Day: March 6, 2018

Sermons

Lenten Programme 3: The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation III

This is the third of three Lenten meditations on “The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation”. The first is posted here and the second here.

“Rejoice with me, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ”

Isaiah’s words of comfort and strength that mark the beginning of The Book of Consolation, chapters 40 through 55 of The Book of Isaiah, have their Christian counterpart not only in terms of Christ’s passion but also its application to us in our lives by way of St. Paul. Nowhere is that perhaps more clearly seen than in the wonderful words that belong to the beginning of his Second Letter to the Corinthians.

“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2nd Cor. 1. 3-4). It is a wonderful and, dare I say, comforting passage and one which belongs to the consideration of consolation. Meister Eckhart, one of the masters of the Consolation Literature, begins his treatise The Book of “Benedictus”: The Book of Divine Consolation with these words from 2nd Corinthians. In the words which immediately follow in the fifth verse of 2nd Corinthians 1, the connection between comfort and consolation is made explicit, yet again, and yet again, through the reality and the dynamic of suffering. “For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” Suffering is paradoxically and inescapably an essential feature of the consolation literature.

We meet tonight in the commemoration of St. Perpetua and Companions, early third century martyrs. “Another liveth in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said, and that sense of the indwelling of Christ in us speaks to the profoundest theme of the consolation literature, the idea of our intimate participation in the goodness of God even in the face of suffering and death, such as the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions. It is really all about Christ in us and us in Christ. Therein lies the greatest good, the greatest comfort and consolation.

And yet, so many things stand in the way of our realizing this truth, a truth predicated precisely on how we look at things, upon our assumptions about the good and about happiness.

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Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Perpetua, Saint Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):

O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14

Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appear to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Felix Louis Leullier, Combat Arena or Martyrdom of SS. Perpetua and FelicityArtwork: Felix Louis Leullier, Combat Arena or Martyrdom of SS. Perpetua and Felicity, 1840, Private collection.

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