Year: 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 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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“My little children, Let us not love in word, neither in tongue;
but in deed, and in truth”

The readings in these early days of the Trinity Season offer a kind of holy seminar about the necessary connection between seeing and doing, thinking and acting. There is a kind of interplay between the readings taken from the writings of John and Luke which shows us this. On Trinity Sunday we had not only the reading from John’s Gospel but also a reading from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. And last Sunday and today we have epistle readings from 1 John and gospel readings, two parables, from Luke’s Gospel.

These readings underscore a basic feature of the Christian faith: namely, the necessity to act out of what we have been given to see through the life of God opened to view through Jesus Christ. It means that there is an inescapable doctrinal character to the living out of the Christian Faith. There has to be that constant attention to the primacy of doctrine which informs our practical activities in lives of service and sacrifice. John is constantly making this point in one way or another even as Luke is constantly providing us with examples and illustrations of just what it looks like on the ground, as it were.

“Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” These are strong words. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God,” we heard on The First Sunday after Trinity and then we were given to see how absolutely necessary it is to attend to the teachings of the Scripture and to act out of what we have been given to see in the story of Lazarus and Dives. Our indifference to one another arises out of our indifference to the things which really matter, the things of God. Today, John again emphasizes the conditions of our love in the face of the world’s animosities and hatreds and even our own failings, pointing out that love is not simply about us but, more fundamentally, it is about Christ’s transforming love in us. “This is his commandment,” John tells us, “That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another,” emphasizing the main point that “he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him.” Luke indicates how we refuse that love through our excuses which are all about a refusal to think the things of God that have been revealed to us. We turn to the ground of our everyday affairs, a thinking downwards that denies what has been opened to view in our thinking upwards.

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