Author: CCW

“Sing ye praises with understanding”

O sing praises, sing praises unto our God; / O sing praises, sing praises unto our King. /For God is the King of all the earth:/Sing ye praises with understanding (Psalm 47.6,7). So the psalmist teaches us. We have had a splendid illustration of what it means to sing with the understanding with the King’s College Chapel Choir tonight under the direction of Paul Halley. Welcome to Christ Church and please, please come again!

“Though we but stammer with the lips of men, yet chant we the high things of God,” one of the early Fathers of the Church says. We sing the high praises of God. It is our freedom, perhaps our highest freedom. But as the Psalmist suggests, our praises are not praises except they be through the understanding. Indeed, it cannot be our freedom unless it be through the understanding – the understanding of the revealed nature of God. For our praises are not projections but proclamations – an acknowledging of what has been given to us to know. We can only proclaim what has been made known to us and, in so doing, we enter more fully into the understanding of what we proclaim. But how is it our freedom?

God alone is praiseworthy precisely because in the freedom of his eternal being he does not need our praises. The proclamation of the Trinity – the highest of the high things of God, the mystery that is shown, what is revealed, not concealed – is the acknowledgement of the perfect self-sufficiency of God upon which everything else depends. Yet in singing God’s praises, the Church is also most free. The God who does not need our praises is freely praised. However much humanity needs to praise God, our praises are not praises if they are forced.

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“Because I go to my Father”

“Elvis has left the building,” it is famously said, indicating that there would be no more encores. Well, here, I hope, Jesus has not left the building! But the question for our culture and day is whether we have left him in our indifference, if not our outright hostility to Christian doctrine and life.

There is a paradox in the last three Sundays of Easter that is captured in the recurring refrain signaled in the Gospels for those Sundays. The recurring refrain is “because I go to my Father.” Jesus prepares the disciples for his going away which is the condition of his being with us in his body, the Church. It is the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel.

The Gospel engages the world. That is not the same thing as being collapsed into the world or being conformed to the world. Nor is it about making accommodations to the world with respect to the agendas and issues of our day. There have always been such tendencies and temptations. They can be, perhaps, the occasion for the discovery or recovery of the deeper truths of the Gospel. “The Spirit of truth,” it is said in today’s gospel, “will guide you into all truth.”

But what is that truth? Is it simply something which we happen to agree upon today only to change our minds tomorrow? Is the truth simply our acquiescence to the loudest voices drumming their mantras of social and political correctness into our heads? Is truth simply the will of those in power? Is it simply our feelings and opinions? No. Complementary to this statement about “the Spirit of truth,” is the equally important statement that we will hear at Pentecost, namely, that the Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Somehow truth is found in the divine relations between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; in short, in the divine life opened to view through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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“Woman, behold thy Son…then to the disciple, behold thy Mother”

Christ crucified beholds us in his love for the Father. At one point he looks down from the cross. He looks down upon us and bids us look upon one another. It is the third word from the cross: “Woman, behold thy Son; and then, to the disciple, behold thy Mother.” These are, we may say, the words of the Good Shepherd. They are the words of his care for us.

The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He does not flee like the hireling – the wage slave – in the face of danger. No. The Good Shepherd endures the danger and overcomes it. His endurance means his suffering and death. His victory means his resurrection and life. He lays down his life for the sheep so that his life might live in us. That life is the life of the resurrection. It flows out in his care for us through the Church.

We hear talk all the time about “caring communities”. But I wonder if we know what it really means. We forget, I think, the lessons of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, there can be no true caring without the care of Christ. The crucifixion and the resurrection reconstitute the human community and give it life and meaning.

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“They were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

But what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think, it is powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense at all. The resurrection captures the imaginations of the gospel writers and compels them to see things in a new light without which they would never have written what they have written about Jesus at all.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation, whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I might add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

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