“Love your enemies”
It remains to be seen for whom this shall be harder, for Silas, for you, for the grandparents, or even a great grandmother? It is, after all, all theology, as it must be. At least there is a party after!
“Love your enemies.” Is this one of the so-called values of the so-called West? If so then hardly one which we live up to in a world of ‘them’ and ‘us’, whoever ‘them’ and ‘us’ are. A hard saying, and yet one which articulates with remarkable directness and clarity an insight fundamental to the various traditions of philosophical religion. It speaks profoundly to our common humanity, to what transcends the tribalisms of culture, nation, family and religion and to the problems of identity and belonging that divide us into ‘them’ and ‘us’. A hard saying but no less true for being hard. Hard sayings are de rigueur.
The hard sayings of Jesus challenge us about belief as distinct from belonging. “I am the bread which came down from heaven”, Jesus said but the response? “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, they said. The consequence was that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.” Enmity and division where truth and unity are sought. Yet, “love your enemies”!
Hard sayings trouble us. But they belong to the truth of our humanity. “Ye must be born again”, Jesus tells Nicodemus in the great gospel for Trinity Sunday. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks. Is not birth hard enough on its own? But to be born again? “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus takes the statement literally to which Jesus responds by explaining the difference between flesh and spirit and their relationship. “Ye must be born again” means something of another order just as the wind blows where it wills and you cannot tell “whence it cometh and wither it goeth; so is everyone born of the Spirit.” This, it seems, is the hard saying. “How can these things be?”
And so for Silas Barry King today. He is born again. Born into the mystery of God with us. And such a rebirth, such a new birth, is of another order and one which transcends all of the divisions and enmities of our world and day. “Love your enemies” is the Scriptural phrase which captures the great and powerful logic of reconciliation and unity that belongs to philosophical religion. It means an entirely different outlook, an entirely different way of thinking. It has entirely to do with our incorporation into the mystery of God. It means being born upward into what has come down to us. Such are the motions of grace about the heavenly things that have been told to us. “No one has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven,” as Jesus patiently but firmly explains to Nicodemus.
Baptism is belief in the God of grace. Something is simply and totally imputed, given to Silas which in turn becomes what he must grow up into, the same imputed grace then infused into his life and ours in the Spirit in the body of belief signalled in the ancient baptismal creed, the Apostles’ Creed. “I belief in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church”; the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” as the Nicene Creed further states. There is no mention in scripture or creed of any such terms as Anglican or Roman Catholic or any other denomination. Here is the Church of belief and not simply belonging, the true measure of the ecclesial forms of our abiding in the mystery of God. As Richard Hooker puts it, “baptism is a sacrament which God hath instituted in his Church, to the end that they which receive the same might thereby be incorporated into Christ, and so through his most precious merit obtain as well that saving grace of imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness, as also that infused divine virtue of the Holy Ghost, which giveth to the powers of the soul their first disposition towards future newness of life” (Lawes, Bk. V, lx. 2). A washing away of original sin and a whole new orientation. A new life.
But how? “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” Only so can there be new life. It means a letting go of ourselves and letting God be the principle of our lives. As Meister Eckhart wonderfully puts it, “God wants no more from you than that you should in creaturely fashion go out of yourself, and let God be God in you…. Go completely out of yourself for God’s love, and God comes completely out of himself for love of you”(Sermon 5b). This is what we see in Holy Baptism and in what it signifies, the beginning of a new life grounded upon God’s gift of Himself to us. We behold the mystery of our incorporation into the life of God. It is the love which transcends all our enmities.
“Love your enemies”? Our enemies are not simply the other who is unknown and foreign. More often than not, our enemies are very close to us; the deepest betrayals are within our own lives. More than even that, we are the enemies of ourselves and as such the enemies of God. This is where the hard saying about being born again connects to the necessity of loving your enemies. It is about overcoming sin and death, the legacy of the old Adam, and embracing and being embraced in the life of God in Christ. And so all of the moments of Christ’s life and death are imputed to us and become the foundation of our lives in faith.
“Non solum,” as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, not only by water, not only by blood, not only by water and blood, but also by the Spirit are we made new and alive to God and God to us. Water, blood, and Spirit gather together a whole host of scriptural images about salvation and grace. The whole of salvation history becomes concentrated in the sacrament of baptism in the overcoming of all division and separation. Thus as Basil the Great argues, “The [crossing of the red] sea is typically a baptism bringing about the departure of Pharaoh, in like manner as this washing causes the departure of the tyranny of the devil. The sea slew the enemy in itself: and in baptism too dies our enmity towards God” (de Spiritu Sancto, ch. xiv).
New life indeed. “While we were yet sinners, God loves us.” God loves us who are his enemies thus making us his friends, making us partakers of his life.
We are born into the mystery of God, born upward. As Andrews observes “the reason is, it is nothing here below that we seek, but to heaven we aspire. Then, if to heaven we shall, something from heaven must thither exalt us. If “partakers of the Divine nature” we hope to be, as great and precious promises we have that we shall be, that can be no otherwise than by receiving One in whom the Divine nature is. He being received imparts it to us, and so makes us Consortes Divinae naturae; and that is the Holy Ghost” (Sermon V, On the Sending of the Holy Ghost).
And so it is altogether about God, about the mystery of the Trinity and about the forms of our incorporation into the divine life. As Eckhart notes, “As truly as the Father in his simple nature gives his Son birth naturally, so truly does he give him birth in the most inward part of the spirit, [in Silas, in us] and that is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground” (Sermon 5b).
In baptism we act upon our belief and our belief in turn becomes the ground of our action. Hooker quoting St. Basil, says that “‘we must as we have received even so baptize, and as we baptize even so believe, and as we believe even so give glory.’ Baptizing we use the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; confessing the Christian faith we declare our belief in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost; ascribing glory unto God we give it to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. It is … ‘the token of a true and sound understanding’ for matter of doctrine about the Trinity” (Lawes , Bk. V, xlii.9). For, as Basil states, “faith and baptism are two kindred and inseparable ways of salvation: faith is perfected through baptism, baptism is established through faith, and both are completed by the same names” (de Spiritu Sancto, Ch. XII).
A little child? To be sure. “Suffer the little children to come unto me” as the writing around window high above the font here at Christ Church reminds us. Origen, commenting on the passage “whosoever shall humble himself as this little child” (Mt. 18.4), says that “humbling himself as this little child is imitating the Holy Spirit, who humbled Himself for men’s salvation” (Comm. on Mt.). The humility lies in the pure receptivity of a child in the gift given and so received. But it marks a beginning in grace that must have its continuing in grace as Silas grows into understanding. Baptism and Communion are, as Augustine suggests, not two sacraments but the “twin sacraments of the Church” (“Haec sunt Ecclesiae gemina Sacramenta” – Tractatus on John).
“We receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk. V, lvii). Silas is the witness to us of our baptismal vocation and challenge to live in the reconciling life of God, the God who loves his enemies, even us; the one who commands us to “love your enemies,” for such is his mercy in us.
“Love your enemies”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VI, July 23rd, 2017
Baptism of Silas Barry King
Christ Church, Windsor, NS