Author: CCW

“If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

In the gentle softness of October and in the quiet stillness of the ending of nature’s year, we celebrate the completion of the Apostolic foundation of the City of God with the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude. All that can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,”as a hymn puts it. And after all, what more needs to be said than that? Very little is known about either apart from their apostleship in Christ though they have come to be known traditionally as the patron saints of zealots and of lost causes, respectively. But that only highlights perhaps the essential doctrine of the saints. Another lives in them and so for us. It is all about the sanctifying power of the grace of Christ reflected in those whose lives are hid in Christ and who point us to the nature of our abiding in the grace of God.

That abiding is wonderfully signaled in the lesson from Revelation as belonging to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God. The Collect emphasizes that the Church is built upon nothing less than “the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the head corner-stone” and emphasizes the unity of doctrine as the binding principle that makes us “an holy temple acceptable unto thee.” We abide in the temple and are to be ourselves temples of the Holy Spirit.

What this means is shown in the powerful gospel for their feast which speaks about keeping the commandments of God in love and about the Holy Spirit as the Comforter or Strengthener of our faith who “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the festal round of the Apostles and prepares us for the harvest festival of All Saints. What is set before us is the wonder of our co-inherence with God and with one another. God in us and we in him.

Saints Simon and Jude usher us into the glorious celebration of that community of divine love in which we have our abiding, the Feast of All Saints; itself the celebration of “all that dedicated city, dearly loved of God on high.” All our agendas are, after all, but lost causes, all our zeal is but misplaced love apart from our abiding in the love of God which passes human knowing. And as the Gospel makes clear this abiding is our peace and our joy, come what may in the course of this troublous life.

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“Thy sins be forgiven thee”

“Do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we’ve done?” Someone asks about the devastation and carnage of the First World War in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, to which the reply is given: “I doubt we’ll ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings”. A poignant remark, it suggests that somehow forgiveness is critical to our humanity, something at the very least for which we sense a profound need, especially perhaps when we recognise how we are invariably implicated in the confusions of our world. Our readings today help us to think more deeply about the nature and power of forgiveness.

The forsaking of sins and the forgiveness of sins are two intimately related concepts that speak to the truth of our humanity. Both involve a re-ordering, a re-establishing of the interior life of the soul: the first as directed to the soul’s activity, to what we do; the second, to the soul itself, to who and what we are.

Forgiveness means the actual putting away of all that hinders the soul’s true motion towards the good, towards God; it means the removal of sin. Forsaking means the act of turning away from sin and turning to loving the good, God; it means the pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the seeking after righteousness through the restoration of righteousness in us. This involves a motion away from sin and a motion towards righteousness. Such motions of the soul constitute repentance. As Jeremy Taylor writes:

“Repentance, of all things in the world, makes the greatest change: it changes things in heaven and earth; for it changes the whole man from sin to grace, from vicious habits to holy customs, from unchaste bodies to angelical souls, from swine to philosophers, from drunkenness to sober counsels”.

“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you,” Paul bids us. God’s forgiveness must be active in our forgiveness. The forsaking of sins depends radically upon the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is a divine act – a divine activity accomplished in the flesh of our humanity in Jesus Christ. And Jesus wants us to know this: “that ye may know”. “Repentance makes the greatest change”. It means just that – a change, a change in outlook, a metanoia, a conversion of the mind, a turning around because of having been turned around.

Repentance means a change of heart and a conversion of mind. “Be ye renewed in the spirit of your mind”, writes St. Paul, exhorting the Ephesians to repentance, to the forsaking of sins. “Put off the old manhood … put on the new manhood”. Put away “all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking … with all malice”. Why? For “ye have not so learned Christ.” Repentance means a radical re-ordering of the soul’s activity. But how is this possible? How are our vicious habits to be transformed into holy customs?

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