Sermon for the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude
“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me”
There is something wonderfully providential about the concurrence of The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude with The Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity. On the one hand, we have the wonderful vision in the lesson from Revelation of the heavenly city that anticipates the great spiritual harvest Festival of All Saints and, in the Gospel, grounds that heavenly vision in the life of the Trinity. The spiritual fellowship belonging to the redeemed human community is grounded in the life of God through his Word and Spirit. On the other hand, in the Gospel for Trinity Twenty-Two, we have the powerful yet instructive parable of the unforgiving servant which illustrates by way of the negative the whole point of having and keeping the commandments of Christ, namely, our abiding in the very love of God and acting out of that love towards one another. That is the very thing that the servant who is forgiven and indeed has been forgiven much doesn’t do towards others. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive others what little they owe to him. It is a refusal of love, of mercy and truth. Yet what is wanted, as the epistle reading from Philippians makes clear, is that our “love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement.” That love is found in Christ and Christ in us; in short, it makes us part of a company of love.
Today’s Scripture readings remind us wonderfully of another kingdom, the kingdom of God. It is another city, the heavenly city, the City of God, which stands in such stark contrast to the disorders and confusions of our contemporary world, the city of man, as it were, the “unreal city” as T.S. Eliot suggests in The Waste Land. The Unreal City is the human community as more dead than alive, an image that follows immediately upon the image of the Church as nothing more than “a heap of broken images” because it no longer lives from God’s word. Yet these readings remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word. “Only/ there is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” as Eliot’s poem argues, signalling the only hope in the modern wasteland, the hope that is grounded upon the rock that is Christ and upon the apostolic foundations of the Church. This is what we celebrate today.
