Sermon for the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, Choral Evensong

admin | 28 October 2012

“I do as the Father has commanded me,
so that the world may know that I love the Father”

It is surely a kind of wonderful providence that our second lesson should encompass this morning’s Gospel at Holy Communion. A wonderful providence that confirms the essential point that the Holy Spirit “shall teach [us] all things and bring all things to [our] remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you,” Jesus says. Somehow that point is brought home to us in the collocation of these lessons. But are we listening?

Or shall we discover our unbelief and our disdain and dismissal of the “righteous man” whom we have afflicted, scorned and derided only to discover that “it was we who strayed from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness did not shine on us, and the sun did not rise upon us?” Such have we heard in our first lesson from Wisdom this evening. To hear that would be a saving knowledge, to be sure, but how much better to let God’s Word have its resonance in us and in our lives? For that is the point.

There are things here for us to ponder and learn. This whole chapter from John’s Gospel opens out to us something of the mystery of the Trinity and in ways that have caused no end of perplexity and grief. They are part and parcel of the working out of a cogent and comprehensive understanding of the mystery of God revealed in Jesus Christ that results in the great Creeds of the Church. What is the perplexing and controversial point in continuation of this passage which I have taken the liberty to read? Well, Jesus says that “the Father is greater than I.” Taking that phrase at face value, some, if not many have concluded that Jesus is not truly God, that he is less than God, that “there was when he was not” as the Arians would say – all of which is contrary to the faith which we confess in the great Creeds of the Catholic Faith.

To see Jesus in this way as subordinate to the Father in his very nature and being misses two crucial and important things. First, Jesus says this in the context of his preparing the disciples for his leaving them and the world and going to the Father which should be an occasion of rejoicing, not sorrow, and it should be that because he is “go[ing] to the Father” as the obedient son, as the son who is defined by his loving relation to the Father, the point of emphasis in tonight’s appointed text. Secondly, and this is to speak theologically, Jesus is not less than the Father in terms of his divinity but in terms of his humanity, the vehicle of his free willing subordination to the will of the Father as the Son, a will with which he is utterly at one. I know, it all sounds like so much intellectual noise and nonsense. But it isn’t. It is really about something very simple. God in the truth of his being engages us in the truth of our humanity in Jesus Christ who is true God and true man, “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,” as the Nicene Creed so eloquently and clearly states. There can be no salvation, no hope or desire for our perfection, our completeness, our blessedness or, to put it in another kind of language, for any meaning and purpose to our lives, apart from God in Christ.

What Jesus teaches us here is the condition of his mission. “He has come to do the will of him who sent him”– the Father’s will. He subordinates himself to that will and in so doing makes it his own. He is not less than the Father in his being, his nature, but he acquiesces to the will of the Father in his Sonship and in so doing teaches us about our obedience to God’s Word and will.

The lesson is positive, good and holy. We may reject it only to discover, like the persecutors of the righteous in the lesson from Wisdom, the sad and sorry truth of our untruth and our unrighteousness. The Father sends the Holy Spirit in the name of the Son and it is our task and challenge to think and understand and believe what we have been given to see and know. Such are the lessons of divine love on the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude. They recall us to the true nature of the apostolic fellowship of the heavenly Jerusalem, whose twelve gates and twelve foundations with the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb have nothing less than “Jesus Christ himself [as] being the head corner-stone,” without whom we have no hope and no life and no love.