Month: June 2015

“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

And yet “more than a prophet,” Jesus himself will say. There are two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Christian Church: The Nativity of Christ, of course, and the feast of The Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June 24^th, a celebration which coincides with the week of the summer solstice and so points us even in the measuring of time to Christ’s holy birth, itself the source and origin of Christian life and faith.

This ‘summer’s’ birth points us to the ‘winter’s’ birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is just past; the long march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, begins! And yet, it is all about Christ within us.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

This morning’s reading continue the underlying theme of the Trinity season which is about the relation between knowing and doing, between things intellectual and matters moral. Jesus commands us to “be merciful as your Father also is merciful”. But what happens if and when we turn our backs on the mercy of God revealed in Jesus? What happens if we fail to act upon what we have been given to see in Jesus? “And he spake a parable unto them,” the parable of the blind leading the blind.

I cannot hear this parable without being reminded of Brueghel’s marvelous painting of a troupe of blind beggars all in the process of falling into a ditch, the leader having his cap pulled down over his eyes, not only blind but doubly blind, almost willfully blind. And in the center of the painting there is the image of a church from which we have turned away. It suggests the disconnect between what we are given to know and what we do which goes to the issue of hypocrisy signaled in the Gospel. Such forms of blindness belong to a wisdom that is both ancient and modern.

In Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thought that he knew who he was and thought that his form of reasoning, that of the being a solver of riddles, of problems, was the only form of knowing. He comes to learn, paradoxically through his reason, that the blind prophet, Teiresias, actually knew the truth of Oedipus even when Oedipus didn’t; in other words, there are other ways of knowing. Oedipus comes to know who he is, namely, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. He learns that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. He was blind to the truth about himself. He had eyes but saw not. But Teiresias, who was blind, knew. He had no eyes and yet he saw. Oedipus, in this moment of realizing who he is, puts out his eyes. He is now literally blind and yet now he knows. For the Greeks, he is “the paradigm of fate”. The one who didn’t know who he is provides the example of the importance of knowing yourself and your place in the world. The forms of his blindness, first, the presumption of thinking he knew what he didn’t know and thinking his form of knowing the only form of knowing, and, secondly, his becoming literally blind, are lessons for the culture. At the end of the play, he is no longer king and is led out of the city, no longer its leader, no longer the blind leading the blind.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

And yet “more than a prophet,” Jesus himself will say. There are two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Christian Church: The Nativity of Christ, of course, and this feast, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, a celebration which coincides with the week of the summer solstice and so points us even in the measuring of time to Christ’s holy birth, itself the fons et origo of Christian life and faith.

This ‘summer’s’ birth points us to the ‘winter’s’ birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is just past; the long march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, begins! And yet, it is all about Christ within.

For beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us – the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives. From that standpoint, the strange and compelling message of John the Baptist is constant and necessary; he points us to Christ, yes, but as well to Christ in us.

There is a kind of miracle of nature in the conception and birth of John the Baptist to the elderly and skeptical Zechariah and Elizabeth. Indeed, Zechariah’s scoffing will be rebuked by his being silenced and unable to speak until the birth of John. His challenge to the angel, “how shall I know this?” contrasts with Mary’s question, “how shall this be?” The difference is between a doubting that denies possibilities and the intellectual inquiry open to their realization.

What is wanted to be grasped is how the birth and ministry of the one prepares us for the coming of the other, a miracle of nature preparing us for the miracle of grace. Everything is preparatory for the coming of Christ.

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“Rejoice with me”

The parables in today’s gospel are powerful illustrations of the teaching in the epistle: not only does “God resist the proud and give grace to the humble”, but that grace conveys us unto glory, for God “himself shall restore, stablish and strengthen you … after that ye have suffered a while”. God is “the God of all grace” and here is a wonderful illustration of the nature and the immensity of God’s grace.

The parables come as a response to an accusation. Christ is accused of receiving sinners and eating with them, thereby identifying himself with sinners, being made sin himself, as it were. But Christ’s response shows that he does, not so as to be defined by sin, “him who knew no sin”, but for the sake of our redemption “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. He tells three parables, two of which comprise today’s gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin. Beyond them, but as the fulfilling of them, is the parable of the lost son, the so-called prodigal son.

Sheep, coins, sons. There is a progression to these images. The first two which we have this morning stress the priority of divine grace in our restoration. What is emphasized is God’s reaching down to us in the gravity of our sins which separate us from God and from the community of divine love. There is, after all, a kind of passivity to sheep and coins, but this only serves to heighten the priority of God’s grace. Yet the effects of that grace are to be realized in us which is what we are given to see in the parable of the prodigal son. In him we see the motions of God’s grace in us effecting our restoration to grace, our establishment in grace and our being strengthened by grace.

The parable of the prodigal son completes the illustration of the teaching about God’s redemptive grace. It signifies the strong and exultant note of God’s mercy towards us. What, after all, is the recurring theme here except the theme of rejoicing? “I once was lost but now am found.” Here is the illustration of the “amazing grace” of God that “saved a wretch like me.”

God seeks the lost and God accepts the penitent who makes some motion of return to him for that motion is the motion of God’s grace in him. The first two parables make this point unmistakably clear. The sheep and the coins are utterly unable of themselves to move towards God. It is God’s grace which literally picks them up and carries them, gathers them up to himself and to the community which his love alone creates. We are reminded that our joy is to be found in the free gift of God towards us in the giving of his son.

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