PASSION SUNDAY, Year C: March 25 2007

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8): the voice of Mary's Magnificat
Preacher: The Revd Dr Alison Milbank

It is a great honour and delight to be back at LSM: back where I was married, my son baptised and my daughter confirmed. But you ask me back in order that I may look forward with you this Lent to discern how we must do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God today. On Passion Sunday we turn towards Jerusalem in our psalm of ascent and to Golgotha, where our Lord did indeed walk humbly, and with Paul in Phillipians, we seek to follow Christ. But our readings look back as well as forward: back in Isaiah to God's saving action at the parting of the Red Sea, as well as forward to the new thing; back in Mary's anointing to the resurrection of her brother Lazarus, for which the perfume is a thanksgiving, but forward to its significance as Christ's anointing for suffering and burial.

The Blessed Virgin Mary too is a link between the past and present, her annunciation being the culmination of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. She is the sole witness to Christ's birth as well as his death, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The voice of Mary in the gospels shares this double perspective of looking back and forward, especially in her Magnificat, in which her words reach back to Jacob/Israel, the son of Abraham, and forward to unborn generations, who will call her blessed. For Mary's is the voice of solidarity: what God has done for her, his humiliated one, he will do for all the poor in spirit, the 'anawin'. Like the resurrected Lazarus, Mary is an anticipation of the new life in Christ, which will involve the whole self: body, soul and spirit, and which is offered to us all. We sing her words as hope for the whole world. The long and varied Anglican Social tradition of the past 150 years, involving people as disparate as F. D. Maurice, Conrad Noel of Thaxted, G. K. Chesterton and Ken Leech, has always held to Mary's song as its anthem: Stuart Headlam called it 'the Marseillaise of humanity'. What they found there however, was not just the freedom from oppression of the Latin American liberation theologians, but the Incarnational principle. In Mary God became man, and this fact transforms our understanding of the world; in Mary the world said yes to God, and she guarantees the redeemability of creation – that it was possible for a human being to make that positive response. She takes us back as the new Eve to the dewy freshness of Eden: she takes us forward to the new heaven and earth in which Christ shall be all in all and we shall share in the Divine life.

When Mary said to Gabriel, 'Be it unto me according to thy word,' she said yes not only to God's action in her life but to that life itself. In one sense she said yes to the world as God's creation. From now on, the poet W. H. Auden suggests, Mary would be the Word's engagement ring for his ultimate wedding with all that it is. So, we too must learn to say 'yes' both to God's call but also to God's world. We must learn. Like Mary, to see it as the arena of God's saving action, and to find the seeds of creative life in our own time. 'I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?' says the Lord in Isaiah.

The new thing in Isaiah 43 is expressed in terms of water: 'rivers in the desert', which is an image often used for the miracle of the Virgin Birth itself. Our readings today are full of liquids: the tears of the psalm, the perfume poured over Christ's feet at Bethany. Mary too speaks in this context, when she tells her Son at the wedding at Cana that they have no wine. And despite Jesus's equivocal response – 'what has this to do with me? My time has not yet come' - Mary intuits that he will act, and calmly tells the servants to do what he asks. The result of course, is hugely excessive and delicious fountains of the best wine. This sign has much in common with the excess of perfume in today's gospel: both stories look forward to our Lord's overwhelming love shown on the cross and to the abundance of resurrection life that results from it. In the Old Testament prophets such as Amos, it was God's justice that flowed like a river, an ever-flowing stream. Now it will literally flow from Christ's side, to be accepted as mercy. There is a beautiful scene – at least I find it so – at the end of Mel Gibson's often grotesque film, 'The Passion of the Christ' when in streams of golden rain Christ's blood and water flow over Mary and the other women kneeling before the cross. It expresses perfectly this sense of the generous fluidity of the Divine justice that can be received as gift.

Despite the neat parallelism of Mary's song – 'he hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek,' it is not just a poem about reversal: down with the rich and up with the poor. Rather it is a song of praise about the excessive nature of God's righteous acts, which only those without pride or self-respect are able to receive. Mary's voice here magnfies, exults, rejoices in the excessive justice of God, which rolls like a river through her song, connecting past and future in the net of an overwhelming presence: the overshadowing of the shekinah, the presence of God. The Magnificat itself is a response to the witness of the aged Elizabeth and the child John in the womb, both of whom have recognised that divine presence and actually move towards it. The scene is as much a dance as a song. All the scenes in the gospels at which Mary is present have this balletic quality: they make connections: they allow grace to flow.

So Mary's ethics is as much a work of art as a social programme. She calls us to join the dance, to sing, and to move to create, as she does, in giving birth to Christ. Long ago philosophers like Aristotle separated the virtues of doing from those of making, the first ruled by prudence, suiting means and ends, the second by art. Mary helps us to put doing and making together by her song of justice. Look up above the altar here and you see her opposite the angel. There is a space between them: not an empty space but the space for God to act: the space of their response to his creative action in their lives. It is the space for a new thing. In Botticelli's version of the Annunciation you can see Mary twisting her body and arm to reach down as the archaangel reaches up towards her. They shape the distance between them as if moulding and forming the air. As we come to the altar for communion, we come to that creative space; we come to respond to God and to his world, met in the forms of bread and wine. Let us like Mary accept God and his world, and fill our mouths with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy. And let justice flow like a river through our lives.