30 Apr Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Year C (Passion Sunday)

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Sunday 6th April, 2025

“Do not remember former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43. 18 – 19a. – from our first reading this morning.

I’m sure Isaiah didn’t mean us not to learn the lessons of history but rather to be open to the fresh ways the things of God are revealed generation after generation.

The choice of this reading for Passion Sunday might alert us not to cling onto things we may assume we have already understood, to remind us to be ready to ‘perceive’, perhaps at a deeper level than before, what was going on in Christ’s Passion, and beyond that to who we are as a Church.

I know many of you are familiar with Ann Lewin’s little verse: Easter Morning, in which Jesus addresses Mary Magdalen:

Do not cling…  /  let me be bigger than your  /   heart can hold.  /  Rise with me to a  /   larger vision.

One element of ‘living’ through Passiontide that had eluded me until the other day is the invitation to share with Jesus’ disciples and his friends Lazarus, Martha and Mary in their confusion, their unknowing of the significance of what God was doing in the life of Jesus. Was he not the Messiah after all? Was he not the Christ? …. Or  – that little worm of a question that was beginning to wiggle at the back of their semi-consciousness: might they have misunderstood what the Messiah was meant to be? What might it mean to think of ‘Messiah’ in a new way – in a way they had been only semi-consciously learning as they had lived with Jesus, watched him and listened to him?

Jesus kept talking about having to suffer and be put to death – but if he had raised Lazarus after he had been dead for four days and, as Martha so delicately put it, “now there was a stench”, why on earth did Jesus have to die? Earlier on he had talked of himself as the Temple which would be destroyed and raised up in three days. What was going on? The Temple was where God lived and was to be found and worshipped.

The raising of Lazarus had brought things to a headwith the Pharisees and the Jewish leaders, and they began their serious plotting to have Jesus killed. Jesus took himself and the disciples off to the relative safety of Ephraim, but six days before the Feast of Passover they came back to Bethany. We have just heard the story of what happened: the dinner given in honour of Jesus by his friends Lazarus, Martha and Mary.

What might it have to tell us about something new God was revealing?

Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, sits at table with them but, according to today’s passage, seems to have been largely passive and not said anything.

Martha served. In his commentary David Ford points out that the same verb translated as ‘served’ is repeated later in the chapter when Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.” (12. 26). (and ‘where I am’ in John’s Gospel is ‘in the Father’s heart’ – and if we are ‘in Christ’ we, too, are in the Father’s heart and, as we hear at the end of Jesus’ prayer in John Ch 17,  we are loved by the Father as was Jesus. But also, there is nowhere where God is not, so everywhere, in each person, each encounter, in the whole Creation. – which encourages us to ask whether our working understanding of Christ, of God, is big enough. Could it be that we fail to recognise our encounters with God because they aren’t what we are expecting? Might an element of the ‘new thing’ God is working a new way of being perceived by us?).

But back to Martha: Martha had shown exemplary faith when Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus; now she gives exemplary service – both are centred on Jesus rather than herself. It’s interesting to note that the classic contrast of Martha the activist and Mary the contemplative that we find in Luke’s Gospel is not here in John’s account. Both are portrayed as model friends of Jesus. And then Mary interrupts the meal by taking the pound of costly perfume made of pure nard and anointing Jesus’ feet which she then wiped  with her hair. Jesus explains that ‘she bought it for the day of my burial’. He brings this extravagant out-pouring of love round to the subject of his immanent death. The beautiful fragrance of the perfume countering the remembered ‘stench’ of rotting flesh at Lazarus’ tomb – a recognition of who Jesus is as the ‘anointed one’. What were they to make of it? Again, David Ford says, ‘In line with the promise of Jesus that his crucifixion would “draw all people to myself,” scent is also powerfully attractive. Like the air that carries it, fragrance also evokes the Spirit, encompassing and edgeless; spreading unpredictably and crossing boundaries…’

Bishop Richard Chartres points out that nard was the main ingredient of the perfume that was used in making the consecrated incense, the Ketoret, offered on the altar of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. He says that ‘John had already spoken of the body of the crucified and resurrected Jesus as the Temple. Now,…, Mary anticipates Jesus dying and being raised by filling the house in Bethany with the odour of the fragrance that evoked Temple worship. Physical death wasn’t going to be the end of Jesus, the Messiah, the dwelling place of God.

David Ford also points out that the meal is ‘six days before Passover’ – that is the first day of the week, Sunday, the day when the Christians John was writing for would meet to celebrate the Eucharistic meal in the presence of the Risen Christ.

Which brings us back to us, here this morning. Here we are, meeting on the first day of the week more than 2,000 years later, to share in this same Eucharistic meal, the Mystical Body of Christ, gathered for communion with our Risen Lord and launching into two weeks of pondering the stories of his Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection – and as we do, might we be asking some of the same questions the disciples and Jesus’ friends must have been asking: what does it all mean? Could it be much, much more than I have previously imagined? Is there fire still to be lit – or to be re-kindled – in my belly? A fresh understanding of myself as a member of Christ’s risen body on earth – or as St Paul puts it, ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’ – with real implications for the way I try to live?

What ‘new thing’ is God working which we are still failing to ‘perceive’ as the Church –  let alone the rest of the world -sinks deeper into crisis?

What ‘new thing’ might we be being invited to allow God to work in and through us?

Might God be suggesting a new vision of the Church? – a dynamic body of Christ’s followers, alive with the life and passion of Christ rather than a rather dysfunctional and jaded institution or a very wordy and rule-bound religion?

Might we say with the same passion, as we heard Paul saying in the second reading, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved… this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

It’s good to remember that, if Jesus had any preferences it was for the poor, the marginalised, the suffering, and his invitation to us is to continue that love: “Whatever you do to the least of these…you do to me” – and we need to remember that, however we succeed or fail in this, we are loved enormously by the Father.

‘Do not cling,’ says the Risen One. ‘Let me be bigger than your heart can hold. Rise with me to a larger vision.’

Br. Stuart

Image: Pittman, Lauren Wright. Anointed, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57085 [retrieved April 30, 2025]. Original source: Lauren Wright Pittman, http://www.lewpstudio.com/.