St Mary the Virgin Cathedral, Diocese of Port Elizabeth
Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin
14th September 2025
Readings: Genesis 3:4-15; Psalm 84; Galatians 4: 1-7; Luke 11:27-28
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, people of God in the Diocese of Port Elizabeth and the city of Gqeberha, it is an honour and a privilege to have been asked to share with you the Word of God at this service. We celebrate a remarkable milestone as we recognise 200 years of worship and witness in this church, first the Collegiate Church of St Mary the Virgin, and now the Cathedral of the same name. On behalf of the whole Province, that is the Anglican Church across Southern Africa, I bring you our warm congratulations!
Thank you to you, Vicar-General Sharon, Canon Kula, and your leadership team, as well as the diocesan family for inviting me to join you in your celebrations. Thank you too, all of you who have worked hard behind the scenes to prepare for this service. And a special welcome to distinguished guests, fellow clergy, and to all of you, the whole wonderful family from all corners of this diocese. Your record of witness, service and ministry through God’s love and grace in this diocese is inspiring, especially during these challenging times.
That helpful little aid to our devotions, the booklet Saints and Seasons, sums up beautifully the centrality of your patronal saint to the story of Jesus. During Jesus’s life, Mary was often among the women who followed him and ministered to his needs. At his death, at Calvary, she was among the few who stood at the foot of the Cross. And after the Resurrection she was to be found with the apostles watching and praying until the coming of the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
And from a modern-day perspective, isn’t it fascinating what a prominent role Mary and other women played in the Jesus story? Scholars now highlight how unusual it was at the time Jesus lived for women to be given the role they are given in the Christian gospels. In Jewish law, women were not seen as reliable witnesses, yet the accounts of Matthew, Mark and John all record that women were the first to witness the empty tomb and the Resurrection.
Having said that about the status accorded to women in the Gospels, let me turn to our Old Testament reading, and to the account of the Fall in the Book of Genesis (Gen. 4:3-15). To modern ears, that is a more difficult read, involving as it does a man blaming a woman for his wrongdoing. The story presents to us the original transgression, the breaking of the law, and thus the entrance of sin to humanity. The serpent was the instrument of Satan, who turned the opportunities given to us by God into an avenue of temptation. The slithering movement of a reptile hidden by its camouflage in the undergrowth made it symbolically suitable as a medium for the schemings of the devil. In her exchange with the serpent, Eve accepted Satan’s violation of the law of God’s kingdom, yielding to the authority which Satan had appropriated.
However, sisters and brothers, it is important to note that although Eve was the first to stumble, the complete Fall of humanity was to involve not just deception by the woman but the transgression of the man. In the combined action of both, Satan in one stroke re-interpreted God as a devil, a liar possessed by jealous pride, and presented the path to being cursed as the way to blessing. As a result of their disobedience, sin entered the world, and a sense of shame attaching to physical nakedness manifested itself in a consciousness of inner nakedness. The evasive half-truth in Adam’s response to God about his sense of nakedness was, like his fear, an evil consequence of his rebellion.
When God saw through Adam’s behaviour, exposing his act of disobedience as a root of evil, Adam avoided confessing guilt by transferring blame. Then Eve sought to escape blame herself by pointing her finger at the serpent. Thus does Satan’s instrument, slithering in the dust, subject to trampling, become a symbol of Satan’s humiliation.
(As an aside, hearing God’s words to the serpent in today’s reading reminded me of how Archbishop Desmond Tutu used to joke that he sometimes felt sorry for the serpent—when the man was caught out, he blamed the woman, then she blamed the snake, and the poor snake, being a mere reptile which couldn’t speak, had no one else to blame! But to get back to my exegesis...)
Paul’s letter to the Galatians (4:1-7)—one of the epistles that we definitely know came from Paul’s hand—makes it clear that after the comprehensiveness of the Fall described in Genesis, our salvation as sons and daughters of God depends totally on the incarnation, the atonement and the Holy Spirit. The Gospel reading (Luke 11:27-28) brings Mary back into the picture, not as someone to be worshipped herself, but as someone who fulfills God’s word in delivering God’s instrument for rescuing humanity. We can read into the text the lesson that the Pharisees should have realised that Jesus was speaking God’s word without there being wonderful signs to confirm it.
The second century theologian Irenaeus—declared by Pope Francis in 2022 as one of the saints whose writings have special authority—draws together beautifully how God’s purpose unfolds in history, linking the witness of the Old Testament to that of the New in a way that is relevant to our readings today. The Oxford University church historian, Professor McCulloch has written of how Irenaeus loved to stress the symmetries to be discerned in the Bible: “...[T]hus the fall of the first man, Adam, was remedied by the second Adam, Christ, rising from the dead; the disobedience of the woman Eve remedied by the obedience of the woman Mary; the fateful role of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was remedied by the Tree of Life which was Christ’s cross.”
As the people of Gqeberha, of the Eastern Cape and of South Africa, today’s readings reassure you that all of you here, members of the Cathedral Church of St Mary the Virgin and of the Diocese of Port Elizabeth, are part of God’s plan for the world, just as Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary, were part of God’s plan for the world.
Understandably, sometimes it’s difficult to see that we are part of God’s plan. Is the confusion and uncertainty over the election of a new bishop of Port Elizabeth part of God’s plan? Are the current struggles in this city, in the Eastern Cape, and indeed across South Africa, part of God’s plan?
Of course this Diocese is not the only one affected by legal challenges, whether to episcopal elections or on other issues, mainly arising from the management of our human resources, which usually means relations between bishops and clergy. Although it’s very frustrating to see hundreds of thousands of rands being spent on legal fees instead of on mission—often fruitlessly because so many of the cases are not well-founded—it is in some ways understandable as people test the limits of the new rights we have under our Constitution. Given that context, the process we are going through is succeeding, case by case, in refining church order, so enhancing the predictability of how the law affects the church. We take ourselves and the needs of people affected prayerfully and seriously, trying our best to discern how to approach each matter in a way which will build up the family of God. Our Canons are much improved, we have fine people serving on our Canon Law Council and we can even dream of establishing an Institute for Canon Law at CoTT. I am pleased that we have been able to affirm that the Elective Assembly to choose a successor to Bishop Eddie will go ahead soon. Let us soak the Diocese in prayer for a new leader.
Your founding fathers planted this Cathedral Church and Diocese through turbulent times of colonialism, oppression, pandemic and sometimes of war. As you move forward with a new bishop into the next 200 years and beyond, you will be challenged to revisit your vision for the Cathedral and the Diocese for the years to come. The Diocese, birthed from a huge Diocese of Grahamstown, remains a big diocese geographically. Might you want to think of adding a Suffragan Bishop to ease the load, or perhaps of negotiating the extent of your boundaries with neighbouring dioceses in the Northern Cape and Free State? I pose these as questions, not proposals!
In public life beyond the church, you are known as a diocese steeped in the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures, powerful in your ecumenical witness with sister churches in the region, and outward looking when it comes to the challenges of the communities in which you are rooted. Like Cape Town, you have serious crime and violence problems. In Cape Town, we recently convened a meeting of leaders of all the faith groupings in the region to liaise with the Minister of Police and come up with comprehensive plans to defeat the drug-fuelled gang violence which destroys the lives of so many of our people. As Anglicans in Gqeberha and the Eastern Cape, you as the Cathedral and the Diocese are well placed to be a beacon of light, working as part of a community known for its action based on faith, action that is aimed at overcoming unemployment and inequality, action that seeks to end poverty, and action that will defeat crime and end fear. In so doing, you will make the eternal life we receive from Christ felt in the here and now, bettering the lives of many in and around Gqeberha, the rest of Eastern Cape, South Africa and beyond.
Our assurance is that God has, again and again, met people and sent them out to proclaim his truth, with clarity and courage, through difficult and challenging times in the past. And God will do so again today and in the future in this Cathedral and Diocese.
In closing, I congratulate you again very warmly on your 200th anniversary. Celebrate it, and build upon it for the sake of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
God loves you and so do I. Amen.
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of ACSA
