Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 24 September 2017

“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”

Paul’s words in today’s Epistle stand in stark contrast, it might seem, to the spirit of the Gospel which seems to suggest that we should not worry about the things of the body – “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” After all, “is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Jesus recalls us to the primary and necessary consideration of Providence. “Behold,” he says, “Consider,” he says, and above all, “Seek,” he says.

It is not that the things of the body and of the world don’t matter. They do. At issue is in what way and to what extent. Jesus in the Gospel puts his finger on a perennial issue in the human story and one which is even more pronounced and even more of a problem in our modern dsytopia. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Anxiety is a relatively modern word, largely derived from the German “angst” and freighted with a whole lot of baggage from the psycho-philosophical traditions of Nietzsche and Freud. It captures a certain unease about the world in which we find ourselves. Since the twentieth century it has displaced the word which Tyndale and the Translators of the King James Version of the Bible used in this passage from Matthew. The English word was “carefull” – be not so full of cares or encumbered, burdened with cares. In a way that describes our world a bit better and in a more concrete way than the various therapeutic descriptors that are part of our contemporary landscape, literally littered by a plethora of conditions and symptoms. We miss, I fear, the deeper spiritual understanding which today’s readings offer.

Suffering is real and the forms of suffering are endlessly diverse and individual. Today’s readings belong, I think, to important questions about good and evil, about suffering and redemption that need to be explored more deeply, especially by the Church. Why? Because of the essential question about ‘redemptive suffering’.

Jesus is not saying that there won’t be hardships and suffering. There will be. And that is the point of connection to the Epistle. To bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus” is to bear the marks of redemptive suffering. It is to bear the marks of the profoundest form of the Providence of God imaginable.

There have been times in the history and life of the Church where the idea of bearing the marks of Christ’s suffering has been expressed in extravagant and physical ways such as the flagellants or the pageants of crucifixions in the Philippines, for instance. The stigmata is a sign of assimilation and participation in Christ’s crucifixion and an expression of its meaning and application to our lives. What does it mean for Christians to say – if indeed they do – that they too have been crucified unto the world and the world unto them, as Paul suggests in today’s Epistle reading? It means nothing less than bearing the marks of the crucified in ourselves, but not just literally, rather spiritually.

The repeated burden of the last several Sundays of the Trinity Season is about how we participate in Christ’s saving grace for us in our lives in a free and complete way. This Sunday makes it perfectly clear that suffering is part and parcel of the Providence of God. We cannot possibly look at the world in a new way, with fresh eyes and a pure heart, without bearing in our bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus and without his presence in our hearts and minds; in short, our lives. It is obvious how this stands in complete contrast to our contemporary world which is risk adverse and entitled.

We suffer. The suffering is ours but in the Providence of God our suffering is wondrously joined to the sufferings of Christ – he in us and we in him. That makes all the difference. It means to engage suffering in a spiritual and active manner.

It transcends and counters the follies of our victim and entitlement culture. It recalls the proper form of “the tragic imagination” – to borrow the title of a wonderful book by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. “To think about suffering,” he notes, following Hegel, “is to think about thinking.” Suffering belongs to a deeper consideration of the human condition in relation to God and one another than the shallow Polly-Anna-like views of Providence suggest. All indeed shall be well but only in and through the sufferings which belong to our own sense of limitation and failing; our recognition of “the frailty of man” which “without [God] cannot but fall”, as today’s Collect notes. We have to think suffering which does not mean self-indulgence, self-pity; literally, being too full of cares.

We have never needed more the profound sense of ‘penitential adoration’ which is at the core of the Common Prayer Tradition than now and which the readings, Sunday after Sunday, constantly remind us. They are altogether the counter to the spirit of our age which despairs and yet persists in the same destructive thinking and acting that has defined the modern melodrama. We need to turn it into a tragedy if ever we might reclaim the strong Providential message of the Christian Gospel. There can be no divine comedy without the tragic sense of our humanity. We have to confront ourselves and recognize our own complicity in the mess of our world.

And it will not do simply to play the sophistic game of the self-loathing of the West while comfortably ensconced in our various gated communities either hedonistically or spiritually. The readings on this Sunday negate every form of Manichaean dualism.

Our folly – not our tragedy – is to be unaware of the deeper truths that belong to our life in the Body of Christ. To be in Christ is to bear the marks of the Lord Christ, the marks of the crucified. Those marks are about an intentional kind of suffering. Not seeking for suffering but endeavouring to find the courage and the way to connect our own sufferings to Christ, to be in him as he is in us. This is the high providence of God who makes our way to him even through the follies of our souls and lives.

It is not meant to be easy nor can it be, by definition. Julian of Norwich’s famous saying that “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well” makes no sense whatsoever apart from the ways in which the marks of the Lord Jesus are born in us. We are called not only to penitential adoration but to sacrificial service. We do so in the awareness of our own shortcomings but knowing perhaps one thing and one thing only: that we are worth something more in the eyes of God. Providence recalls us to the dignity of our humanity – not to an insurance policy.

Suffering takes on a whole new aspect at once about the tragic and about redemption. The two go together and are inseparable in the Providence of God.