by CCW | 23 July 2023 10:00
Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but they follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things”. That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.
The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.
That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.
This is in accord with classical Anglican teaching. As Richard Hooker puts it: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes,Bk.V, ch.LVII). But this is a basic Christian understanding: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes,Bk.V,ch.LXVII).
The organic nature of the images is instructive. A branch is grafted into a living vine without which it is but a dead stick. It lives not from itself but from the vine. It is no longer dead or dying but alive and growing. Imputed, “put into” the vine, the vine then infuses, “pours into”, the branch its life-force. The branch lives from the vine to bring forth what belongs to the truth of the branch in the vine, namely, its blossom and fruit. The branch does not cease to be itself by being grafted into the vine; rather it becomes its living self, a living branch. Apart from the vine, it would be dead. “Apart from me”, Jesus says, “ye can do nothing”.
But what does it mean to be grafted into “thy Name”? What is “thy Name”? In Scripture, in Liturgy and in Prayer, the word “Lord” is the circumlocution – the way of speaking around – the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush (Gen.3). The holy Name is “I am who I am”; it is not an arbitrary, conventional or nominalistic appellation, a term which we agree among ourselves to use; in short, a social or human construct, something invented by us. Rather it conveys an understanding about something known which is altogether beyond the ordinary and beyond the natural; in principle, beyond empirical, scientific verification. It is instead wholly spiritual and metaphysical. God reveals himself as “I am who I am”, as that upon which everything else depends. Everything else – the phenomenal, natural, empirical world – is secondary. It is revealed as a product of what is primary, God alone.
But what exactly, then, is the relation of everything else to that principle of origin? Jesus intensifies and clarifies the understanding of God as “I am who I am” into the spiritual relationship of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. God in his perfect self-relation is the basis of his relation to all else. The division between God and what is other than God is brought into the life and unity of God himself. Such is the meaning of the Word and Son of God, Jesus Christ, the divine mediator between God and Man.
“Increase in us true religion”. One of the meanings for the word religion comes from religo, religere – to bind. Religion is about the bond, the element which binds the soul and God. True religion is about that true bond between God and Man in Jesus Christ into which we have been grafted so that we might live and grow as branches in the vine. In Christ we are nourished with all goodness even in the wilderness of our lives. Grafted into him, we have our life and our growth and our abiding in him. He has compassion on us in the wilderness of our lives.
What stands in the way? Primarily our refusals to understand. We refuse the Word in the images of Scripture and in the metaphors of existence. In the prosaic muddle of our daily lives, we refuse the understanding. We forget the primacy of the Word. We forget that the Word gives life to the natural and sensual aspects of our lives and gives them purpose and direction.
Without the living Word religion is really mindless and less than fully human, less than fully alive. This is Paul’s point in the Epistle reading about sin as death and eternal life as the free gift of God in Christ. We can only receive it and act upon it, literally letting it live in us. This is the challenge of our age in the face of our despair of the understanding whether it is through our idolatry of the practical and the technological or in our nihilism, our will to emptiness and despair. Yet, even there in the wilderness of our bewilderment and confusion, Christ has compassion on us. His love reaches out to us. Thomas Aquinas puts it best in recalling us to “that pattern of teaching” emphasized by Paul.
He who does not nourish himself on the word of God is no longer living. For, as the human body cannot live without earthly food, so the soul cannot live without the word of God. But the Word proceeds from the mouth of God when he reveals his will through the witness of Scripture.
That will is signalled for us in Jesus’ word. It is his compassion for us. It is his word. Let it live in you.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VII, 2023
(revised 1999)
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