Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Alphege (c. 953-1012), Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr (source):

O merciful God,
who didst raise up thy servant Alphege
to be a pastor of thy people
and gavest him grace to suffer for justice and true religion:
grant that we who celebrate his martyrdom
may know the power of the risen Christ in our hearts
and share his peace in lives offered to thy service;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Revelation 7:13-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:4-12

Artwork: Martyrdom of St Alphege, carved painting, Canterbury Cathedral.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Second Sunday after Easter.

“I am the good shepherd”

It is the classic Christian image of care and compassion and yet it is so often misunderstood in ways that diminish and deny human dignity and agency by rendering us passive and subject to the tyranny of others. In other words, care and compassion easily become the kindness that kills. This is contrary to the radical nature of care and compassion that belongs to Christ the Good Shepherd. The radical nature of the image shows us the care that has cure in it and that belongs to the dynamic of essential life in us. In this sense it is not simply about being taken care of. It is not about who is going to take care of me so much as how am I going to take care of others and myself. The care of others is not about controlling others for that would be to use others for our own ends. Such is manipulation and abuse, the care that is uncare. It makes us victims and victims twice over when we think that we are victims. We lose the agency that belongs to the image.

The radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd has altogether to do with the Passion and the Resurrection. We forget that this image is a resurrection image. It is about the triumph of life over death and about living in the meaning of that overcoming of sorrow and sadness, of evil and death. Why? Because of the essential life of God. “God is the beginning and end of all beings but especially rational beings,” as Aquinas notes. As the Epistle reading from 1st Peter puts it, “ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” That return is God’s grace moving in us, alive in us through our awareness of both our waywardness and of our redemption.  We return to the truth of ourselves in God.

The Gospel makes this clear. Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” and grounds that saying in his relation to the Father. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” The care here is self-giving love, the love which is greater than death, the love which gives entirely of itself and is never exhausted. Such is the radical meaning of the Resurrection in and through the Passion. We are known in God’s eternal knowing and loving. That is essential life and the radical meaning of the image.

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Sunday, April 25th, St. Mark/Third Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, April 27th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: On the Shoulders of Giants (2017, trans. 2019) by Umberto Eco and The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and The Invention of Art (2017) by Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney.

The collect for today, The Second Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 2:19-25
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Viera Hlonikova, Jesus as Shepherd, 1987, Block print with hand coloring.

Touch me not … Touch and see

The twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel contributes greatly to our understanding and thinking about the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. It complements the idea of the interplay between ontology and epistemology that we talked about last week in the story of the Road to Emmaus. We learn about the reality of essential life through words and deeds, through different forms of knowing. That, too, is highlighted in this remarkable chapter.

The first part of the chapter is read as the Gospel on Easter Day and continues on the Evening of Easter Day; then the story of the Risen Christ appearing to the disciples (minus Thomas) behind closed doors is read on the following Sunday, the Octave Day of Easter, with the scene of his appearing again behind closed doors to the disciples (now with ‘doubting’ Thomas) read on the Evening of the Octave Day of Easter.

How do we deal with disappointment, with sorrow and loss, with fears and anxieties, with suffering and death? This is especially important in a week that concerns the death of Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, as well as a former chaplain, Rev’d James Small, and, very sadly, Josh Baker (Class of 2013). Do we run away like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus? Do we go and hide in the bathroom? Or do we face things honestly and thoughtfully? This chapter speaks precisely to such concerns and in ways that belong to the educational project of the School. In Chapel on Monday and Tuesday, we heard part of the beginning of Chapter Twenty. It is the powerful and, dare I say, ‘touching’ story of Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning grief and sorrow to the tomb of Christ a second time. On Thursday and Friday, we read the second half of the Chapter about Jesus appearing twice to the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors. In the first part, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, noli me tangere, touch me not. In the second part, Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his sides and later tells Thomas to touch and to see and believe. Don’t touch and then touch! Two completely contrary commands in the same chapter.

In both cases we are being made aware of the Resurrection as belonging to the being of things, to reality. It is all about essential life, the essential life of God which is the principle of all life. Such is ontology, our knowing about being. But we come to that in different ways each accord to the capacity of the knower to know, we might say with Augustine; in short, by various forms of epistemology, the different ways of knowing

There are things that are known to us through the operation of our minds independent of things outside our minds which becomes known as rationalism. But there are things that are made known to us through our sense perception of the world which is empiricism. It is not simply a matter of one over and against the other but a matter of recognising both ways of knowing as belonging to our grasp, albeit in a glass darkly, of reality.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave Day of Easter.

“There are three that bear witness”

The week of Easter immerses us in the accounts of the Resurrection just as Holy Week immersed us in the Passion. In both the Gospel of John plays a crucial role as providing the underlying logic to the accounts of both Passion and Resurrection. This is simply to recognize what we see or know through the eyes of John whose Gospel helps to illuminate what belongs to the unity of the Scriptures of the New Testament and in its relation to the Jewish Scriptures; in short, to what is known as the Canon of the Scripture, and by extension to the development of the Creeds. The Bible did not just drop out of the sky. To call it the Word of God does not deny in any way how it has come together in its parts and as a whole through human agency precisely in our engagement with the things which are written and passed on.

It is important to mention this with respect to the Resurrection since the readings both in Easter week and throughout the Easter season show us the way in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. John’s Gospel is particularly helpful in highlighting the unity or balance between ontology and epistemology, how we think about being or reality, and how we think about thought or the forms of knowing.

It is known as the Johannine Comma. It is not about punctuation – itself a most helpful innovation that helps to clarify the relation of phrases and words. The term here refers to a phrase or clause either added to the fifth chapter of I John or removed from it. It is one of the notorious mysteries about the transmission of texts. While not found in the earliest New Testament manuscripts known to us which don’t predate the second and third centuries, it seems to have been received and accepted by some theologians such as Origen. And it appears in much later texts and entered into the later translations such as the King James Version of 1611 which, following Tyndale, drew upon Erasmus’s third critical edition of the Greek New Testament which included it. It doesn’t appear in Luther’s Deustche Bibel since he based his German translation of the New Testament upon Erasmus’s second critical edition of the New Testament which excluded it.

The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer which have used the King James Version for the Epistles and Gospels since 1662 have therefore included this phrase right up until fairly recently. It was in the 1918 Canadian Prayer Book but absent from the 1928 American Prayer Book and quietly disappeared in the 1959/1962 Prayer Book. Some of you are just old enough perhaps to remember this. What is the phrase and what is the controversy?

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Tuesday, April 13th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, April 18th, Second Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, The Octave Day of Easter, being The Sunday After Easter Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:4-12
The Gospel: St. John 20:19-23

Artwork: Cristoforo de Predis, The Risen Jesus Appears to His Disciples (from Codex of Predis), 1476. Miniature, Royal Library, Turin.