Year: 2013

“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.”

There is something quite wonderful in the way in which Jesus teaches one of the great and most distinctive Christian ideas, the idea of forgiveness. He takes Peter’s argument about number, about how many times do you forgive someone who has offended you, to open us out to the infinite nature and quality of forgiveness. It is not merely a matter of substituting a greater number for a lesser number, 490 in place of 7, as if forgiveness could be quantified. No. Forgiveness is a divine quality given to us so as to be lived in us. Not to forgive is to deny the forgiveness that has been given to us. It can only result in cutting ourselves off from God because we have cut ourselves off from one another. Love is dead in us.

This is the point of the parable that Jesus tells. “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.” The servant who has been brought to account owes a great debt to his king and is forgiven his debt only to refuse to forgive the paltry debt that another owes him. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive his fellow-servant. We sense the outrage, the wrong, the violation of the ethical idea that you should do as others have done to you. Forgiveness received requires forgiveness to be shown towards others; and if it isn’t, then we are in a mess. There seems to be about this a certain quid pro quo, a kind of justice.

True enough but I think this hides the much more radical nature of forgiveness, its divine nature, as it were, and the seriousness of forgiveness. Forgiveness returns us to the will of God for our humanity. It is really about nothing less than the life of Christ in us. It is Paul’s prayer “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. Forgiveness is nothing less than the love of God ruling in our hearts.

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“For wisdom is known through speech,
and education through the words of the tongue”

Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach is not to be confused with either The Book of Ecclesiastes or The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. Like the latter, however, it belongs to a collection of books known as the Apocrypha written in the inter-testamental period, between the time of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, and the New Testament. An interesting collection of writings, they have had a fascinating history of reception and rejection in the history of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, they are an important collection and for Anglicans they belong to what is received as the Scriptures, albeit in a peculiar fashion, not “to establish any doctrine,” essential or creedal doctrine, that is to say, but “for example of life and instruction of manners.” Passages from the books of the Apocrypha are appointed to be read at the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season beginning on the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity.

These books embrace a number of different forms of literature but the most outstanding form is known as ‘wisdom literature’. Bearing the imprint of the philosophical culture of ancient Greece, these texts provide an important way of thinking about the revealed Word of God and about living a holy way of life based upon wisdom. Tonight’s lesson is a marvelous encomium or song of praise to wisdom personified as a woman, at once the source, perhaps, of Lady Philosophy and/or of Mary, the mother of God, sometimes referred to as the Seat of Wisdom. But more theologically, properly speaking, wisdom is understood to be the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus the Word and Son of the Father. Word and wisdom are inescapably united.

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“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”

The long Trinity season runs out in a series of reflections on wisdom. It is on this Sunday that we begin to read in the Sunday offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Books of the Apocrypha.

This follows an ancient understanding about the role and place of those books in the doctrinal understanding of things. At the heart of the Protestant reformation was a new sensibility about the primacy of Scripture and the nature of its interaction with tradition and reason in determining the teaching or doctrine of the Church on matters of essential faith, on matters of morals, and on matters of polity or church government. As a consequence, there was debate and question about a collection of books that arose between the time of the setting down of the Old Testament – the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and the period of the Christian New Testament. The debate had largely to do with the claims about certain teachings alleged to be based upon these texts to which the Reformers took exception.

For some Protestant Churches these books are not regarded as part of the Scripture. For others, like Anglicans, for instance, these books are received and read not “to establish any doctrine” – meaning essential or creedal doctrine – but “for example of life and instruction of manners” as Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states. In this the Anglican Churches understand themselves to be following the example of Jerome, the great translator of the most influential and famous version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible for more than a millennium for the western and European world. Anglicans read the Apocrypha or are encouraged to do so as complementing the Old and New Testament.

In a way this is necessary in order to make sense of the New Testament, since there are several instances where the New Testament writers make explicit reference to events and ideas found in the Apocrypha. Such is the argument for the inclusion of Apocryphal texts in the public reading of Scripture in the life of the Church. But there have been Anglicans of an Evangelical persuasion who would not be persuaded about reading from the Books of the Apocrypha and so for the sake of those of tender conscience, the Prayer Book (Cdn., 1962), makes provision for alternative Old Testament passages to be read instead on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season. This reveals what was once a typical kind of Anglican compromise, a kind of principled accommodation to different theological sensibilities, even a kind of wisdom, at least practically speaking, it seems to me.  It is an approach, perhaps, that has been lost in our church for some time.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. The Trinity season and the season of Epiphany abound in miracles. They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John and there are few gospel readings from John’s Gospel in the long Trinity season. Yet that season runs out in wisdom as we are reminded in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer today, the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. For we begin to read from the Apocrypha and, particularly, from the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha on this Sunday. I want to suggest that there is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle, to be sure, a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign, the word sign here is significant, teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

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