“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”
We don’t hear these readings very often. Epiphany season varies in its length along with the Trinity season. The readings for the Fifth and Sixth Sundays after Epiphany do double duty. They were appointed by John Cosin in the 17th century for both these Sundays after Epiphany and for the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity in those years when the date of Easter is early, resulting in the shortening of the Epiphany season and the lengthening of the Trinity season. Cosin’s choices reveal a profound understanding of the logic of the eucharistic readings throughout the course of the church year and, especially, about the connection between the Epiphany season and Trinity season.
One of the benefits of the suspension of services over the past several weeks – over Christmas in its entirety and most of the Epiphany season – has been the opportunity to consider not just the eucharistic readings (Epistles and Gospels) but the readings for Matins. For the last three Sundays we have been reading from the Book of Amos and from John’s Gospel. Such readings contribute to a deeper appreciation of the doctrinal and devotional aspects of the Epiphany season. Accordingly, I want to make reference this morning to the Matins readings along with the eucharistic propers.
This Sunday marks the end of the Epiphany season this year. It ends, we might say, with the sunset blaze of the light of Candlemas, on the one hand, and with a note of reflective judgment, on the other hand. Candlemas marks the transition from the Christmas cycle to the Easter cycle. It belongs both to Epiphany and to the pre-Lenten and Lenten journey of our souls. Such coincidences are providentially wonderful and soul-enriching..
Epiphany season is about the making known of God and about what God wants for us. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us. That says much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity and about the truth and the mystery of God. God makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us. This is Paul’s point: “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”. In a way, it is a kind of summary of the Epiphany teaching.
The second lesson from John’s Gospel at Matins this morning is about Christ bearing witness to himself. “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me”. Christ’s words are about himself in his relation to the Father, to eternal life, the foundation of all life. Our finite life is “incapable of being self-sufficient, incapable of bringing itself into life”, as the philosopher Michel Henry observes, because our life is “always in need”, always “desiring and seeking”. The lessons of the Epiphany include God’s will and purpose for our humanity. Our wholeness and completeness is not in ourselves but in him. Our life has no foundation in itself. This contrasts with the infinite life of God whose life is the foundation of all life and whose life is self-sufficient and self-complete. “In him was life and the life was the light of men” as John’s Prologue puts it. Light and life, life and light – the nature of the complementary interchange is everything. God’s Word and Son is the foundation or ground of the light and life of the world but only as founded and grounded in the Trinitarian life of God. God reveals himself in Christ.
Yet Epiphany also reveals things about ourselves. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; it is itself a judgment.
Judgment belongs to the idea of Epiphany in the contrast between finite human knowing and the infinite knowing of God. In our day, judgment is about being judged by others without any recourse to the question, “Upon what basis?” What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse? How is judgment in our disturbed world anything more than mere opinion and dogmatic assertion?
We live in a world of wheat and tares, the Gospel suggests, wheat and weeds, as it were. It is not always easy to know which is which and, metaphorically, which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the eucharistic epistle for today to forbear and to forgive one another and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. “Whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”, Paul says. That is a check upon our judgments of ourselves and upon one another.
In a world where we are constantly being told what to say and what to do and what to think on the basis of mere assertion and arbitrary authority, it is good to be reminded of God’s judgment rather than our own. It is to be returned to the Lord who has made known both himself and his will for us. This signals a kind of intellectual and principled accountability, it is the wisdom of humility. That is what Epiphany has been all about if we are willing and ready to attend to that Word and let it live in us, “let[ting] the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”.
We have as church and culture despaired of God’s Word, preferring instead to be conformed to the world and its ways, desperate as an institution to have the world’s approbation only to find ourselves the target of its scorn and hate. And yet, this is part of God’s judgment in the realisation that we have not always spoken the truth in love and that we have frequently, if not always, been fallible in our encounters with others. A triumphalist Church wagging its finger at the world in its woes and distresses is not a pretty picture nor true to Christ. But neither are churches enslaved to conformity to the world true to their calling and being.
The measure is not about being popular in the eyes of the world. The mission is not simply about this or that issue of advocacy, for such things are really our contemporary confusions and uncertainties about what it means to be human. The challenge is something greater. It is about reclaiming a thoughtful and theological understanding of who we are in the sight of God. That will require our willingness to hear the very things to which we have closed our ears.
In the second lesson at Morning Prayer, Jesus is at pains to point out exactly what he is teaching. The strong claim is that “my teaching is not mine, but his who sent me”, that he is not speaking on his own authority, that is, human authority, thereby seeking his own glory, but as one “who seeks the glory of him who sent him”, that is to say, divine authority. Truth lies in a kind of accountability to a principle, in this case, the principle of God and the revelation of his word and will. Jesus places his own testimony in the context of the Law. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law.” Strong stuff that names our hypocrisy. The dialogue and the encounter in the temple turns not just on what Jesus is teaching but upon who Jesus is, upon his relation to the Father, and upon the presumption of human judgment. At issue is not merely the avoidance of judgment but the making of right judgment.
There is debate and confusion about who he is and what he is saying. It goes to the limits of our knowing because of our sinfulness and because of the finite nature of human knowing itself. We are constantly being challenged to grow into a larger understanding. It isn’t possible without the recognition on our part of our ignorance and folly.
This is why Amos’s prophecy is so important. He offers four visions of judgment: judgment by locusts, judgment by fire, judgment by measurement – the plumb line – and judgment by decay and rot in the image of a basket of summer fruit, the point being that such fruit cannot last but must rot away. This is the imaginative context for his strong words of condemnation against the institutions and individuals in his world and day and that extends to ours. His words are a strong indictment of the rich in their neglect of the poor because of their obsessive interest in shallow materialism, and a powerful critique of the official prophets of his day whose self-interest overrides their commitment to God’s truth. Why does this sound so familiar? Deja vu all over again?! It is a critique of immorality and of pretentious but empty piety. What is the underlying problem in Amos’ view? We have stopped our ears to the word of God.
Amos sees this as itself a judgment. “Behold,” he says, “the days are coming when I”, the Lord God, that is to say, “will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord”. It is a famine about hearing!
It is a powerful statement. They are not to be simply the words of Amos but God’s word just as Jesus claims to teach nothing more than the teaching of the one who sent him. Both are laying claim to a teaching which is not merely of human invention and fancy but absolute and divine. Their words make known to us what God wants us to know. In the case of Amos, the words are a kind of wake-up call to how we are seen in the eyes of God; in the case of Jesus, it is about the radical nature of God being with us in the intimacy of his humanity.
How will we hear and learn again? Sometimes it takes the experience of a famine and an emptiness in ourselves to turn us back to the one whose words are the food and drink of our weary souls; the bread and wine of grace and salvation. In a time of spiritual and intellectual famine, we are recalled to Christ whose word is light and life. We end our eucharistic fast with a hunger and a desire for Christ’s Word and Sacrament.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 5, 2022
(In the Parish Hall – return to worship)