Author: CCW

“I am the bread of life”

Thanksgiving is a strong reminder to us of our spiritual identity. We are inclined, perhaps, to think of Harvest Thanksgiving as a form of folk religion left over from our more agrarian past when we were more directly dependent upon our labours in the fields, the woods and the seas. Or we may be inclined to think of our National Thanksgiving Day, as the left-over of the long durée of the state nationalism of the last century and more, now passé in the age of the global community and the end of the cold war. What, then, are we to make of this Thanksgiving weekend? Does it simply remain with us as a social gathering, a family event, an occasion to get together and enjoy a common meal? Or is there something more to the idea of Thanksgiving?

In the contemporary world where everything, from health care to the environment, from warfare to education, is said to be “driven by technology” or “driven by market forces”, we are in danger of forgetting the spiritual principles which belong to our social and political relationships and identities and which have a more organic character to them, something which is wonderfully illustrated in the way in which our churches are so beautifully decorated with the rich bounty of the fruits of creation at Harvest time. It is, after all, for no technological purpose or economic reason that the fruits of the harvest are before us here in the Church.

No. The point is that Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. Pumpkins and zucchinis, apples and turnips, all the rich variety of the harvest are gathered into our churches. Why? To feed God? No. To signal the praise of all creation and all human labour to God. We are with the whole created order in giving praise and thanks to God for what God has given us without which there could be no harvest, no life, no being whatsoever.

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“If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed;
but let him glorify God in this name.”

His martyrdom, it seems, holds sway over his scholarship, and yet, perhaps, the two are really one. Martyrdom is about a witness to truth; translation was his witness. Tonight we commemorate “William Tyndale, Translator of the Scriptures into English, Martyr, 1536,” as the Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer so concisely and simply puts it. It both reveals and conceals a whole story and an important concept. A translator of the Scriptures into English and a martyr? To be sure.

Some of the greatest achievements of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ are precisely about the connection between language and martyrdom. William Tyndale inaugurates a fateful tradition belonging to a fateful century. Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer – all of them great masters of the word in English; two of them as translators and one as a preacher – all of them martyrs. There are others, too, of course, who were martyred in that age when politics was religion and religion was politics; all of which is hard, if not impossible, for us to understand. Yet, there is this wonderful idea that we cannot ignore, I think, namely, the power of translation as a witness to truth.

In the second century BC, the only named author of one of the apocryphal books, Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, comments in the prologue the problem of translation.

“For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly
the same sense when translated into another language.”

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“Be not anxious”

Jesus’ words are comforting words that speak to an anxious world. What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts. The first Books of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) use the phrase “be not carefull,” as derived from William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. The King James Version of the Bible, produced four hundred years ago in 1611, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are so easily taken captive or occupied, possessed, we might even say, with various concerns. The phrase, “take no thought,” became the version in the Books of Common Prayer from 1662 onwards until 1959, when in Canada the word “anxious” was introduced in its place, a word which has 17^th century provenance in English but which has been given a much greater weight of interpretation in the 20^th century, no doubt, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud. The German word angst has entered into our contemporary vocabulary with a vengeance. We are anxious about our anxieties, stressed out about our stresses; in short, self-absorbed.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us and preoccupy us. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. It is not too much to say that out of self-preoccupations arise no end of disorders and troubles: anger and depression, recklessness and stupidity, meanness and selfishness.

The cares of this world beset us but Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way. The passage here from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount recalls us to the great and grand theme of God’s Providence by way of reference to Creation and the Fall.

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