Christ Church

“You have received a spirit of sonship”

The year was 524. The place was Pavia, a northern Italian town. The person, a scholar and public official, named Boethius, languishing in prison falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He would be brutally killed. But not before writing one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. Along with his theological works, it would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and thought.

The word “person”, much invoked in the contemporary discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutyches. Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Boethius’ argument serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there followed the application of the term to our humanity. For Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago dei which in the Christian understanding is imago Christi, imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity through the image of Christ in us. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known and through which we begin to know ourselves as selves; in short, as persons.

The word person derives from the Greek προσοπον and the Latin persona, originally in the context of ancient Greek tragedies. The terms refer to the masks worn by actors through which they spoke, as in sounding through, but as such conveying meaning and understanding of character. What is Boethius’s definition? “Person is an individual substance of a rational nature.” Compact, precise, and comprehensive, it highlights the spiritual and intellectual features of our humanity that embrace and contain the various aspects of human individuality. The theological context suggests that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God, emphasizing that our humanity is radically incomplete apart from God. Even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology.

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“I am the vine, ye are the branches … Abide in my love”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today offer an extended commentary on the last of the so-called “I Am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel; hence my text for this morning. “I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches … Abide in my love.” This expresses in a concrete and dynamic fashion the theme of sanctification that belongs to the Trinity season through our abiding in the images of Scripture; our inhabiting their meaning.

Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, the Collect gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as abiding in the truth of God revealed. The organic, agricultural images of grafting, growing, nurturing, and preserving follow upon a doctrinal, metaphysical understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding belongs to the meaning of these images. They are profoundly sacramental. Without such an understanding we are but the accidents of desire and the fall-out of circumstance; in short, radically unfree.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks about the sacrament of Holy Communion for there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things.” Through the compassion of Christ, we are fed in the wilderness and set upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” If we have been grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” then we must also live from the Word of God revealed. “I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in my love.”

We are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name.” Thus baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuing in the eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life.” The Epistle and Gospel show the intimate connection between baptism and communion. They are gemina sacramenta, “twin sacraments,” as Augustine notes.

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