Month: April 2013

“The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries upon centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read in the Easter Season. Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is the strong theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it, namely, that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

We forget, I think, that Christ the Good Shepherd is also the Lamb of God. We forget that the care of the Good Shepherd has cure in it, the cure of the radical dis-ease of our souls because we are so wrapped up in ourselves that we no longer know how to live beyond ourselves and for one another. We can’t on the strength of our own power. We can only through the power of Christ living within us. But that means precisely dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another, the very thing that God shows us as belonging to his very nature.

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“Now I go my way to him that sent me”

The contrasts between sin and grace, between heaven and earth, and between God and man are essential features of religious philosophy. They are always before us in the liturgy or worship of the Church and in the Scripture readings. How to think about these contrasts is a critical task of our lives in faith.

The Eucharistic readings of Eastertide present these contrasts in very powerful ways. We are being challenged to think through them in order to grasp the wonder of Christ’s Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives. The Gospel readings for the last three Sundays of Eastertide are all taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. Jesus is preparing the disciples for his going from us into the darkness of the death of his crucifixion, on the one hand, and into the glory of his eternal life with the Father, on the other hand. We may find the first easier to understand but I suspect we are equally challenged about both.

Jesus seems to know about what is going to happen to him and this, perhaps, perplexes us. And yet, John, especially, is always drawing our attention to the theological idea of the Incarnation, the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, as the essential tenet upon which the whole story stands or falls. The crucifixion cannot be simply an accident either from the standpoint of our humanity or from the divine standpoint. That would render it entirely meaningless and miss the outstanding theological point of the Resurrection. God is able to make something good out of our evil. Nowhere do we see the potentialities for human evil more graphically and more completely than in the Crucifixion of Christ. The whole packet of human sin, past, present and future is already comprehended in the arms of the Crucified Christ. That is why images of the Crucifixion remain such a fundamental feature of Christian art and architecture.

One of the features of the liturgical revolution, especially for Anglicans, has been to downplay this essential idea, but the ideology of progressive liberalism is bankrupt and, in one way or another, we all know this, though we don’t want to face it. We live in a “disordered world” precisely because of our attachment to the themes of material prosperity, scientific naturalism and technological progress; all of which assumptions need, at the very least, to be qualified and critically examined. The idea of a disordered world, of course, is not new – which is a good thing. Why? Because the readings that are before us today, and which have been part of the life of the Church for centuries, provide us with a way to think about our own disorders and distresses by recalling us to God’s story in Jesus Christ.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church; the life of prayer and praise is about our communion with God. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

What do we mean by the disordered world? We can no longer deceive ourselves about being “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes IV), it seems to me. We live in the ruins of a revolution. We live, certainly, in the failure and collapse of certain assumptions about material prosperity and about scientific progress. We are beset by the prophets of apocalyptic doom and, no, they are not religious fanatics so much as doomsday environmentalists. And yet, even that is being challenged. In short, without giving a full blown chronicle of the contradictions, confusions and complexities of our contemporary world, disordered seems to fit the bill rather nicely and to capture our present sense of uncertainty and unease.

How to deal with it? I think this is where an openness to what we have forgotten and dismissed and even denied is required. What is it? Simply what we are being given to see in these remarkable lessons which belong to the season of Easter. They offer nothing less than a new and radical way of looking at our humanity. The doctrine of the Resurrection, I wish to argue, speaks wonderfully and profoundly to the disorders of our world and day.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church, concentrated for us in the Great Thanksgiving Prayer at Holy Communion. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues, in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

(more…)

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