“No-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit”
There is something quite wonderful and compelling about this morning’s readings as difficult and challenging as they may be. They remind us in no uncertain terms of the creedal form of reading the Scriptures, reading the Scriptures through the Creeds. Here we are in the midst of our summer sojournings in the land of the Trinity, as it were, and yet here is something which recalls us at once to the Advent of Christ and to the Passion of Christ; in short, to the creedal principles of our Christian lives. Paul is emphatic. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD, but by the Holy Spirit.” The capitalisation is a form of emphasis.
It is one of the earliest creedal statements from within the Scriptures themselves and which goes to the question of being able to say what is the Faith. It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures, out of such words as these, and which return us to the Scriptures within a pattern of understanding.
“Concerning spiritual gifts … I would not have you ignorant,” says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts…” and he goes on to list them. They are gifts which arise out of this fundamental proclamation, out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.”
The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God, the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us, Jesus Christ, God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am,” as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name, “I am who I am,” is opened to view, explored and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity. Such is the heart of the Christian religion and the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life opened to us through Christ’s sacrifice.
Something of this teaching underlies the strong scene in today’s Gospel, Christ’s cleansing the temple, a story which we recall from Palm Sunday and, thanks to Archbishop Cranmer, to the extension of the Gospel reading for Advent Sunday.
It is a strong and, perhaps, disturbing reminder to us of the true purpose of this and every holy place. This is where we attend to the high things of God, to the things which Jesus wants us to know. The Church is to be a place of teaching and the place of our abiding in the love of God revealed and proclaimed. Such is the challenge for all the churches in our communities. It is the challenge to be the confessing Church in a post-Christian age; confessing God and confessing our own sinfulness, including the sinfulness of the Church. It means acting upon what we have been given to see and be.
What stands in the way are our preoccupations with our own immediate, economic, material, psychological and sensual concerns, our wills as over and against God’s will. We forget that we have an end in God and that such things as our economic, material, psychological and sensual concerns fall under the rule of his will and purpose without which they are empty, meaningless and quite miserable When we forget that our projects become deadly and destructive, literally “because [we] knew not the time of [God’s] visitation”, His presence with us in our lives. We so easily become the thieves of the grace of God, taking things for ourselves heedless of the gifts and the giver.
The challenge is to enter more fully into the understanding of what we have received. We are not to be strangers “to the time of thy visitation,” but constantly on the look-out for the grace-notes of God in our lives. That requires our attention to the things of God in the places where God’s Word is proclaimed and his Sacraments are faithfully administered. It really cannot be otherwise.
Yet there is something else that must disquiet and disturb us because it seems to challenge so directly the notions of inclusivity in our contemporary rights culture. After all, here are some very strong, unequivocal, and rather exclusive statements. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.” Contrariwise, “no one speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed,” literally, “anathema Jesus.” What is emphasized is the utter uniqueness of Christ which complements the theme of Christ’s cleansing of the temple.
The claim to the uniqueness of Christ as quote/unquote the only way to God seems to many in our cultures and our churches as terribly exclusive. It challenges the relativistic perspective which argues that there are many ways to God.
Christianity arose historically in a pluralistic, religiously syncretic and eclectic world of varying religions and cultures. It did so not by denying that Jesus is Lord but by arguing for Jesus as Lord, connecting Jesus with the essential insight of Israel in the revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush as “I am who I am”, the essential principle of all reality. Out of the cauldrons of controversy about the divine identity of Christ came the Creeds, the canonical Scriptures, and the Church. But there is something more. It is only from the position of the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can properly engage in respectful discourse with the other religions of the world, including the religion of secular atheism. Several years ago, The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, addressed a group of Muslims. “I greet you,” he said, “in the name of Jesus Christ, whom you honour as a prophet, but we as the Son of God.”
This honours the differences between Christian and Muslims and allows for a proper and respectful engagement. No true conversation can come from ignoring or denying such things. There is no point in Christians denying the very thing which defines them. “I do not wish to say that all religions are more or less the same,” Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, wisely stated, adding “I wish to say that all who seek God have the same dignity.” Dignity. But it is the dignity of the intellectual and spiritual principles of religious life that is at stake. Principles, not issues, are what properly define the Christian Church and while they may inform and shape social and political issues, they cannot be reduced to them.
Dignity. It is a rich and wonderful word yet one which is easily hijacked to different purposes. “The dignity of difference”, as the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, put it in a book by that title, means holding one another accountable to the principles of faith that define the religions and the non-religions of the world. He argues for a new form of toleration where Jews hold Christians and Muslims accountable to each of their respective faiths and vice-versa and so on by extension. That requires one simple thing, however, namely, clarity about the principles that belong to one’s own religious and philosophical identity without which there can be no real engagement with others. This signals our Christian challenge – to learn again what the principles of the Christian Faith are; in short, to be the confessing Church. A lot better than the collapsing church.
At the heart of the matter for Christians is precisely this “creedal” phrase: “no-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit”. To attend to it means to begin to enter into the understanding which it opens to view. It reminds us of our vocation and the vocation of the confessing Church. Nothing less will do because this is all the grace of God for us and in us.
“No-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 10, 2016
Christ Church & St. Andrews’, Hantsport