by CCW | 3 July 2016 15:00
Friends and enemies. Life and death. Peter and Paul. There is richness to our reflections this morning. The Sixth Sunday after Trinity falls this year within the Octave of the great feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, a feast which reminds us ever so strongly of the apostolical and catholic character of the Christian church, her very being, we might say. And yet we seem to confront a series of opposites. There could be, it seems, no greater contrast than between Peter and Paul, the one a poor fisherman, the other, a proud scholar. And yet, as Augustine argues, “they were as one”. What unites them? Christ Jesus. What does that mean? It means that Christ Jesus has overcome all the oppositions, enmities and animosities that are present in the world and in our souls. Such is the strong and rather special teaching of the Gospel. “Love your enemies”, Jesus says, commanding us to do what seems to be utterly impossible especially in a world increasingly defined by strife and tension, uncertainty and conflict, a world of many, many hates. How can we love our enemies? Because Christ loves us.
The truth and unity of the church is found in the confession of Christ and that makes all the difference. “No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit”, Paul will say, even as Peter famously confesses to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God”. “Flesh and blood”, Jesus will say, “has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven”. One of the most dominant metaphors for God in the Old Testament is God as the Rock, the rock which like a father has begotten you, the rock which like a mother has brought you to birth, as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy puts it. “That rock was Christ”, Paul proclaims, having in mind the wilderness journey of Israel and the stricken rock out of which comes life-giving water. The image is at once static and solid and dynamic and life-giving. Christ, too, is the stricken rock out of whose wounded side water and blood pour forth, the symbols of the sacraments by which we live from him who died and lived again. Jesus will say to Simon Peter, “you are the rock upon which I shall build my church”.
The church, the ekklesia, is defined by the Lord, Kyrios. Peter and Paul are one in the beginnings of making this doctrinal point clear as the basis for our life together in “the blessed company of all faithful people”, the church. Their stories are somewhat better known to us biographically speaking since they figure prominently in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles and because Paul’s writings are the earliest and the greatest in number of what will become the New Testament. And yet their story is not without controversy and argument, a conflict about the universal and the particular, about Jew and Gentile in relation to Christ and his company. It was a necessary argument out of which arises a deeper understanding and confession of “Christ, the son of the living God” whose death and resurrection mean the overcoming of all and every form of enmity and whose redemptive love is by definition for all.
“God is love”, we so frequently and casually say, forgetting that this is the love which died and rose again for us. Why? So that in him we might die, being “buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead…even so we also should walk in newness of life”. It is the very meaning of our life in Christ, our life in his body, our life as confessing the crucified and risen Christ.
It requires doing what seems utterly impossible, namely, loving our enemies. For in Christ the impossible is made possible. Only one thing stands in the way. Ourselves. Each of us in our own stubborn way clings to hurts both real and imagined. We love our hatreds. We love clinging to our sense of having been hurt and injured, to our bitterness and resentment. We are so much the enemies of Christ’s love that we do not even want the hurt and the hatred to go away. We have become so easily accustomed to it. We do not want to look at ourselves and one another in any other way except through the lenses of hurt and hatred. Bitterness and resentment mark our faces and our lives. We need the strong words of the Gospel to shake some sense into us or better yet, some mercy and compassion, some love and joy.
Today’s readings remind us that forgiveness is the living force of the Gospel of Christ alive in us. It means death and life – our dying to ourselves and our hatreds in order to live for Christ in and through one another. To love your enemies is possible because Christ loves us while we are his enemies, the enemies of his love and truth in our bitterness and resentment. To be sure, this does not mean that those who hate you will suddenly no longer hate you. It does not mean that enmities and hurts and animosities will be suddenly waved away. No. What it means is that the spirit of Christ triumphs in us against ourselves.
Sunday after Sunday we see and hear this and perhaps most profoundly in the pageant of Holy Week when we contemplate ourselves as the enemies of God in Christ Jesus, calling out, “Let him be crucified, let him be crucified”. Only in confronting our enmities can we begin to learn about Christ’s victory over us and in us.
“The war changed everything”, Marion Turner remarks in Timothy Findley’s classic anti-war novel, The Wars. It shattered an entire civilisation. We are reminded of the deadly and destructive nature of our enmities so colossally shown in the cataclysmic catastrophe that was the First World War, the legacy of which has hung like a pall over so much of the last hundred years. No battle more destructive than the Battle of the Somme which began on July 1st, 1916 and only ended in November 1916 after the deaths of more than a million men; not to mention Beaumont-Hamel where in the space of an half-hour over seven hundred out of eight hundred Newfoundlanders were slaughtered. No doubt there are enmities and conflicts that are beyond our personal control but Christ’s command to love our enemies speaks directly to our hearts about what is potential in us and what by grace can be made actual in us. It speaks to us whatever the discontent and disarray of our world and day. It speaks to us about the radical meaning of the apostolic fellowship of the catholic church.
Such is the point of the remarkable conjunction of readings and commemorations on this day. It is about confessing Christ with the whole of our being. That changes or at least makes possible the beginnings of a change in each of us with respect to the hostilities and animosities in our souls to which we so foolishly cling. It is the counter to our bitterness and resentments. And to help us in the project of loving our enemies, which means learning in part to love ourselves, at least as God loves us, we have the wonderful collect for this Sunday. It expresses powerfully the sense of the impossible made possible through the loving grace of Christ. It shows us exactly what God wants for us. We can do no better than to pray it and memorize it and make it part of us.
“O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee”, it begins, speaking immediately about the priority and the necessity of love. And what has been prepared for us are “such good things as pass man’s understanding”, things which are far greater than what we either desire or deserve. Why? Because God is greater than our hearts, especially our hearts of hatred and misery. Acknowledging such a divinity compels us to pray God to “pour into our hearts such love towards [him]” because only in loving him can we begin to love one another and hope to “obtain [God’s] promises” made known to us in Christ Jesus, promises, too, “which exceed all that we can desire”. Pray it and learn to live it.
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity VI in the Octave of Peter and Paul,
July 3rd, 2016
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