He searches out the abyss, and the hearts of men,
and considers their crafty devices.
For the Most High knows all that may be known.
The rubric or direction on the bottom of page 258 (BCP, Cdn.) explains today’s readings. Sometimes the Trinity Season runs beyond twenty-four Sundays, sometimes less, so what happens when it runs over? It is a question about the distribution of the Sundays and about the appointment of the readings. There is a wonderful logic to the way in which the Trinity Season and the Epiphany Season complement one another, the one longer or shorter as the case may be. This year the Trinity Season runs to twenty-five Sundays. In the New Year, Epiphany Season will run to five Sundays. Note that from the rubric, what is read today are the readings appointed for The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Thus there will be no duplication just a marvellous liturgical and scriptural sensitivity through which time is continually gathered into eternity.
These provisions are a post-Cranmerian development. They belong to the work of John Cosin, the Bishop of Durham, who in the middle of the 17th century undertook to make provisions for what was missing for certain Sundays in some years in the lectio divina, the divine reading of Scripture at Mass on Sundays. He appointed readings for the 5th and the 6th Sundays after Epiphany, a season which like the Trinity Season is variable in length owing to the movable date of Easter, which would also serve as the readings for the 25th and 26th Sundays after Trinity when needed. In other words, they do double duty. And, taking his cue from Cranmer, he composed the Collects as based on the Scriptural texts chosen for those Sundays. You can see how this morning’s Collect draws explicitly upon the Epistle and the Gospel. All this offers a wonderful theological insight into the reason for our reading the passages appointed for The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany on The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity. They bring us to next Sunday, The Sunday Next Before Advent.
How appropriate because we hear in the Gospel reading that “they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.” That signals an Advent theme captured in the Advent Hymn, “Lo, he comes with clouds descending” (Hymn # 60).
The church year runs out in the themes of justice and mercy. That alone occasions a certain reflection. November is the grey month of remembering, its sombre qualities calling us to a kind of inwardness. And so we come to the Gospel which is a striking and disturbing passage from what is called The Matthean Apocalypse, which can be viewed in conjunction with the Morning Prayer reading from Ecclesiasticus (43.15-end). Ecclesiasticus means ‘Church Book’ as named by the Latin church in the 3rd century AD. The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach is its 3rd century BC Hebrew title. It was also translated into Greek later in the third century BC as indicated in the Prologue which was added then and which provides an interesting insight into the problems of translation. It notes the differences between one language and another and the “good will and attention” and “indulgence” needed in order to make sense of the meaning. One of the outstanding books of The Apocrypha, it is the only one whose author we know. But it is the conjunction of Apocalypse and Apocrypha which I want to explore briefly because it speaks to a significant feature of spiritual life.
First, let us get clear about the terms. Apocalypse refers to what is unveiled and unhidden; in short, uncovered or revealed. It is commonly associated with visions of the end-times and with a sense of judgement. Apocrypha, on the other hand, refers to what is hidden and is used with respect to a series of texts written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament, and the Christian New Testament; in short, intertestamentalworks. Important and wonderful texts, they are viewed differently in terms of their Scriptural authority by different Churches. In the Roman Catholic Church some of these texts are known as “deuterocanonical,” meaning a second canon, and are viewed as equivalent to the canonical Scripture as texts upon which to base doctrine. And Anglicans? Well, following an older Patristic understanding, Article VI “On the Sufficiency of the holy Scriptures for salvation,” which you can find on page 700 (BCP), states that “the other Books (as Hierome [Jerome] saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine,” meaning any teaching independent of the canonical Scriptures. The Article then lists those books. Among them is Ecclesiasticus. Along with some other works, that text belongs to a category of literature within and beyond the Apocrypha known as “wisdom literature.”
What is hidden also reveals and what is revealed equally conceals. And that pertains to the quality of our life in Christ in terms of two fundamental movements which belong to the character of the Church year and the pattern of Scriptural readings. One is about what God does for us; the other about what God does in us. These movements are justification and sanctification.
Advent signals the spiritual idea of God coming to us; in short, revelation. It inaugurates a whole programme in which we learn about God and God’s will for us and for our salvation. It is about how we are made right with God through Christ. This is justification, our being made right with God through the righteousness of Christ. That programme of justifying grace runs from Advent to Trinity Sunday, culminating in the great revelation of the mystery of God as Trinity, the divine self-relation which is the ground and basis of our life in Christ. In a way it is all apocalyptical, all about the revealing of God for us as ultimately grounded in God’s own life, the life of the Trinity. Christ is our justification, to be sure, but that grace is yet to be perfectly realised in us. It is perfect and inherent in him but not fully so in us who are still in pilgrimage; fully revealed in him but not fully realized in us. We remain a work in progress.
This point is made in the Epistle reading for The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany which also serves as the reading today for Trinity 25. John in his first epistle recalls us to the love which God the Father has bestowed upon us so “that we should be called the sons of God.” We are God’s beloved but even as the sons of God, “it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Something, we might say, remains hidden. “But we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” Our life is hid in Christ. His appearing will mean our being fully found in him as the end and perfection of our lives. “Then shall I know even as also I am known,” as 1 Corinthians 13 also puts it.
From Trinity Sunday through to Advent, we seek to put on Christ more and more, as it were, seeking the grace of Christ in us. This is the programme of sanctification. It is about our growing in grace and righteousness. From Advent to Trinity, we run through the Creed, itself the pageant of justifying grace; from Trinity to Advent, the Creed runs through us in the pageant of sanctifying grace.
There is the constant interplay between justification and sanctification, between what is revealed fully in Christ in the motions of God’s love for us and what remains hidden and incomplete about God’s love in us. The passage from Ecclesiasticus rejoices in the majesty and glory of God which is always greater than us. “By the words of the Lord, his works are done… and the work of the Lord is full of his glory.” But we don’t always see that. It is at once revealed and known and yet hidden and unknown. “The Lord has not enabled his holy ones to recount all his marvellous works.” We are not perfect but imperfect and sinful people who yet seek God’s perfecting grace. God knows us better than we know ourselves. “He searches out the abyss, and the hearts of men, and considers their crafty devices,” the devices and desires of our hearts of deceit and sin. “No thought escapes him, and not one word is hidden from him.” Yet “how greatly to be desired are all his works, and how sparkling they are to see!”
In these days of the ending of the Church year, we are returned to our beginning. Our beginning and ending are all about Christ, the Alpha and Omega of our lives, something which the beams of this building constantly remind us. As Ecclesiasticus wonderfully and rhetorically puts it, “who can have enough of beholding his glory?” It complements powerfully The Matthean Apocalypse about “the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory” a vision which is ultimately about our hope in the “gather[ing] together of his elect from the four winds.” Things hidden and revealed, apocrypha and apocalypse, God for us and God in us. Such is the dance of justifying and sanctifying grace in our lives; our end and our beginning are in Christ.
He searches out the abyss, and the hearts of men,
and considers their crafty devices.
For the Most High knows all that may be known.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXV, November 18th, 2018
Christ Church