Christ Church

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Jesus meets us as mourners several times in the Scriptures. In every encounter something happens that speaks to human suffering and to human dignity. As today’s Gospel story illustrates, there is something uniquely human in the very act of burying the dead. It means that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences; a counter to the various reductionisms of ourselves whether it be to genes or hormones, to culture or history, to cosmic or climate forces real or imagined, to class or economics, to social constructs or political agendas; in short, the problems of the ‘natural sciences’ as transposed and magnified in the ‘human sciences’.

These are all things that happen to us, to be sure, but are we reduced to such things? Or does the pathos, the pathétic, of life in its self-affectivity mean that we are more than these reductive externalities? Suffering has its fullest and deepest expression in death and mourning; in short, in the forms of our self-awareness as living beings. Thus these encounters highlight the gathering of all human suffering into the compassion of Christ, and thus to the redemption and restoration of the dignity of our humanity through suffering.

Jesus encounters a funeral procession on their way to a burial. A young man has died and is being carried out of the city of Nain. He is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” as Luke poignantly tells us. We feel her loss, as we commonly say, in an effort to comfort both the grieving and ourselves. But what does that really mean?

I have pondered that question in the realization that there is something profoundly and uniquely human about the burying of the dead precisely at the time in our culture when there is a very real danger of losing this sensibility, and thus losing what it means to be human. Reflecting on this requires looking into what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abyss of time” (Tempest). historically and in literature itself, one of the greatest witnesses to human culture and so to human suffering and dignity.

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“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”

Today’s Epistle from Galatians complements Holy Cross Day which is tomorrow, September 14th. The Major Feast days in the Church Calendar are known as “Red Letter Days” because in the manuscript tradition they were highlighted in red, rubro in Latin, from which we also get the idea of rubrics or directions in the Prayer Book. Ironically they are printed in the Prayer Book Calendar in bold black letters! The Major Holy Days highlight important moments in the life of Christ and the Apostles and others named in the New Testament Scriptures.

There are also a number of Minor Feast days or “Black Letter Days” that commemorate events or people in the history of the Church. Holy Cross is a Minor feast day, associated with an historic event, the so-called “discovery of the Cross” of Christ’s crucifixion by the Empress Helena in the fourth century, originally commemorated on May 3rd as The Invention of the Holy Cross, meaning discovery, and then as The Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14th in the basilica in Jerusalem. Both feasts were known in Saxon times as Roodmas-day; Rood means cross in Old English. Both feasts were restored in the calendar of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother-prayer book of what has come to be known as the Anglican Communion.

These titles belong to Holy Cross Day, September 14th. It also serves as a marker for an ancient sensibility about the natural seasons of the year in relation to the Sanctorale, the cycle of Saints’ days within the structure of the Church Year. The Autumn Ember Days occur on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after Holy Cross Day. In the Canadian BCP, a Collect for Holy Cross Day (BCP, p. 321) is appointed along with a permissive rubric about using the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday. A nice provision, it underscores the interrelationship of justification, sanctification, and glorification through the centrality of the Cross. All these considerations speak to the theological significance of the Cross in the life of the Christian Church as today’s Epistle indicates. Along with the awareness of the patterns of the seasons of nature, the Ember Days highlight the ordained ministry of the Church, directing that the Pentecost Ember Day propers about the divers Orders in the Church be always used first in the other Ember seasons.

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