Month: October 2015

“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will,
but the will of him who sent me”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the parade of Apostolic Saints. With this feast, the holy band of twelve is gathered together in the unity of Jerusalem and in that gathering we glimpse something of the meaning of our eternal home. St. Simon and St. Jude complete the festal round of the Apostles and prepare us for the harvest festival of All Saints.

St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles of Christ. Very little can be said about them. What can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that? And how appropriate, too, on the eve of Nick Hatt’s deaconing in our diocese tomorrow night and whom we keep in our prayers this evening. Simon and Jude speak directly to the nature of the ministry.

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance! The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness readily complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. For what we have here is really “the unreal city” (T.S. Eliot), a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says, in a passage recalled by the disciples in John’s Gospel in relation to the cleansing of the temple. Through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings for this feast concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship; these are two things which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. They belong to the truth of the ordained ministry. Without them, our parishes become little more than a club for seniors and a playground for children – we wish!. The church becomes a sect, championing one spiritual idea or quasi spiritual idea at the expense of all the rest, or trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day while ignoring the larger vision of the whole of redeemed humanity that is hers to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”

The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which,” as Paul tells us, “passeth knowledge,” which goes beyond what we can know and do simply on our own. Without the love of God, we are utterly incomplete, bereft and empty. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

Compassion is the operative word in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. That compassion is ultimately the love of Christ, the Son of God who became man for us and who engages us in our brokenness and hurt to heal and restore and to set us in motion towards one another. Christ’s compassion, too, is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan.” Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.

We just heard the powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It is one of three stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and each time something happens that is transformative. The operative word is compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion is deep love, the deep love of God in Jesus Christ which reaches out to our humanity, at once to the sorrow and loss of the widow and to the death of her only son. We are meant to empathise with her loss and to feel its depth. She is utterly bereft – a widow who has lost her husband and now a mother who has lost her only son. We sense her desolation, the utter emptiness of her being.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God creates and now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and only answer is love, the love which manifests love. And that love is so powerful, so great, that it extends to the restoration and redemption of all that is broken and dead, empty and bereft.

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“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”

In one way, it is a curious criticism. After all, the concept of Revelation begins with signs and wonders. God reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush, a sign and a wonder, to be sure, and one that catches our attention, a bush burns and is not consumed out of which God speaks his Name, “I am who I am.” It initiates the Exodus, the journey into the understanding of God’s will for our humanity. But there is a further question.

What is the effect of God’s Word on our minds? His Word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle, which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? It is Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s Word on human minds.

God’s Word causes delight. God’s Word causes healing. God’s Word creates new life and new birth. Such are the desired effects of God’s Word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in this place of signs, Cana of Galilee? It was at the Wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee that Jesus turned the water into wine, a story which we hear every year during Epiphany. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. They who heard the word “receive[d] the word with joy”. Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. That most excellent wine belongs to the abundant life which he would give us – our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s Word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s Word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.

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