Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 15, 2019 / Monday in Holy Week
John 12:1-11
Most of you will know by now that the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the great monuments of Western civilization, caught fire this afternoon. Arson is not suspected, just a terrible accident, during restoration work on the cathedral’s roof. If you are hoping for good news about the building, I’m sorry to say that I have little. The spire [flèche] has collapsed, and the roof has been destroyed. Although the fire is contained, the Paris fire department expects the building to be a stone shell, at best. Happily, much of the art and many of the relics and other treasures were carried to safety, but the building is faring much less well.
This is not the first go-round with devastation that Notre Dame has experienced. Victor Hugo’s novel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was published in France under the more direct title, Notre Dame de Paris, was inspired by the dilapidated condition of the cathedral, which was half-ruined inside and battered without, and the popularity of the book led to a national restoration campaign for the cathedral. That is probably not much comfort today.
I must say that I am a great lover of church buildings, and that I always have been. I remember, as a child, gazing in wonderment around Europe at the soaring churches in almost every city. They resembled in a vague way the church buildings one knew at home, insofar as the windows had pointy tops, but they were of a different scale and ethos altogether. Notre Dame and its European cousins were built ad majorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God, and an encounter with such buildings definitively produces an encounter with the majesty of God himself, whether we call the focus of that encounter “God” or “the sublime” or some other form or psychological transcendence.[1] They are places within which the mind of man is confronted by something at the limits of his imagination, and that is a place in which he can meet God on something close to God’s own terms.
You might imagine, correctly, that I have visited hundreds of churches over the years. But when Hannah and I most recently visited Notre Dame, in March of last year, we two were among many thousands of visitors that day, just ordinary pilgrims, and the building was literally awesome. Awe-inspiring. Utterly magnificent. Even as worldly and jaded a person as your preacher could not do otherwise but look up and marvel.
We live in a moment that tends to disassociate these forms of transcendence, these ways of experiencing the majesty and glory of God, from the work of the church. Perhaps it is more correct to say that we are in a moment in which religious professionals, and people who take themselves to be religious professionals, tend to be dismissive of church buildings. One of the things I’m least looking forward to about the aftermath of the Notre Dame fire – other than the massively trite and uninformed 24-hour news commentary – is the debate amongst church people over what the French government ought to do now. What should one do with a devastated church building, even a monument of world significance? Couldn’t that money be better spent on social programs? Let me rephrase the debate:
Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair… But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
The evangelist is very clear about Judas’ motives, by the way: “He said [what he said] not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” We might remember Jesus’ sharp rebuke to Judas Iscariot in this scene. When Jesus tells him that the poor will always be with them, he is not telling him, “don’t worry about the poor.” Quite the opposite. He is drawing the attention of Judas and everyone in earshot to the unvarying Old Testament commandment of their duties to care for the poor. He is also drawing their attention to Judas’ hypocrisy, laying bare the way he gussies up his cravenness and self-dealing in the costume of charity.
When Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” it is worth remembering that those duties to the poor – duties shared by Judas and the disciples and all of us – are not ends in themselves. They are not absolute on their own terms: they are a subsidiary of our commitment and our need, as Jesus said, to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” He continues: “This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The second commandment is important only inasmuch as it reflects our wholehearted love of God, and the two are not coextensive.
What we find in tonight’s Gospel lesson is that God is not finally reducible to a kind of social worker, or a sort of fairy Godmother, or a buddy, who’s there when we’re kind of bummed out, ready to cheer us up and help us get back on track. The god who is the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ is experienced and glorified by ordinary men and women in a limitless number of ways. Art, architecture, music, and literature go hand in hand with ordinary community life and service to our neighbors. In fact, they glorify each other. Pot luck is a dreary business without Bach and Milton and the cathedral of Notre Dame.
Everything we have been given – everything in the world around us – is excess to requirements. It is gratuitous that the leaves in the fall are beautiful, even as they decay. It is gratuitous that music should be pleasing as well as mathematically coherent. It all glorifies God, and it tells us something about who God is. Creative. Extravagant. And most especially so in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
St Paul writes, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”[2] As we make our way faithfully through this Holy Week, we are well to remember the enormity of what has been accomplished on the Cross. Christ’s victory over Sin and Death – for our sake – is no small matter, and not something that can be properly appreciated without fear and trembling before the God who is at the limits of our imagination. May our lives be devoted to glorifying that God, even as we mourn the ashes of one of the world’s great houses of prayer, built to his everlasting glory.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
AMEN.