by CCW | 1 May 2018 21:00
The most provocative, the most challenging, and the most controversial of Jesus’ so-called “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel, at least with respect to interfaith dialogue is where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
Yet the things which Jesus says and does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.
Are there not other ways to God, the ways belonging to other religions, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, has important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself. The point for Christians in honouring what is distinctive about Christianity is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the Way, the Truth and the Life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.
The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture.
There is another complexity to the richness of this evening’s celebration. There are two Collects for St. Philip and St. James. The first alludes to the Gospel and specifically to the figure of Philip, presented in dialogue with Jesus. The second collect centers on the figure of James. It collect draws upon the imagery of the epistle reading, again from St. James, from which we read on the Fourth and the Fifth Sundays after Easter. But the Collect and the rather curious explanation that precedes it, allude to another factor that relates again to the uniqueness of Christ. About the apostles, we don’t really know a whole lot about them in an historical and biographical sense. But there is mention in the gospels of James, the brother of the Lord. What exactly does that mean?
To be honest, no-one knows or can know for certain historically whether Mary had other children, whether Jesus has brothers and sisters biologically speaking, if you will. But doctrinally, the point at issue has to do not with Jesus as being merely an ordinary Jew of his day, but as the Lord and Saviour of mankind through the particularities of that culture. The tradition of the Church in reflecting on the uniqueness of Christ has tended to insist on the perpetual virginity of Mary and on the uniqueness of Christ as the only-begotten of the Father, divinely speaking, and the only son of Mary, humanly speaking. Jesus cannot be just another guy. He is like us in all aspects save sin. Mary cannot be just another gal; she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by God.
Mary’s role in the economy of salvation and in the preparation of Providence is to be the theotokos, the God-bearer, the pure and perfect human source of Christ’s pure and true humanity without which he is not saviour, both hers and ours. While one can speak of the customs of earlier times, one cannot prove from such customs that Jesus actually had brothers and/or sisters from Mary, his mother. There is equally the custom of the extended family of relations, cousins and kinsman, spoken of as brethren. This point of view is captured in the second Collect that pertains to James, associating James with the epistle of James, and suggesting that he along with Jude are “kinsmen of the Lord.” There are actually about eight different ‘James’s’ in the New Testament. The Collect however is scrupulously honest with respect to the Scriptures and to the historical understanding while being firmly principled with respect to doctrine.
Such things go to the heart of the apostolic faith and to the witness of the Church to Christ in the world where we are placed.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of SS. Philip & James
May 1st, 2018 (adapted from 2013)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/05/01/sermon-for-the-feast-of-ss-philip-and-james/
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