‘The One Thing Needful’
Ben Quash
Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
For your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely. (Song 2:14)
We fail all the time to give due recognition to others — to
allow them to be really present to us as themselves. But we also fail
to make ourselves recognisable to them; to show the truth of ourselves
in a way that makes us really knowable and genuinely present to them. I
think of this latter withholding — the withholding of ourselves,
the refusal to give others any opportunity to recognise or acknowledge
us — as a form of "one-way looking." "One-way" looking is the
attempt to avoid reciprocity: to look without being looked at; to have
knowledge, and even intimacy, without presence or self-offering. It is,
in that sense, a form of spying.
But our calling as human creatures is not to withhold our presence
from those around us. Our calling is to bestow ourselves; to seek
ever-new ways of being more fully present to our brothers and sisters,
and the people God gives us to share our lives with.
There is something bold to be said in all this about a theological
anthropology. A scriptural view of the human being — of what the
human being is for, and of what his or her vocation is —
is partly that he or she is made to be a recogniser. The
vocation of the human being is, amongst other things, to
recognise. This seems, for example, to be a fundamental insight
of Karl Rahner’s theology. All creation is oriented towards a
fulfilment in God — through all levels and stages of being, from
the primeval slime onwards — but it is uniquely the human being
who is bestowed with the gift of consciousness, of knowledge of self.
In the human being, the created order can think at last; it can
think about itself. It can be present to itself, in a distinctive and
higher way than through the fact that its parts are just materially
lumped together. It can be present to itself in the medium of
consciousness. It can also think beyond itself, towards God —
and so God too becomes present to the created order in a new and higher
way, through the medium of the human being. (This is almost a priestly
vocation - mediating God to the world and representing the world to God
in the medium of consciousness.) God through the human being, who is
the priest of creation, becomes present in knowledge as well as
(implicitly) in the stuff of being. We get a vivid representation of
this high vocation of the human being — the vocation to be a
recogniser — in the Genesis account of the naming of the
animals. This naming is the human being’s role in the context of
the whole creation — no other part of creation can do this. In
Adam’s work of naming, we have an image of the created order
recognising itself, acknowledging itself, in recognition of God and in
cooperation with God.
The vocation of being acknowledgers or recognisers, therefore, draws
us into close cooperation with the will of God — when we perform
the role properly. When we cooperate with the will of God, we discover
the work of acknowledgement (or recognition, or naming) to be a ministry
of truth and love. True naming, true recognition, can only happen when
we acknowledge the fullness of God’s presence in others (other
beings, other people). That is another way of saying that it can only
happen when we approach the other in love. Any name we give and any
recognition we bestow without love will be a false or misleading
name, and a misrecognition. When we do acknowledge and recognise
one another in love, meanwhile, we are actually sharing in the divine
life — we are more adequately reflecting the image of God, for
God is himself a recogniser.
(In the Christian tradition this is shown by those passages in
John’s Gospel which, more than any others in the Bible, show the
trinitarian life to us. And the movement that we see is described as
being like a movement of recognition, acknowledgement, love, presence.
The trinitarian life is one of total mutual recognition and
recognisability, total mutual acknowledgement and openness to being
acknowledged; or, to put it another way, total presence. The Son truly
sees the Father, and the Father truly sees the Son. Not partially, not
with certain obstructions in the way, but completely. The Spirit looks
into the heart of both, and knows and has access to all the riches of
love and truth which are there. The Son does what he sees the Father
doing; the Father receives from and is glorified by the Son. The Spirit
abides in and with both, as they abide in each other. The Father is in
the Son, as the Son is in the Father. The Spirit can make them known in
their fullness because he lives in them and out the heart of them.
Perfect presence.)
The human vocation, in the image of God, is to know even as we are
known; to be utterly transparent to God; to hold back nothing from his
recognition; to hide from God no longer, but to be totally present to
him. This is achieved when we are conformed to the total presence of
God to himself. Maybe this is concordant with what Safi articulates in his paper:
The very purpose of creation, these Sufis remind us, is for the Divine
to manifest Himself in utter fullness, and for the creation to come into
that intimate relationship of knowledge and adoration with the Divine.
These reflections are activated in part by a reflection on where the
intense intimacy of the Song of Songs can be ‘heard’ in
Christian tradition — and more particularly in the texts of the
New Testament. The farewell discourses of Christ in John’s
Gospel are perhaps one of those places. There is also an unusual little
scene that appears only in Luke’s Gospel in which Mary of
Bethany, sister of Martha, sits at the feet of Jesus listening to him,
whilst her sister busies about the house:
38: Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house.
39: And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.
40: But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me."
41: But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things;
42: one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her." (Luke 10:38-42)
Maybe this Mary is the same woman who at another time anoints
Jesus’s feet (or head - Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9) with
incredibly costly ointment, so that the fragrance fills the whole house,
and who provokes Jesus’s comment that only a certain quality of
presence could evoke this extravagance — there is no other
justification for it. Certainly not a utilitarian break-down of this
lavish act into a calculus of ‘good works’, which could in
some way (it is supposed) have substituted for it:
2: There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Laz'arus was one of those at table with him.
3: Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.
4: But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said,
5: "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?"
6: This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it.
7: Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial.
8: The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me." (John 12:2-8)
What is this ‘one thing needful’? This is the question
entertained, perhaps, by the Song. It presents an extraordinary
intensity of relation, and (by its inclusion in the canon) it presents
it as somehow a ‘lesson to be learned’. This is also true
of the incident between Mary, Jesus and Martha in Luke’s Gospel,
which resonates for Christians with some of the qualities of the Song.
Here too is an extraordinary intensity of focus, and here too it is
presented (at least to Martha, in whose place the Christian reader may
well stand) as a ‘lesson to be learned’.
Some of the wonderful essays on the Song offered to the Society
emphasise the difficulty and disorientation it provokes. Where are we
to stand? Maybe we are not to stand anywhere at all, if to stand is to
have a place of leverage on the content of the Song — to feel
capable of applying it (instrumentally) to problems. Maybe it
wants us not so much to find a place to stand as to leave us lying down,
surrounded by lilies, or dreaming on our beds. Or sitting at the feet
of the Lord. Where do we stand in relation to the Song? We
don’t. We are disarmed, and invited to succumb — we, who
are ‘anxious and troubled about many things’.
Without this intensity at the heart of our involvement with God,
nothing else is worth it. Without Mary’s consuming offering of
her attention, her presence, to the one who offers love and truth to
her, all the worthy labour and hospitality of a Martha is a
distraction. Without the Song in the canon, the one thing needful is
missing.
Finding ourselves in this place, we do not (as Davis puts it) ‘have to
know just what to say’. Martha may find this attitude
‘peculiar and only minimally intelligible’ —
frankly impractical and useless in its failure to be goal-oriented
— but it is an attitude appropriate to the kind of offering made
in the Holy of Holies. ‘Seeking God for his own sake’, as
Safi reminds us.
While the king was on his couch,
My nard gave forth its fragrance . . .
Ah, you are beautiful, my love;
Ah, you are beautiful;
Your eyes are doves.
Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved,
truly lovely. (1:12, 15-16)
© 2003, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
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