by CCW | 17 March 2011 13:45
Matthew recalls Isaiah’s prophecy about the light that has arisen upon “them which sat in the region and shadow of death.” He does so in the context of Christ’s coming to Capernaum which is on the sea-coast of Galilee in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali. Christ’s coming there occasions the connection in his mind with Isaiah’s prophecy about those same sea-coast lands. Matthew is suggesting the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Christ Jesus, the Jesus whose mission of repentance, discipleship, healing and salvation are the very things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel.
The lesson from the Acts of the Apostles echoes that same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied,” we are told, and we hear of the spreading of that word into Seleucia and Cyprus through Barnabas and Saul; all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. With the commemoration of St. Patrick, we are taken in an opposite direction, “away in the lovable west,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, to the shores of Ireland but with that same spirit of mission. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland; the one who brought the good news of the Gospel to those sea-coast islands on the far, far reaches of Europe, the very outposts of civilization and order in the fifth century.
The remarkable spread of Christianity is one of the great mysteries of the world; an undeniable fact that bespeaks a remarkable revolution from pagan darkness to the light of Christ. With the coming of Christ, light and hope triumph over the dismal darkness and despairing fatalisms of the pagan cultures, whether sophisticated and urban or rustic and rural, whether ancient or modern. Patrick lit the paschal fire, the fire of Easter triumph of Christ’s resurrection, on the hill of Tara. It signaled the conversion of the Irish.
There is the necessary clash of cultures and civilizations that issues forth in a new understanding and a new world. We are, perhaps, cynical and suspicious about such clashes and collisions, seeing such things in the light of power and politics and despairing of that inward strength of vision which defined a new world to which figures like Patrick belonged. Sometimes we need to remember the Saints if only to be reminded of such possibilities for ourselves. In Christ we are ever in the world and never of the world. It is that outlook alone which changes the darkness into light; it turns the grim fatalisms of a hopeless world into joy and delight.
A joy and a delight in what? In the light and love of God the holy, blessed Trinity. “I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity.” Why the Trinity? Central to Patrick’s lovely hymn or poem, known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate and set to an ancient Irish melody arranged by C. Villiers Stanford, is the invocation of the Trinity, at once transcendent and immanent, the divine community from which and to which all nature and all human endeavour at once arises and returns. The hymn captures vividly this new sensibility. In Christ, we are joined to God and in him we find a world redeemed and renewed. It is in our hymn book at # 812[1].
The hymn has an evangelical impulse to it in the repetition of the phrase, “I bind unto myself.” Beginning with “the strong Name of the Trinity,” the poem suggests the soul’s commitment to the mysteries of Christ, the doctrinal moments in the Christ’s life rehearsed in the Creed, by which we are opened out to the greater mystery of God as Trinity and to a company of Angels, Confessors, Apostles, Patriarchs, Prophets and virgin souls, who are all defined by a like commitment.
It is the creed as a kind of poetic dance of the imagination, full of lively vigour and force.
I bind this day to me for ever,
By power of faith, Christ’s Incarnation;
His baptism in Jordan river;
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom.
And in a further poetic tour de force, the poem/hymn embraces the world of nature seen as the redeemed creation: “the virtues of the star-lit heaven, the glorious sun’s life-giving ray, the whiteness of the moon at even, the flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old eternal rocks.” It is the world seen as God’s world, the world which bears testimony to its maker and redeemer and yet remains inescapably nature as we experience and know it.
The fifth verse draws the mystery of God as Trinity to the very life of our souls, binding unto ourselves “the power of God to hold and heal,” reminding ourselves of God’s providential care, “his eye to watch, his might to stay,/his ear to hearken to my need,” themes that go far beyond the pagan cultus. And from the invocation of the divine power to preserve and protect, the verse shifts to “the wisdom of my God to teach” as part of that providential outlook, “his hand to guide, his shield to ward;” ending with the invocation of the divine word, “the word of God to give me speech/ his heavenly host to be my guard.” Always we are in the company of the Trinity and with the company of the host of heaven.
The hymn breaks off into a new modality in verse six which centers the Christian life and mission in the person of Christ in the most intense and intimate way, at once ecstatic and mystical. It is all Christ. Christ is all our prayer. “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.” The vision is comprehensive and total, comprehending, as it were, “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of Christ’s love as Paul puts it in Ephesians 3. “Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” Nothing, St. Paul suggests, “is able to separate us from the love of God which is Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39). Nowhere is that concept expressed more intensely and more positively and, perhaps, more beautifully, than in St. Patrick’s Breastplate.
The poem/hymn ends with a final verse that returns our souls to the Trinity with an even stronger affirmation of the Triune majesty of God, the God of our souls, “the Three in One, and One in Three,/ of whom all nature hath creation;/ Eternal Father, Spirit, Word;” concluding on the high note of praise “to the Lord of my salvation, Salvation is of Christ the Lord.”
Not a mention of a shillelagh or a shamrock; not a word of a snake or snakes or even of green beer, and not a whisper of melancholy and maudlin sentimentality. Instead, all is joy and all is praise and prayer. All is Christ in the mystery of the Trinity. It is, as Matthew suggests, the light of Christ to us in the darkness of our souls and our world and day.
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Patrick
March 17th, 2011
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/03/17/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-patrick-3/
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