by CCW | 2 December 2018 15:00
Today’s Collect draws explicitly upon the rich imagery of the Epistle reading from Romans, the images of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light.” The Gospel reading from Matthew complements and illustrates this teaching. We are awakened to the necessity of an ethical principle and to its presence in our lives. That is the meaning of the Advent of Christ, the coming of Christ.
The Epistle opens with a commentary on the law as fulfilled in the love of neighbour. “Love,” Paul argues, “is the fulfilling of the law.” Law is love? That must seem rather strange yet it goes to the heart of the matter of God as the ethical principle for our lives. The law proclaims God’s will for our humanity and as such illumines the darkness of our lives. Left to ourselves, to “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” we are deadly and destructive, harmful to ourselves and to one another. The biblical story of Cain and Abel, the first murder, inaugurates the long bloody tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Thus it serves to highlight the need for an ethical principle which by definition cannot come from us; it is not a human construct, but something divine through which we learn the true worth and dignity of our humanity.
The story of Cain and Abel is followed by the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and, then, the Mosaic covenant in an ascending order of completeness and universality, the meaning of which is summarized in Paul’s statement that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
We often misunderstand the Ten Commandments and confuse the ethical teaching they present with our more ordinary assumptions about laws and legislation, about rules and customs as something constraining and limiting. To the contrary, we are presented with something much more radical and much more freeing. We forget that the Ten Commandments are about our freedom, our liberation, and that they are grounded in the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am,” as the universal principle upon which the being and knowing of all reality depends. “I am has sent you,” God says to Moses. The Ten Commandments begin with God as “I am”: “I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The law is the charter of our freedom, our freedom to God. That freedom is love in its truest sense
The Ten Commandments are the universal moral code for our humanity. And while given authoritatively, they can also be known through natural reason. John Chrysostom remarks in the 4th century that nine of the Ten Commandments are known by natural reason. Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish theologian writing in Arabic in Cairo, especially emphasizes that the first two commandments about the existence and the unity of God are known by natural reason. This is to say that they are universal truths.
More than a list of proscriptions and commands, they form an integral whole. They ground our life in God. Because God is God, there are no other gods but God. Because God is God, He is not to be confused with anything, absolutely anything else, in creation; the distinction between Creator and created is absolute. Because God is God, His name – “I am Who I am” – is not to be taken in vain, not to be casually and carelessly invoked, not to be used profanely which is to say for other purposes than what belongs to the principle of being and truth. Profane means what is before or outside the temple as standing in opposition to the Holy. Because God is God, we are to “remember the Sabbath” to “keep it holy.” Why? Chrysostom thought this was the one commandment that was particular to the Jewish story and, indeed, it is, but creation is universal and while the story of creation talks symbolically about the six days of creation and the idea of the sabbath rest on the seventh, surely the idea of a time for rest and reflection, for contemplation, is universal. Contemplation, as Aristotle argues, is the highest life for humans.
Remembering the Sabbath recalls us to creation and thus to the Creator as a principle that is to be honoured with respect to the ordering of time. Joseph Pieper reminds us of a deep truth which our world has largely forgotten, namely, the proper meaning of leisure. In our culture, we live to work. This is one of our problems which stands in stark contrast to the wisdom of the Hebrews and the Greeks where we work to live. The Greek and Latin words for leisure are skole and scola from which we get the word, school. School, properly understood is leisure, our freedom from the pressing necessities of everyday life. Aristotle literally says “we are un-leisurely in order to have leisure.” Work is un-leisure, literally, a-scolia. Similarly in the Latin, busyness is neg-otium, literally, the negating of leisure. Thus, leisure is the freedom to contemplate, to wonder at the mysteries of life, and, ultimately, to take delight in the things of God. A profoundly counter-culture idea and yet how necessary and how freeing! Once again, we are freed to God and to the truth of ourselves in God, to our good as found in Him. Without it we are lost in all of the distractions of ourselves, unable to focus; literally, uncollected.
The Ten Commandments divide between our duty to God and our duty towards our neighbour, meaning our fellow human beings. With the fifth commandment, we turn explicitly to our relations with one another, recalling first, a fundamental feature of human life. We all come from a mother and a father. Regardless of how we feel about our parents and by extension all our family relations, they are inescapably and undeniably our parents and our relations. We, literally, have no say in that. What we can do is honour our natural derivations, honour the natural sources of our being. That is our freedom. Once again, this recalls us to the order of creation and so to God.
“Thou shalt do no murder.” We are not the authors of our own being let alone the arbiters of the existence of others. The necessary truth here is that human existence is to be honoured and respected and not denied and destroyed especially since we are made in “the image of God.” To kill another is to deny the image of God in the other and in ourselves. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is the seventh commandment and reminds us that we are sexual beings and that marriage is to be honoured and respected as belonging as well to our relationship with God. “Thou shalt not steal” reminds us that property is an extension of personality and that the distinction between mine and thine is to be respected. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” goes to one of the distinctive features of our humanity. We are language beings, beings endowed with tongues and speech which are to be used for speaking truth, not spreading lies. “Thou shalt not covet” brings us to the last commandment and speaks to our hearts as the seat of all our desires. To covet is to want what belongs to someone else. It concerns what is within us.
Thus the commandments provide a complete picture of the principal aspects of human life. They are the ethical principles which inform and shape the particular rules and laws of our cultures and communities, the informing and animating principles without which we are lost in ourselves. They ground our relationships with one another in our relationship with God. This is their signal power and truth.
There are different traditions about the numbering of the Ten Commandments. Anglicans, along with other reformed traditions as well as Eastern Orthodoxy, speak of the ten in the order enumerated in the Prayer Book. Roman Catholics and Lutherans collapse the second commandment about graven images into the first and divide the tenth commandment about not coveting into two: the coveting of things and persons.
In the Advent of Christ, love is the fulfilling of the law, its true meaning. How does this relate to the Gospel about Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem? The story of Christ’s triumphant Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem is also the Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent. Why? Because it signals the purpose of God’s coming to us. It signals the idea of redemption, of the light of God in Christ which illumines and overcomes the darkness of our hearts. We know the story. We who shout Hosanna shall also cry, Crucify. Thus, Archbishop Cranmer thought it wise to continue the Gospel passage to include the cleansing of the Temple. It serves to remind us of our darkness, of our misuse of the good things of God, of our misuse of the Temple as the place of our truest leisure, our skole, in learning about God’s will for us in our lives. Our hearts are the temples that need the cleansing grace of Christ. Thus the Gospel illustrates the Advent theme of “casting off the works of darkness” in order to “put on the armour of Christ,” a casting out in order to learn to take delight in God and in God’s being with us.
Such is the point of Advent. It awakens us to our need for God our Redeemer, the one who comes to the darkness of our world and our hearts as light and joy and grace. Such is the divine love in which the law is fulfilled and has its meaning. Such is the grace of Advent.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/12/02/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-advent-9/
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