Month: April 2016

“I am the Good Shepherd”

This Sunday presents us with one of the great and most familiar images of care, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is at once commonplace and yet altogether radical in its meaning. The root of care is cure. The care, we might say, is in the cure.

Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” What distinguishes good shepherds from bad is care. The Good Shepherd cares for the sheep. The meaning of that care is that he lays down his life for the sheep. There is sacrifice – the total giving of oneself for the good of another. It is what we have been privileged to see in Holy Week, on the one hand, contemplating the utter failure in and of ourselves to seek the good of one another and, on the other hand, contemplating the sacrificial love of Christ who alone accomplishes what belongs to our eternal good.

The Good Shepherd, and this is the great and wonderful paradox, is also the Lamb of God. His sacrifice is the cure for our sins but it also imparts his care for our lives. The pastoral ministry of the Church is rooted in this sense of care which is often called “the cure of souls.” It goes beyond the superficial and external matters of comfort and ease and convenience to address the distempers of our souls, the disenchantments of our hearts, and the despair of our lives. There is no pastoral care without the naming of the cure and there is no cure without the acknowledgement of our need to be cured in the very root of our being. Once again, it belongs to the pageant of Holy Week to point this out to us. But it also belongs to the parade of Eastertide to show that sacrificial love is a living love. It belongs to the divine life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the divine love that has been made visible in the passion and crucifixion of Christ and in the wonder and triumph of Christ’s resurrection.

Jesus, as today’s Collect so marvelously puts it, is “both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life”. He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep – ultimately our sins are his destroyer even as our sins diminish and destroy us. He is the shepherd who wills to be struck, not so that the sheep may be scattered, but so that through his being struck and our being scattered, he may gather us to himself. He gathers us through his care for us. He cares for us through his cure for us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word captures the truth of our humanity. It signals the virtue of humility, the virtue of an honest deference to what is absolutely prior, namely, the word of God. This is what defines Mary and, in turn, defines the Church.

The Annunciation is ordinarily celebrated on March 25^th, nine months before Christ’s birth from Mary in Bethlehem on December 25^th. For centuries March 25^th has marked the beginning of the Christian new year; time itself being measured by the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. Her Annunciation is his conception in Mary, the beginning of his incarnate life. Her Annunciation marks the beginning of the intimate engagement of God with our humanity. Christ becomes human through Mary, through Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God.

This year, 2016, the 25^th of March coincided with Good Friday as it has at various times, such as in 1608. Then it occasioned a poem by John Donne on the paradox of Christ’s coming to us through Mary and Christ’s going from us into death through the Crucifixion, what he called in a marvelous economy of language “the abridgement of Christ’s story” in the conjunction of the Angel’s Ave and Christ’s Consummatum Est. There is something wonderful in the overlap between the Annunciation and Good Friday. It underscores a fundamental and necessary Christian insight; namely, the intimate connection between Christmas and Easter, between the Incarnation and Redemption. The interplay of theological concepts is an integral feature of orthodox thinking; the abridgement of Christ’s story, the story of human redemption.

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

“April is the cruellest month,” the poet, T.S. Eliot, notes in The Wasteland. He must have had a Maritime spring in mind, a kind of April’s Fools Day joke that never ends! And yet there is a counter to the misery and the cruelty of the Maritime spring in April. It is the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not a static event. It is the dynamic truth “that God hath given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”. We behold the Risen Christ. We are set in motion by what we see. The Church does not simply stand upon the doctrine of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is the running life of the Church. It means that there are always breakthroughs in our understanding; resurrections of the understanding, we might say. They belong to the dynamic reality of the Resurrection.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more dramatically illustrated than on The Octave Day of Easter. “On the same day at evening, being the first day of the week”, John tells us, the disciples were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the day of Easter, to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day”, the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive to his presence or dead in ourselves.

“Jesus came and stood in the midst”. They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety, not unlike many of us today, perhaps. The world of their hopes and expectations had been utterly shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to be knit together into something new and strange. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

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