Year: 2015

“This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you”

The Saints’ Days commemorations provide us with wonderful ways to reflect upon the essential nature of our Christian identity. They concentrate for us at once our vocation to holiness of life and witness and to our communion with God. They are a poignant reminder of our life in Christ here and now. They encourage us and perhaps never more so than in the commemoration of St. Barnabas whose name means “son of consolation” or “encouragement.”

Can there be any greater consolation or encouragement than this commandment to love as Christ has loved us? Can there be any greater consolation or encouragement than to realise that we are the friends of God and not simply servants? In short, can there be any greater consolation or encouragement than to be recalled to our communion with God?

The Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Barnabas is from the 15^th chapter of John’s Gospel. The passage follows immediately upon the last and perhaps greatest of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus, sayings where through metaphor and image, Christ indicates the forms of our incorporation in the life of God. The last and perhaps greatest of those images is that of the vine. “I am the vine,” Jesus says and goes on to talk about our abiding in him and he in us for “without me,” he says, “ye can do nothing.” Here the force of that image extends to the explicit idea of friendship; our friendship or communion with God in Jesus Christ which is the basis of our friendship or communion with one another. We live in the love of God.

This is the wonder which turns the world on its head. The idea of communion and fellowship with God and with one another. But why a commandment? Do friends command friends? Yes and no. The wonder here lies in the communion between God and our humanity that has been established – created – by God. “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” Jesus says. The distance between God and Man is not denied even as a connection and an intimacy between God and Man has been created. The God who is love commands love because of the necessity of love itself – because of its essentially divine nature.

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“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded
though one rose from the dead.”

“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.” Familiar words perhaps, though we know them better through the scriptural sentences in the Offices for the Trinity season with the word, “abideth” rather than the King James version, “dwelleth.” Either way the phrase captures the essential point of the Christian Faith – our being with the God who dwells with us. We live in the love of God without which we do not live at all. Something of the radical meaning of our communion with God is wonderfully and, perhaps, terrifyingly set before us on The First Sunday after Trinity.

We either live out of what we have been given to behold – “a door opened in heaven,” as we heard last week – or we are, quite literally, it seems, in Hell. To live out of the love of God as Trinity governs how we look at one another and treat one another. As today’s epistle reading from 1 John and the Gospel parable from Luke make clear, heaven and hell are right here in how we hear and see; in short, in how we think God and how we regard one another. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” To love God means loving our brother also.

The parable makes it clear that this ethical principle has its basis in the Jewish Scriptures spoken of here as “Moses and the prophets.” What does that mean? Simply that the love of God and the love of neighbour belong to the essential ethical insight of Judaism which is carried over into Christianity. In telling this strong and powerful parable, Jesus convicts both Jew and Christian alike of the way in which we betray God in ignoring one another. Lazarus lies at our feet. Do we simply walk over him or do we care for him? “Our life and death,” one of the desert fathers says, “are with our brother.”

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“He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”

My text comes not directly from the Scriptures but from the Scriptures credally understood, from the Athanasian Creed, to be more precise, itself one of the three catholic creeds of the universal Church. It is rarely used and yet it speaks most wonderfully and profoundly to the central and essential mystery of the Christian Faith as well as to the spiritual nature of the great religions of the world. It is all about the Trinity, about God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures as Trinity, the three-in-one and the one-in-three, God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The important point is that the Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to the Scriptures within a pattern of understanding – an understanding above all else about God. We cannot not think God. In the Christian understanding thinking God means thinking the Trinity.

This is the essential insight of the Christian Faith but it belongs as well to the deeper meaning of all of the great religions of the world. As the great nineteenth century German philosopher, Hegel, observes, the Trinity is adumbrated – shadowed forth – in some way or another in all of the great religions of the world. At issue is how do we think the Trinity?

The Trinity is the fullest possible statement about the spiritual reality of God: God in his self-sufficient majesty and truth. This is a day where we stand on our heads, as it were. We are enveloped in mysteries which we strive to think knowing that we are struggling with what is inescapably beyond our grasp and yet cannot not be thought. Such is worship which is why the lesson on this day is from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It presents us with a vision of heaven but even more with a vision of worship, the worship of the whole of creation. It is in worship that our humanity achieves its greatest dignity and highest honour. Our souls are made apt for worship. We are made for worship and for worship, in the language of Isaiah which John deliberately recalls here, of the thrice-holy God, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Worship is about thinking God.

Think about that for a moment and realize how much that runs counter to our culture and church. It is not simply about us and about what pleases us as if entertaining ourselves and making us feel good about ourselves was the aim and purpose of the Church. No. It is first and foremost about God and only then the discovery of things about the truth of ourselves in God. Such is the true meaning of worship: God and us in God.

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