An old politician was beginning to lose his hearing.
He went to the doctor, and the doctor asked him if he drank at all. “Yes,” the old man answered. “How much?” the doctor asked. “About a pint a day,” the politician responded. “Well,” the doctor said, “you’re going have to cut out your drinking if you want to keep your hearing.” So, with that, the old politician went away, only to come back six months later—his hearing hadn’t improved at all. And the doctor asked, “Did you cut out your drinking?” “No,” the old man replied. “Well, how on earth do expect your hearing to get any better if you don’t follow my advice, if you don’t take my prescription?” The old man reflected and pondered a bit and then said to the doctor finally, “Well, I went home and considered it, and I just came to the conclusion that I liked what drank so much better than what I heard.”[1]
I tell you this because we need to tell funny stories from time to time to make points without taking ourselves too seriously. But it also shows something tragically true about us, and that is although we almost always have an opportunity to choose that which is better, that which is more in harmony with the good, we often don’t. “I do not do the good I want,” Paul said.[2] The law and truth of God may tantalize, but there is another damnable law within us that continually frustrates our better judgment. A tragedy since that first sin, our human story, as Augustine said, is full of “toil and trouble, pain and grief, death and all the wear and tear of the world.”[3] We know this ourselves by experience. For me, to tell you the truth: most of the time I walk around just confused, continually making half-right and wrong decisions, fumbling along in constant need of your forgiveness.
Yet, I give thanks to God that ever since the beginning of our sinful ways, he has always come to us. He has always been the first to respond to our sinful plight. It was God who went into the garden in the cool of the day while the first man and woman hid from him. It was God who looked for us—not we for him—saying, “Where are you?”[4]—just as the father of the prodigal, seeing his estranged son “still a long way off,” had pity and “ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.”[5] Such is the witness of Scripture and of innumerable saints. “May He be blessed for ever who waited for me so long,” Saint Teresa of Avila said.[6] I give thanks for this: that God does not leave us in our sin, but rather, comes to us.
But what is so frightening about this morning’s readings is that even in the visitation of God, in the advent of God, even in his presence, we can laugh, make light, disregard and choose something else. How many Sarahs do we have in the Church today? (Mind you, Abraham laughed too.)[7] How many of us have heard the truth of God and instead of believing, tried rather to rob God of his power by failing to expect more from God than we are able to understand?[8] How many Marthas do we have in the Church today? How many of us try to organize the Lordship out of Jesus and freedom out of the Spirit? How many of us have chosen the wrong thing? “I liked what drank so much better than what I heard”—this is how we respond to God, bemused and interested in something else.
For me, one of the most intriguing Christian thinkers of the last century was a complex Frenchman named Jacques Ellul. Writing just after World War II, Ellul said, “the world of the present day is reaping what Christians have sown…We have conquered on the material level, but we have been spiritually defeated.”[9] Christians had become distracted by what he called “technics,” a sort of technological fascination with human ability. That is, Christians had become seduced into confusing the good with whatever we were able to achieve technologically. And confusing the good with what we were simply able to achieve, we traded genuine good for false good, a false good determined by a rather sinister logic of technology and the market. “In this terrible dance,” Ellul said, “no one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed—to go nowhere.”[10] You see we can trick ourselves. We can fool ourselves into thinking Christianity and moral good is a matter of our arrangement, of our work alone. There really is a danger in imagining the will of God. God’s will, as we sometimes falsely dream it, becomes the playground of our pride and hate. Christian life is fundamentally a life of expectation, but to live this life truly we must banish the dreams we’ve made and continually search for the true will of the always surprising God. Even for us, the faithful, idolatry is a mighty temptation—the idols we make ourselves, even with the best intentions.
But what do we do? How do we avoid the idols of our good intentions? When Jesus visited the home of Martha, Mary her sister “sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.”[11] We know nothing of what Mary thought. We don’t know what she made of Jesus’ words. Some may see something else, but I think she was beautifully silent. She represents something of the silence of the mystic. Hers is no sort of quietism; rather, hers is an active gaze made ever more human because of the human person upon whom she looks. She is silent and in love. As Jesus said, “Mary has chosen the better part.”[12]
This, it seems to me, is what we need to be about in this troubled world. We must not take Christ for granted but look and listen and choose the better part, the part that will not be taken away. This silent Mary should become our patroness. Her gazing, her listening, her silence ought to be our model. We try to emulate her in our worship, but often fail in a cheap exchange of words. Too many of us fear silence. In prayer, with others, alone with ourselves—we fear quietness. Even here, we’re anxious before the silent vulnerability of the bread, that consecrated host, the Lamb led silently to the slaughter.[13] And so we assault divine silence with cheap words. But faith is silent. That is the secret.
We must become content to waste time as Mary did. We must be content to look at Christ in silence—not squandering the patience of faith for the sinister illusion of safety, certainty, and endless commentary. We are in an uncertain time, confusing and dangerous, and the peculiar temptation for us at this moment is to manipulate, to organize, campaign and explain ourselves out of the chaos. Our temptation is to marshal the chaos into something manageable, usually organizing those with whom we disagree out of our lives. Often we’re a church full of Marthas. Like her, we don’t believe our house is ready to receive Jesus. We think we have to do something else to get it just right. We don’t believe in grace.
A dangerous habit has arisen among some of us: the habit of being too interested, too fascinated and too wrapped up in the humiliating politics of man. There are those who cling to the latest news, people given over to the fetish of politics and power. Now while we need to attend to the great and pressing struggles of our Church and society, there is that ever so subtle danger that in attending to these things so intently (that is, so intently that we forget to pray), we lose sight of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In our fascination with political struggles, we can begin to imagine that the resolution of our woes comes only with the elimination of our troubles. We can begin to imagine that the final victory of God is something we achieve, and not him. It is possible, in fighting for a noble cause, to lose sight of Jesus. This is always a danger, and we should be on guard for our souls.
In that classic, the Inferno, Dante on his journey got distracted by the sight of two liars eternally bickering. Fascinated by the sight, he “was all intent on listening to them,” the text says. It was at the moment of intense fascination, at the sight of those two liars fighting, that Virgil stepped in saying angrily, “Go right on looking and its I who’ll quarrel with you.” Instantly shamed, Dante turned away and carried on. But Virgil then moved to comfort Dante saying, “set down…such remorse. Do not forget I’m always at your side.”[14] Dante’s purpose, you see, was the spiritual journey. He was wasting valuable spiritual time, gawking over scandal. We can be like this, distracted by lesser and less helpful things.
But we’re not altogether doomed by tired distraction. Sarah was blessed despite her laughter, and Jesus didn’t refuse Martha. We won’t be refused either if we stand in our humiliation—if we repent. If finally we sit at Jesus’ feet like Mary did and listen, if we finally choose the better part, the Lordship of Christ and not the lordship of our own making. If we do this, then we will have what Mary has, and it will not be taken away from us.[15] Only then can we take on the sufferings that remain for the sake of Christ’s body, the Church.[16]
[1] This joke comes from LBJ
[2] Romans 7:19, 24
[3] Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 11.35.48
[4] Genesis 3:8-9
[5] Luke 15:20
[6] Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila 1
[7] Genesis 17:17
[8] John Calvin, On Genesis 18.14
[9] Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 17
[10] Ibid., 56
[11] Luke 10:39
[12] Luke 10:42
[13] Isaiah 53:7
[14] Dante, Inferno, 30.130-145
[15] Luke 10:42
[16] Colossians 1:24
© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
