Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

admin | 28 April 2013

“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.

The epistle reading from St. James offers a kind of religious commonplace in the contrast between the changing world and the unchanging reality of God and the idea that all and every good thing comes from above. A kind of religious commonplace, it is for our culture a radical teaching that we have, if not utterly repudiated, then certainly forgotten. It is part of the religion of atheism – a refusal to think the essential idea of God as eternal, unchanging, all good and all-knowing, to mention a few of the essential attributes of God. These concepts are critical for making sense of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection and essential for the possibilities of living ethically. Take them away and we are left with the destructive tyrannies of our empty souls.

“God alone,” the Collect rightly prays, “canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.” We pray for God’s grace that we “may love that which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise.” Only so can we persevere and hold on amid “the sundry and manifold changes of the world,” our hearts being firmly fixed “where true joys are to be found.” Guess what? Such things are not found in us. This is the great insight that we deny and dismiss. It is, however, experientially true. To raise our children without this teaching is to condemn them to unhappiness and to the shallowness of hedonism and narcissism which will only destroy and disappoint. They will, of course, learn this from experience but it may be a very painful lesson. No point in pretending otherwise.

This is where the Gospel speaks so profoundly and directly to the human condition and to human redemption in Christ. God engages our humanity in its truth and its untruth to bring us to joy and salvation which can only be found in him. As soon as we pretend otherwise, we are condemned to our own folly. Jesus speaks about sorrow and joy, about absence and presence, about sin and grace. All of these concepts are concentrated in his relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit. In other words, everything is rooted and grounded in the divine life of the Trinity. The divine will underlies the Passion of Christ and turns our evil into good; an astounding idea without which we cannot make any sense of the Crucifixion. Our failure to grasp this truth is the main reason why our churches are empty. We will only believe in a God who conforms to our expectations and entitlements, socially, politically and materially. That we are all over the map about such things only adds to the disorder. What is missing is our thinking upon what is presented to us here.

Jesus says that if he does not go away, “the Comforter will not come unto you.” The Comforter or Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the bond of their mutual love; in short, the Spirit of God. God is God but God wills to engage the world he has made to bring it back to himself. The world and our lives have no meaning apart from God. The language of Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit is theological language, the taking up of certain terms of relation that are given a new and transcendental meaning. To think of these terms sociologically and politically in terms of the dynamics of family and state is to miss their meaning completely. These terms are not the projections of our notions skyward. To put it bluntly, for Judaism and Christianity and Islam, God is not made in our image but the other way around. Anything made in our image is idolatry and there is nothing that is more strongly repudiated than idolatry by all three religions.

The Holy Spirit is identified as the Spirit of truth. In this morning’s intriguing gospel, Jesus teaches us that there are three things that belong to the coming of the Comforter – a coming which will be at Pentecost. And yet, this teaching already contributes to the profound and strong lessons of human redemption in Eastertide. The Comforter will “reprove” the world of three things: “sin, righteousness and judgment.” All because, as Jesus says, “I go to the Father.” In other words, these three aspects of human redemption are grounded in the divine will for our good and salvation.

They are about God’s engagement with our disordered world. “Because I go to the Father,” the world is “reproved” or convicted of “sin” – that is to say, for acting as if there is no God, such is our worldliness, our worship of the world; “reproved” or convicted of “righteousness” – meaning that what is right and true is not to be found in ourselves but in God and God in us; and “reproved” or convicted of “judgment,” because all that stands against God and his will must be shown to be ultimately empty and futile , “the prince of this world is judged.”

“The Spirit of truth,” Jesus says, “will guide you into all truth.” There is truth and we are to walk in its paths in some form of service and care for one another; the confusions of the disordered world notwithstanding. We only live when we live for God and for one another. The Risen Christ is the counter to all our fears. He is in our midst. He would not “leave [us] comfortless.” He would not leave us empty but filled with his love. The love that sets us in motion in lives of service and sacrifice is the love of the Father for the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, the love that is resurrection and life. Christ has entered into the depths of our humanity in all its sorry array of suffering and death to bring us into the fullness of his joy and life. Such is his death and resurrection for us. It is the only antidote to “the unruly wills and affections” of our hearts in this disordered world. It is all about God’s will made known in Christ.