by CCW | 21 April 2024 10:00
In “Images of Pilgrimage,” the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse wisely advises that “we should stay close to the language of images themselves,” especially “the images of pilgrimage, of wilderness and paradise” that encompass, as he puts it, “the whole of revelation.” This speaks profoundly to our current distresses and confusions about language itself. We have lost the capacity perhaps to think the metaphors and images of Scripture and have defaulted to turning words into things; the reification of images that misconstrues the understanding of ourselves and the created order. The consequence is that there is no self or any nature, any created order. The post-modern despair of metaphysics is premised on the assumption that all we have are words but the words are endlessly empty of meaning.
Yet that sense of the emptiness of meaning, the crisis of meaninglessness in the contemporary world, paradoxically leads to assertions and claims about meaning and identity that are entirely arbitrary; it is all a power game about who controls the narratives. In a way it is an attempt to fill the vacuum that we ourselves have created but only by two contradictory assertions: first, that words create reality (they don’t); and second, that words are essentially meaningless (they aren’t), or, at the very least, there is an endless deferral of meaning (there isn’t despite changes in meaning).
God speaks the world and the world of things into being. We don’t. At best we are “secondary creators.” Certainly language either shapes and helps our understanding of things or distorts and hinders our understanding of the givenness of the world and ourselves in it. Words matter but not when they become things, mere commodities to be used and consumed. Not when they are used to control thought rather than enable our thinking.
The Eastertide readings are a profound treatise about thinking the images of revelation and thus of finding ourselves within the understanding which they offer. The recurring phrase in the last three Sundays after Easter is “because I go to the Father.” Taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse” of Jesus in John’s Gospel, it grounds the whole pilgrimage of the soul in the pilgrimage of the Son to the Father. Nowhere are we taught more clearly about the reality of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost than in these readings. It is what Jesus himself teaches and makes known in the face of our confusions and uncertainties. And, here, it is taught even through the realities of the human condition of suffering and tribulation. One cannot help but note the wonder of metaphor that opens us out to a larger understanding of our humanity which transcends the limits of human experience but without negating its different forms which belong to the created order.
Jesus speaks to the disciples in their bewilderment and perplexity to explain what he means by his “going to the Father.” It is about the gathering of all things back to God in redemption from whom all things have come in creation. And that is really about the radical life of God in joy and love. The image which Jesus uses is particularly striking: it is the image of child-birth. “A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”
“Her hour has come” just as Christ had told us about his “hour,” the “beginning of signs” in the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee, ultimately realized and made visible and audible on the Cross in his going to the Father. The Resurrection makes visible what these images mean.
The natural miracle of child-birth becomes the metaphor or way of understanding the radical miracle of the life of God for us in and through the ups and downs of our broken and fragmented lives. “You now therefore have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one taketh from you.” Such is the Resurrection. It is the opening out to us upon what our lives and thinking ultimately and completely depend.
It is primarily and essentially Jesus who names and reveals God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. This is the language of revelation into which all aspects of human life are gathered. The language here is not the imagined projection of some theory about the structures of the human community. It is not a human construct. God is not made in our image or in the image of the structures and order of human governance. It is the other way around. Human governance imitates divine governance but not in a reductive and literalist way. It is not about power and domination but sacrifice and service as we saw last week in the powerful image of Christ the Good Shepherd who is equally the lamb of God. Why? Because he gives his life for the sheep. That sacrifice has its fuller meaning in his going to the Father, our heavenly Father, but here imaged in terms of child-birth and mothering care. This picks up on what we saw in the Passion. As Jesus tells the disciples in his journey to the cross, “the Son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” The pastoral ministry is about the radical meaning of that mothering care which frees and enables rather than manipulates and smothers. It does so by gathering us into that all-sufficient and eternal love.
The love of the Son for the Father in the mutual bond of their love in the Holy Spirit is the underlying principle of the Passion and the Resurrection. The challenge of the Scriptures and the liturgy is for us to find ourselves in this divine movement, the pilgrimage of God himself, we might say. That is seen and understood in the going forth of the Word and Son of the Father into creation and his return in redemption to the Father. In such movements we learn and see the nature of the eternal and self-giving love and life of God, the love and life that has no end and is not exhausted and spent but enriches and transforms. No words capture this better than the metaphor of child-birth and mothering care that belongs to the motion of the Son in his going to the Father. Here are the words which open us out to the truth and beauty of God and which belong to our journey as “strangers and pilgrims” as 1st Peter puts it, who are defined not simply by the circumstances and events of our world and day but by our life in Christ.
That insight signals the greater paradox: God’s sacrifice of love moves us to “love the brotherhood,” to “honour all men,” to “fear God,” and to “honour the king;” and all “for the Lord’s sake.” All authority is of God. We live in the world but are not simply of the world; thus we “live as free men” who have been freed to God. The repeated good news of the Resurrection is the transformation of sorrow into joy, mirrored profoundly for us in the juxtaposition and complementary play of images. The image of child-birth belongs to the mothering care of God for us in Christ’s going to the Father.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 3, 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/04/21/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-easter-13/
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