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The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant, we beseech thee, merciful God, that thy Church, being gathered together in unity by thy Holy Spirit, may manifest thy power among all peoples, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. (Proper 16)
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The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
✛
Jesus of Nazareth, God incarnate
Last year I had the great and distinct privilege of teaching an introductory theology class to an impressive group of undergraduate students at a nearby Roman Catholic university.
As luck, or providence, would have it, this group of students was not meeting in the main classroom building on campus, but in an adjacent building, which bore the impressive royal name, “Queen’s Court.” It took me a minute to figure out why it was named Queen’s Court, but, once I did, I made the students figure out not only why it is named Queen’s Court, but why it is named Queen’s Court now, at this particular moment in history.
The easy answer is that the building is named Queen’s Court because it is next to a courtyard, and in that courtyard is a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, bedecked in royal regalia, as befits the queen of heaven. So: Queen’s Court.
That is only the beginning of the answer, because it leads to another question: why is there a statue of Mary in the courtyard? The easy answer to that is that it is because the Bible tells us that Mary is the mother of Jesus, and that is a pretty impressive thing.
However, there are lots of impressive people in the Bible, doing impressive things, women and men alike, and they do not all get buildings named after them. Yes, Mary submitted herself to the will of God—“Be it unto me according to thy word”—but lots of people in the Bible submit themselves to the will of God, at great personal cost, and they do not all get buildings named after them.
There are even lots of mothers out there, in and out of the Bible, and while many of them probably deserve buildings, only a few get them. Mary’s motherhood is different, of course, and the students and I read in the scriptures the miraculous story of Jesus’ conception, by the Holy Spirit. But there are several people in the Bible who have miraculous conceptions, including Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Hannah, the mother of Samuel; Samson’s mother; and Mary’s kinswoman, Elizabeth.
Granted, in the Magnificat, the song of Mary that is our gospel reading for today, she recognizes the greatness that is to come from her son. She is thus one of the first people to recognize Jesus as the savior of Israel. And she is, of course, the only person who shared her body with this savior. In that sense, she is different, and that is a great thing. But it is only a royal-sounding, building-worthy, very special thing if there is something different in kind about Jesus. If there is not only something special, but something wholly unique.
And here we arrive at the answer to our question. There is something special and unique about Mary conceiving and bearing Jesus, because Jesus of Nazareth is God.
Jesus, Mary’s son, was and is God. Not partially God, or god-like, or someone who developed into God. Not only someone who points us to God, though he is that. Not only someone who instructs us on a radically new way to live, though he does that, too. The building is named after Mary because Jesus of Nazareth was and is God incarnate, and Jesus was God incarnate at his very conception, and this conception took place in and through Mary. Jesus of Nazareth is God and Mary is his mother.
The implications of this are not necessarily self-evident, and that is why there was such a great hullabaloo in the fourth century over the Greek title for Mary of theotokos, which can be translated in English as “mother of God.” In the fourth century, as today, plenty of faithful and sincere Christians resisted such a title for a human being: it sounds pagan, idolatrous, irreverent. It sounds like it makes Mary somehow equal to God, or the originator or source of God himself.
To be sure, their insistence on calling Mary “the mother of God” was a deliberately provocative move. (This was during an era of the Church I like to refer to as a time of “bishops behaving badly,” and being deliberately provocative was one of the ways they did that.) But it was a provocative move with a theological point. The argument that won the day used an analogy something like this: the saintly Ginger Cook Daniels, of blessed memory, can be referred to as “the mother of Joel Daniels”—speaking of things done at great personal cost. When we call her my mother, we do not qualify it in any way. We do not say, “She was the mother of Joel but only in a limited sense,” or add “She was his mother but, of course, they are not the same.” We just say, “Ginger was Joel’s mother,” and we leave it at that. To qualify it in any way would be an anomalous and strange use of the word “mother.” The plain sense is plain.
Jesus was and is God, without remainder. Without qualification, without caveat, without any fingers crossed, Jesus is God in a complete and total way. To say “Jesus” is to say “God,” full stop. Thus, they insisted, Mary is the mother of God, in a plain, if provocative, sense of speaking, and any diminishment of that is a diminishment of Jesus’ divinity, and any diminishment of Jesus’ divinity is a diminishment of the gospel, the good news, and any diminishment of the good news is a diminishment of our very hope for salvation. After a great deal of protracted squabbling, this was the conclusion that much of the Church drew, and it held through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, for about a thousand years.
In the turn to the modern era, however, Western Christianity suffered, as one theologian put it, from an episode of collective amnesia regarding its own theological history. Language like “mother of God” that had been written to make a sharp theological point now fell on unsympathetic ears, uninterested in learning the history of how that language came about, or what questions it answered, or why it is important. As a result, the uniqueness of Jesus was qualified and salvation itself was secularized. Salvation was made social or political or artistic, but it was evacuated of the particularity of the God of Israel, incarnate in Jesus Christ.
In some quarters, however, around the mid-nineteenth century, a reaction developed against that ahistorical, flattening-out of the faith. Not everywhere, of course, but, in some places, there was a recovery of the riches of the historical Christian tradition, in its many aspects: artistic, theological, as well as in terms of worship and piety.
Part of that retrieval was a re-emphasis on the fully divine nature of Jesus of Nazareth, shared with the Father and the Spirit, as the eternal Holy Trinity; a re-emphasis on the authority of the Holy Scriptures as containing all things necessary for salvation; and, indeed, a re-emphasis on the role of Mary. It came out of the conviction that if Christianity is true—if Jesus Christ does indeed save us from sin and death, and in the midst of this vale of tears offers us the hope of everlasting life, in communion with God and one another in a city of perpetual peace—if that is true, then Jesus of Nazareth must be God incarnate, divine and human, with Mary as his mother.
And that, I told the students, that is why that modern building is named “Queen’s Court,” after Mary, queen of heaven, and that is why, at Saint Thomas this morning, we celebrate the Feast Day of Saint Mary the Virgin. Because, in every age, the unique saving power of Jesus Christ must be ever at the forefront of our hearts and minds, and its truth must ever be on our lips. Without God incarnate—without his conception, his life, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension—without that we are lost. Without it we live in a world that is lost, among people who are lost. We live in a world in thrall to sin and death, a world without promise, without hope, without a living future with the living God. Without that, the vale of tears is a dead-end road, traversed without purpose and without destination. So: Queen’s Court, and today’s feast of Saint Mary.
In the interest of full transparency, I should say that, in the classroom, despite my stirring and dramatic conclusion, I looked out at that point at students with eyes completely glazed over, staring absently at me or out the window. If I read their faces correctly, they were pondering what mistakes they must have made in their lives to that point, for which they were now clearly being punished. But along with bishops behaving however, and death and taxes, I imagine this is to be expected.
Even so, for the preacher and teacher, it remains a great and distinct privilege to speak of this good news of God in the incarnate Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Things change, and people change, and the world changes. It isn’t the fourth century anymore, or the nineteenth, and we mostly argue about other stuff now. Fashions of various kinds come and go, and then they come and go again. The past is a foreign country, and the future is unknown.
Through it all, however, Christ remains the Alpha and the Omega; at the beginning and at the end; the rock of ages, for every age. And when the last day comes, as it will, that the last teacher sets down her chalk, and the last student puts away his notebook; when the last preacher files away his notes and the last parishioner stands to leave; when the last choir sings their last hymn; when the last mother gazes adoringly at her last son; when the last building closes its doors, regardless of its name: still, there he stands and there he reigns: God incarnate, Jesus Christ.
Whatever journey we go on, whether as civilizations over millennia, or countries and cultures over centuries, or even in our own individual personal journeys over the course of individual, ordinary human lives—wherever luck, or providence, takes us, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, stands at the beginning, and Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary—come what may—will be there at the end.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
