Author: CCW

“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”

The long Trinity season runs out in a series of reflections on wisdom. It is on this Sunday that we begin to read in the Sunday offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Books of the Apocrypha.

This follows an ancient understanding about the role and place of those books in the doctrinal understanding of things. At the heart of the Protestant reformation was a new sensibility about the primacy of Scripture and the nature of its interaction with tradition and reason in determining the teaching or doctrine of the Church on matters of essential faith, on matters of morals, and on matters of polity or church government. As a consequence, there was debate and question about a collection of books that arose between the time of the setting down of the Old Testament – the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and the period of the Christian New Testament. The debate had largely to do with the claims about certain teachings alleged to be based upon these texts to which the Reformers took exception.

For some Protestant Churches these books are not regarded as part of the Scripture. For others, like Anglicans, for instance, these books are received and read not “to establish any doctrine” – meaning essential or creedal doctrine – but “for example of life and instruction of manners” as Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states. In this the Anglican Churches understand themselves to be following the example of Jerome, the great translator of the most influential and famous version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible for more than a millennium for the western and European world. Anglicans read the Apocrypha or are encouraged to do so as complementing the Old and New Testament.

In a way this is necessary in order to make sense of the New Testament, since there are several instances where the New Testament writers make explicit reference to events and ideas found in the Apocrypha. Such is the argument for the inclusion of Apocryphal texts in the public reading of Scripture in the life of the Church. But there have been Anglicans of an Evangelical persuasion who would not be persuaded about reading from the Books of the Apocrypha and so for the sake of those of tender conscience, the Prayer Book (Cdn., 1962), makes provision for alternative Old Testament passages to be read instead on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season. This reveals what was once a typical kind of Anglican compromise, a kind of principled accommodation to different theological sensibilities, even a kind of wisdom, at least practically speaking, it seems to me.  It is an approach, perhaps, that has been lost in our church for some time.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. The Trinity season and the season of Epiphany abound in miracles. They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John and there are few gospel readings from John’s Gospel in the long Trinity season. Yet that season runs out in wisdom as we are reminded in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer today, the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. For we begin to read from the Apocrypha and, particularly, from the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha on this Sunday. I want to suggest that there is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle, to be sure, a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign, the word sign here is significant, teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

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“I am the bread of life”

Powerful and yet familiar words. They speak profoundly to the special meaning and purpose of Thanksgiving. Ultimately, thanksgiving is a spiritual activity. To push it even further, I would argue that there is no true thanksgiving which is not a thanksgiving to God.

We are rather good about the idea of thanksgiving for something or other. We get that because we like to be on the receiving end. The idea of thanksgiving makes some kind of sense if we have been given something, especially if it is something which appeals to our appetites and desires. Where we fall down on the thanksgiving front is on the radical idea of thanksgiving to God for all and everything that exists. For that requires reflection and awareness, an aspect of self-consciousness. The deeper and more explicitly spiritual aspects of the act of thanksgiving reveal to us what runs completely counter to our culture of entitlement. You may like to have turkey, squash, potatoes, pumpkins, even zucchini, and so forth – certainly I do – but no, none of us deserves any of it. Even if we have raised and slaughtered the turkey, grown and harvested the various fruits and vegetables of creation, all of those things and our labour included depends radically and completely upon God and upon the good order of his creation.

We create nothing of ourselves. We are only secondary creators, acting in accord with the good order of God’s world and out of the idea of having been made in the image of God. God is the Creator. Thanksgiving reminds us of our human limitations and recalls us to God’s “bountiful goodness” as this Sunday’s Collect so wonderfully puts it. There can only be life and there can only be a bountiful harvest of edibles and delectables as well as a harvest of rational and spiritual pleasures and principles because of God’s great “bountiful goodness”.

That is the central spiritual insight of thanksgiving. It is less about thanksgiving for and more about thanksgiving to. Why? Because there can be no harvest whether of material or spiritual goods without God.

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