Sunday
April 6
Communion Meditation
By Marsh Chapel
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Communion Meditation
John 12: 1-8
April 6, 2025
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
Spirit
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(By Robert Hayden)
What of our gospel in John this Lord’s day? For a moment, John has brought interruption to our year long. weekly reading from Luke. With authority. But what form of authority does the Gospel of John prefer, select, elect, prize? Ah, glad you asked…
No church in John, just a communal experience of Christ. No leadership in John, just the deeds and words of the risen, I mean crucified, I mean incarnate, I mean spirited One. No worries about ethics in John, no catalogue of virtues or vices, just a single command, to love. No hierarchy, patriarchy, oligarchy, ecclesiology in John. Just this: Spirit. Another Counselor. With you forever. A guide into all further truth. How is that going to work? Exactly. That is why we have the letters of John, uno dos y tres, because, clearly, it did not. The letters add in: leadership, orthodoxy, ethics, teaching, form, all. They wake from the Johannine dream. But what a dream! A spirited dream of spirit. A dream of Spirit, leading to truth, over time. A fullness of fragrance, spirit in life. As in Proust, ‘What matters is to transform common occurrence into art (NYRB).’
You will recognize the story of the anointing at Bethany. Sort of…as we sort of recognize things in memory, or forget and remember or forget…
It is like the “familiar” parable (sic): A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and saw a man who had fallen among thieves, so he went and he asked his father for his inheritance. The father gave him seeds to plant, but most fell on rocky ground. He appealed to a judge, who would not listen, and then to a dishonest steward, who would listen, but who stole the rest of the seeds, and then planted them and they multiplied thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. But he left 99 of the fold and went after a lost sheep. On the way, he stumbled on a lost coin, and put it in his tunic. This will be like a mustard seed, he thought, which is small but grows a big plant. He went back to his father and said, I am not worthy to be a son, but make me a worker in a vineyard, and pay me as much as you pay those who started at dawn. Which of these do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?…I know you remember that one. ().
Fragrance
That is, John has somehow combined a story which was also known to Mark, and used by Matthew, with a story from Luke, unused by Mark or Matthew, and has added his own special ingredients, Johannine special sauce if you will. Or maybe a redactor re-edited portions of this passage. For the record: John has added Judas as the stingy one; John has added Judas’ motive, not so liberal, of greed; John has not kept Mark’s ethical admonition, ‘For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want you can do good to them’. (But Matthew also apparently erased that sentence, for who knows what reason.) John also has misplaced or erased the fine conclusion, which Mark writes and Matthew copies, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. John also neglects to repeat that Jesus said of Mary’s act that she has done a beautiful thing for me. In other words, what has been told in John was not so much in memory of her, though perhaps in the rest of the whole world it was so. Most delicately, Mark and John both use a rare adjective, rendered her by the English word ‘pure’, which comes in the original from the same root as the word ‘faith’. The gospels repeated an admonition from Deuteronomy 15, ‘the poor are ever present’, not at all to discountenance care of the poor (so important to us, and rightly so), but to lift the fragrance, the wonder at the heart of the gospel, to the highest level. (Bultmann, perhaps rightly, hears here a reference to the full fragrance of gnosis, knowledge, spreading throughout the world.)
John, alone, fills the room with fragrance. That is his point, here. Incense, the sense of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the idea of the holy, the presence. Resurrection precedes crucifixion in this reading. Crucifixion is merely a coming occasion for incarnation in this reading. Incarnation is a lasting fragrance in this reading, the fullness of fragrance. The fragrant communion reminder, the fragrant gospel reminder, the fragrant Sunday reminder of our own, our personal, mortality.
Friends
My friend says of his work in ministry: ‘we are trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world’. That is what we are trying to do in and from this pulpit, trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world.
Long ago, tracing the same line, our poetic friend George Herbert wrote:
Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.
To do so, for eucharist, we come together, in the same place, and at the same time, for Sunday worship. Some of us learn to do so, learn so, as children. One year a friend brought her children to worship on Christmas eve. Afterward, she asked each one—6,8, and11 years old—what they most liked. Said 6, ‘I especially liked the candle, except the wax dripped on my finger and that hurt. Said 8, ‘I liked communion and the way the choir music drew us forward, together, into it.’ Said 11, ‘I like the way you feel after you have been to church’. 6,8,11—they came to themselves. And grandma did too. And here, this Lord’s Day, meditating on eucharist, we may too.
Ron Dworkin wrote just before his death: I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life…These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one’s life. They engage a whole personality. They permeate experience: they generate pride, remorse and thrill. Mystery is an important part of that thrill. (NYTRB, 68, 3/13).
Yes, our current tragedy has daily roots, roots in the daily foibles of the human. Tomorrow you might wake up to list the smaller showers of estrangement that meet us every day, long before we ever are drenched in the great thunderstorm of tragedy. And we are living in the throes of national tragedy, as the tens of thousands gathered yesterday on the Boston, the Boston Common, did testify. The gathering was a shared, communal witness in grief to unfolding national tragedy, whose roots are deep and tangled and personal and daily…
Premature resignation
Partial self-awareness
Indirect criticism
Cold honesty
Inflated responsibility
Excessive enjoyment
Needless worry
Wasted time
Careless haste
Misguided loyalty
Postponed grief
Avoided maturation
Partial planning
Unconscious entitlement
Pointless earning
Self-serving posture
Thankless reception
My grieving friend wrote of presence, some years ago, wrestling and reckoning with the loss of his wife…
Her death left me empty. Stunned even. That emptiness stayed for the 1st year. Then, two years ago, I began to be bumping into something that I finally put a name down. ‘The Presence”. My first experience with the mystic corners of our world.
I felt unprepared and awkward, but in time, I began to experience what can only be described as whisperings quietly in my ears. So, I began to struggle with poetry as I think I was hearing:
God is as close as my breath
My heart pulsing my breast
No search reveals the Presence;
Only exhaustion, tragedy, and
Failure will temper my vision to
The point where I can sense the
Presence who responds to my
Needs with gifts of patience
(F Halse, Epiphany at Kennebunk Pond, 8/16/01)
Says the Lord: She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
