October Devotions

Homily for October Devotions Sunday 3 October 2010

Today’s gospel at Mass is from St Luke chapter 17 and it in Luke has Our Lord speaking of faith, and answering the disciples’ request for an increase in their faith by mentioning the mustard seed- if only you had faith the size of a tiny grain of mustard…and so on. Luke rather likes this image of the mustard seed, he has already referred to it in an earlier chapter (Lk 13 xix) when he compares the kingdom of God, the ideal and easy relationship that mankind should have with God, as “like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden”. Now St Ambrose commenting on this text back in the fourth century said “The Lord himself is the mustard seed”. Our Lord is the seed sown in the garden. And I raise this idea with you because I want to reflect this afternoon with you on one of Our Lady’s ancient titles, but one that is not in the well known Litany of Loretto which we shall address to her later in our devotions today- it is “Our Lady, the Garden Enclosed”- or it the Latin, Hortus Conclusus”. This was a late mediaeval devotion particular to the Low Countries- there is in the cathedral of Ypres still a shrine to Our Lady of the Garden.
This title is a very rich image. The word “garden” brings so many scripture passages at once to mind doesn’t it. The garden of Eden- that perfect state in which humans in their innocence could naturally and without effort maintain the intimacy with God that is our destiny. In the creation account in Genesis 2 we read “God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man he had formed” (Gen 2 viii). And of course the garden was the place of the fall, of the disobedience of man and woman, after which they forfeited for us all the right to inhabit that place of peaceful co-existence with God, they are expelled from it because of their sin. So no human being is in the garden, no one can be so innocent and free of self will any more to qualify as it were to be in the garden – or is there someone? Is there? Of course – the one sinless member of our race, Our Lady herself. She, as we have said before, allowed no shred of self, of selfishness and self will, to come between herself and the will of God for her, the version of herself that God wanted her to be. And therefore she inhabits still the garden, the garden of innocence and of perfect harmony with God that we the rest of us find so elusive and difficult to maintain.
We will come back to Our Lady, but for a moment let’s concentrate on her Son, her Son and the garden. God put Adam into a garden, and Adam messed the garden up. Now who else does God put in a garden? Yes, he puts that part of the Divinity that is Our Lord Jesus, who has taken on human flesh to become, as St Paul loves to tell us, the second Adam. Newman’s hymn springs to mind- “A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. Quite a lot of things happen to Jesus in a garden, don’t they: the Passion begins on the Mount of Olives, where St John tells us “there was a garden, into which he went with his disciples” (Jn 18 i) and here of course he was arrested; later we read in John that Jesus is crucified and died in a garden- “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had been yet buried” (Jn19 xli). And so, like the mustard seed sown in the garden where it must die underground, Jesus is buried in a garden, and just as a vast mustard tree will in the fullness of time grow from that seed, so the vast living edifice that is the Church will arise from Our Lord in his resurrection life.
We could go on with this, and think about the connexions with the word “tree”- Jesus hanging on the tree in the garden of Calvary, and by his death on the tree bringing life to the whole of humanity, and that other tree, which God has planted in the Genesis story – “the tree of life in the middle of the garden” (Gen 2 ix). But back to Our Lady! Our Lady has been called a garden, partly because she cannot leave the paradise of harmony with God by any sinfulness, which has barred all of us; but she is called “A garden enclosed” and this is a way of describing her fruitfulness that is combined with her virginity: this is a quotation from the Song of Songs used from the patristic period of Our Lady: “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride, a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain”. (Cant 4 xii). And so we move to a further development: Our Lady is not only a garden, she is a garden reserved for God’s own use, a garden which no man can enter, or should presume to enter, because God’s Holy Spirit came to this garden to overshadow it and engender in the garden of Our Lady’s womb the seed that would be the second Adam, the one that would help us all find our way back to paradise, to the garden of harmony with God. This idea is foreshadowed in the prophesies of Ezekiel, where he speaks of the Eastern Gate of the Temple as being permanently shut- (Ezek 44 ii)- because God once entered through it: “for the Lord the God of Israel has entered by it, therefore it shall remain shut”. Again, the Fathers of the Early Church were clear that this referred to Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, and so this title, the Shut Gate, Porta Clausa, was also used of Our Lady. I think that in this passage in Ezekiel there is a prediction if you like of what we are doing today, of the great devotion that would come in later centuries to Our Lady, the garden in which God planted his seed. I end with this verse (Ezek 46 iii): “The people of the land shall worship at the entrance of that Gate before the Lord”. We are your people, Lord Jesus, and here we are in your presence, and we feel the presence close to us of your holy Mother whom we honour today, we venerate her as the Garden and as the Gate, the Gate through which you passed as you came into our world. Let us always worship at the entrance of that gate. Amen.