Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

admin | 20 June 2021

“God … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you”

Some ancient texts add ‘settle’ to this list of verbs, as in being “settled upon a foundation”. In a sense, our return to in-person worship here at Christ Church is about our restoration, about our being established, about our being strengthened, and about our being settled upon the foundation of our life together in Christ. It is good to be back and I hope that we can begin to settle into the regular forms of our corporate life in Christ with a spirit of gratitude and forbearance, knowing that there are and will be uncertainties ahead. We have, I hope, learned something about ourselves in and through these troubling times. The challenge has been to keep our focus on the spiritual teachings that alone restore, stablish, strengthen, and settle us upon the care of God; “casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.”

The care of God is a radical concept and teaching. It belongs to the even more radical concept of God as love, whose love is the ground of all life and being, all knowing and loving. Yet again, the Gospel provides us with a telling illustration of what the care of God means for us in our lives. In the face of the critical murmurings of the Pharisees and Scribes about Jesus being in the company of publicans and sinners, “receiving sinners and eating with them,” as they suggest, Jesus tells three powerful parables, two of which comprise today’s Gospel. They are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal or lost son. The fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a tour-de-force of teaching about repentance and rejoicing. Repentance and joy go together. That alone is worth pondering and thinking about. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables.

Such a view underlies an important aspect of the Prayer Book liturgy as penitential adoration and reminds us of the deep love of God for us that derives from the love of God himself. Our whole liturgy is about joyful repentance; our turning back to God because God has turned us back to himself. Such is restoration and the grounding of our lives in God, restored, established, strengthened, and settled upon his love.

I have on occasion thought about the ethical teaching of this chapter of Luke’s Gospel aesthetically, by way of the idea of a triptych. A triptych is three panels, usually painted, depicting certain biblical stories understood in relation to each other and often placed just above or standing on the altar. In this case, the whole chapter could be captured in a triptych illustrating the theme of repentance and rejoicing. Triptychs are a feature of Medieval Christian art and usually take the form of a large central panel framed by two hinged side panels each half the size of the central panel. The hinges allow the side panels to enclose the central panel if desired at certain times in the liturgical year. In terms of the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son would have to form the central panel framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

But another powerful work of devotional art comes to mind in relation to these readings today. It is Tilman Riemenschneider’s remarkable ‘Altarpiece of the Holy Blood’ (1501-1505) in St. Jakobs-Kirche in Rothenburg, Germany, which, while it has three panels, are all wood-carvings. It is a visual narrative of the Passion with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and his Agony in the Garden depicted in bas-relief, hence two-dimensional, on the two wings or flügel which frame the central theme of the Last Supper which is in carved three dimensional figures of outstanding quality. What makes this work even more striking is the way the carved wood work comes alive through the passage of light in the course of the day. In the morning light, faces of the figures in the front row of the scene of the Last Supper are illuminated except for Judas. As the sun moves on through the course of the day, Judas becomes more and more the solitary centre of the event. In the late afternoon light, the figures in the back row are seen in silhouette while Judas is illuminated. The interplay between the face and hands of Christ and the face and figure of Judas offer a moving tableau of the narrative of love and betrayal.

The altarpiece captures brilliantly the love of God extended towards us even when we are like Judas, traitors and betrayers of that love. In short, it is a symphony of divine love in the face of human sin and wickedness and in that sense a powerful lesson about the grandeur and mystique of divine love ultimately concentrated on the theme of the Holy Blood, the sacrifice of Christ for us and the means of our participation in that sacrifice sacramentally. But how? Through repentance.

The altarpiece contains a relic of the blood of Christ supposedly from the Crucifixion. This is all part of a symbolic understanding of the Crucifixion going back to the Fathers who saw in the water and the blood flowing out of his pierced side the twin sacraments of Baptism and Communion. And somehow, this remarkable artistic and spiritual work survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation. We are recalled to the divine mercy outpoured for us in the sacrifice of Christ, body broken and blood outpoured, in so many ways.

This is where the parables of Luke 15 come into play. What is the emphasis in the first two parables? The shepherd leaves the ninety and nine in the wilderness and goes after the one sheep which was lost; the woman lights a candle and seeks diligently for the one lost coin. In each case, the idea is that there “shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth” and “joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” We are meant to see an analogy between the shepherd and God, and between the woman and God. In other words, they illustrate the theme of God’s restorative love. We are meant to see ourselves by analogy as like the one lost sheep and like the one lost coin, on the one hand, and like the community as restored to wholeness by their return, on the other hand; hence the interplay of repentance and rejoicing. It is not just the juxtaposition of the one and the many but the greater idea that the repentance of the one is the basis for the joy of all. In a way, it is a strong illustration of the nature of our corporate life together; our life and death are bound up with one another in God’s love and life, a life which has been poured out for us. The emphasis of the first two parables is on God’s activity as the ground for our return in repentance signaled so movingly in the third parable of the prodigal son.

“After that ye have suffered a while,” Peter says, God “shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you.” That idea of suffering becomes redemptive and compelling when it is connected to the deep care and love of God for us through the sacrifice of Christ. That is the radical meaning of shepherd and the woman in the first two parables. The woman seeks diligently, we are told. The word is one of the Latin words for a kind of deep love which has become englished, as it were, but which picks up on the Greek adverb meaning to seek carefully and attentively; in short, to seek lovingly. And with the shepherd, what do we see but his joy “for I have found my sheep which was lost”? A joy which he invites others to share even as the woman, too, calls her friends and neighbours together to rejoice with her. Joy is contagious. It is only our petty-mindedness that renders us unable to rejoice in the good of one another and is thus unable to grasp the true joie de vivre that is our life in Christ. This, too, is something which is hinted at in the drama of the prodigal son and the elder brother. To rejoice in the return of the one who is lost is to rejoice in nothing less than the redemptive power of God’s love. It is the true counter to the theme of ressentiment which feeds the endless grievance culture of our contemporary world and which makes us all victims. Such is death not life precisely because it sets us in opposition to one another and imprisons us in a deadly form of isolation, lost in fear and worry, envy and hatred.

The Riemenschneider altarpiece reminds us that at the heart of all life is God’s love. That is the love which moves in true repentance, the love which moves us to return to God together as a community of repentance. For that is our joy and our life.