Day: December 17, 2020

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 December

December Last Chapels

Last chapels, whether at the end of Michaelmas Term or at the end of the school year, are rather poignant times. This year our last chapel services seem somewhat anticlimactic coming after the Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Psalms owing to the shift from exams to classes. Yet they provide an opportunity to think more deeply about the great Advent pageant of Word coming to us in the Service of Nine Lessons.

All of the readings were prefaced by introductory phrases that give an explicitly Christian meaning to the service. The two lessons from Genesis, the three lessons from Isaiah, and the lesson from Micah are all seen in terms of their fulfillment in the story of Christ illustrated by Luke’s account of the Annunciation, Matthew’s account of the birth in Bethlehem, and John’s prologue about the Word made flesh. The readings form a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration.

Though explicitly Christian, the readings are not exclusively so since they really belong to a long and profound tradition of reading and thinking about God as Word, logos. In other words, the service is logos-centric, something which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common in terms of their indebtedness to logos, word or reason, as coming out of the Greek and Hellenic traditions of philosophical reflection. Advent is profoundly philosophical.

That is signified through the great questions of Advent which open us to the truth of God ever present and ever coming towards us in the ways of our endeavours to understand that which is greater than ourselves. In our last Chapel service for the 11s, we read the story of the Annunciation with Mary’s question, “How shall this be?”. It is a question of genuine intellectual interest belonging to the desire to know. It leads to her great response, “Be it unto me according to thy word,” a phrase which speaks to the educational project of being defined by ideas conveyed by words coming to us. We also read at the last Chapel service for the 12s the great Christmas Gospel, the last reading in the Pageant from John’s Prologue, about “the Word made flesh”. Augustine famously noted that he already knew about the Word which was “in the beginning”, the Word which “was God”, and the Word which “was God”, words that mark the beginning of that Gospel, from the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists. This looks back to Plato and forwards to his heirs in the Neoplatonisms of Augustine’s own time. The Word is the intellectual-principle, the principle of the being and knowing of all things in God. Thus the Advent Christmas Pageant of Word has a universal dimension and scope.

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Prayers and liturgy

Ignatius, Bishop & Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Ignatius (d. c. 107), Bishop of Antioch, Martyr (source):

Feed us, O Lord, with the living bread
and make us drink deep of the cup of salvation
that, following the teaching of thy bishop Ignatius,
and rejoicing in the faith
with which he embraced the death of a martyr,
we may be nourished for that eternal life
which he ever desired;
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: Romans 8:35-39
The Gospel: St. John 12:23-26

Maxim Sheshukov, The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius the God-bearerIgnatius, who became Bishop of Antioch c. 69, is a key witness of the early church in the era immediately following the apostles.

Nothing certain is known of his episcopate before his journey from Antioch to Rome as a prisoner condemned to death in the arena. Arrested during the persecution of the emperor Trajan, he was received in Smyrna by Bishop (later Saint) Polycarp and delegates from several other churches in Asia Minor.

While at Smyrna, Ignatius wrote letters to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, and Rome. Later, at Troas, he wrote to the churches at Philadelphia and Smyrna, and to Polycarp.

In his letters, Ignatius clearly affirmed Christ’s divinity and his resurrection from the dead. He encouraged all Christians to maintain church unity in and through the Eucharist and the authority of the local bishop, and he wrote against a heresy that contained elements of Docetism, Judaism, and possibly Gnosticism.

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