart of all things, the serene presence who dwells in Mary’s body. We place ourselves in his presence now to receive his presence now in the way he promises to be with us in his Body, in this sacrament. We make Mary’s ‘yes’ her ‘let it be to me according to your word’ our own. We become bearers of Christ, who give birth to him in the world, having received him and welcomed him into our lives.

Temples, bodies, sacrifice & encounter: A Lent sermon

 Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster. Gospel text John 2.13-22.

 

‘[Jesus] was speaking of the temple of his body’ John 2.21

 

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For centuries the temple in Jerusalem sat at the heart of Israelite religion.

 

The temple was the place of sacrifice and of encounter with the presence of God in all his holiness.

 

Housing the Ark of the Covenant, the very presence of God, the temple’s roots are deep in the story of God’s people.

 

Early on, in the account of the Exodus it is as a roving sanctuary, resting on the journey as the people of Israel moved through the wilderness before entering the Promised Land.

 

Eventually, brought by King David, God’s presence in the Ark came to rest on Mount Zion and his son, Solomon, began the work of building the temple to house God’s presence.

 

Solomon’s temple fell into disrepair when Israel was captive in exile in Babylon. Yet under the priests Ezra and Nehemiah it was restored, and by Jesus’ day it had recently been rebuilt by Herod the Great, taking some 46 years.

 

That brings us to this visit of Jesus to the Temple, as recorded in all four gospels (Matthew 21.12-17; Mark 11.15-19; Luke 19.45-48).

 

Indignant at what he finds Jesus sweeps away the buying and selling which is a spin off from the necessity to have animals to sacrifice in the temple.

 

Some see this as an example of Jesus’ anger, an example of his humanity. On one level that is right - Jesus has assumed our humanity - but it’s not that Jesus is ‘losing his rag’. As the disciples later remembered, it is ‘zeal for God’s house’ that has consumed him: it’s zeal; it’s passion.

 

Re-read today’s gospel and we see that what Jesus is doing, in the tradition of the prophets, is a purposeful, intentional act of resetting the Temple to its original purpose: sacrifice to God is not about trading animals; encountering God is not a commercial transaction.

 

The temple is to be a house of prayer, a place of encounter with the Living God.

 

What is new, and different from the prophets, is that this is a divine visitation on an institution that had become all too human: as the prophet Malachi had said, ‘the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’ (Malachi 3.1).

 

The stone-built temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, some forty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. So where is the temple now? So where is the place of sacrifice now? Where is the place of encounter now?

 

The clear statement of our gospel today is that the temple is a temple of flesh: the temple of Jesus’ body. So, that’s the place of sacrifice; that’s the place of encounter with the living God. The Body of Christ is of course profoundly what the church is: you and me together, who feed on the Body of Christ in the sacrament.

 

This is the place of sacrifice, Jesus Christ gives his life that we might live. Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrificial victim: ‘worthy is the Lamb once slain’ (Revelation 5.12), not a lamb traded in the temple precinct, but the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

 

The temple is not abolished by Jesus but transformed and relocated in his flesh.

 

Read the letter to the Hebrews and the Revelation to John and you see that the temple, recast by Christ, feeds the Christian life and imagination.

 

In its cleansing, the liturgical life of the temple - its rituals, customs, sacrifices and services - are transformed by Jesus and embraced by the church, not to exploit God’s people but to feed them.

 

So, then, where sacrifice and encounter with God take place there is the temple. In Christ this is a temple cleansed and fit for worship.

 

So as Christians when we speak of the temple we speak of Jesus Christ, we speak of our church building and we speak of ourselves.

 

Our church is a temple, a place of sacrifice – where lives are offered and life is received – and this holy place is a place of encounter.

 

And you are too.

 

As St Paul says, ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?... God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple’. (1 Corinthians 3.16,17).

 

Christ’s Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the pioneer of this reality. The power of the Most High dwelt in her body, she gave her body – her human body, her woman’s body - as the Lord’s temple; her life was opened to receive his life.

 

This all points to the reverence and honour we have for the body as Christians: we believe in the resurrection of the body, the ultimate statement of optimism about human bodies.

 

So we reject the separation of body and soul, the ancient heresy of Manicheism, which sees the soul as too good or pure for one’s body; the body is seen as a terrible encumbrance on a free spirit, and it means life is only lived through the body and physical gratification. That is the path to self-loathing. It afflicts many in our culture today.

 

We are body and soul together.

 

Christ visits the temple of our bodies and as we pray in Lent, ‘wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin’ (Psalm 51.2). That is a prayer that Christ might purge us, turn over some tables and upset some of our cosy bargains with God, so that we can become more truly people of sacrifice, offering our lives to Christ, the Lamb of God, that he might give us life in this bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist.

 

Let us pray that we might be worthy temples of the Holy Spirit, a worthiness which is not earned but is Christ’s gift, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer:

 

We offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that all we, who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction. (Book of Common Prayer, Order for Holy Communion)