Christ Church

“They overcame him”

We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.

Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his seven Eastertide sermons (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Eastertide Meditations on the Seven Last Words of the Crucified In the Light of the Resurrection”.

Fr. David Curry has collected his three Lenten meditations (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Book of Homilies”.

“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? Whose words? Those questions take on a certain poignancy of meaning in the service of Tenebrae. The Latin for darkness or shadows the ancient services of Tenebrae were anticipatory of the three great holy days, the Triduum Sacrum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The service of Mattins was sung solemnly the evening before each of those days. This reminds us that Holy Week is not simply a linear sequence of events but a cluster or crowd of events that belong to the credal understanding of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, events that are all interrelated doctrinally and which inform each other. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be understood independently and in separation from each other.

Tenebrae in the modern practice anticipates the Mattins of Maundy Thursday but includes a number of psalms and canticles that point us to the Resurrection. It is essentially a psalm office. The Psalter is the Hymn and Prayer Book of the Jews and of Christians. Thus many of the words we are meant to hang upon in an attentive and serious way are the words of the psalms. That is intriguing and poignant because the psalms present us with a number of different voices: the voices of our humanity in its distresses and fears, its disorder and violence; the voice of God in judgment and compassion; and the voice of Christ both as suffering victim in his humanity and as seeking our good. The psalter, as Calvin observes, presents us with an anatomy of the soul. We are meant to learn things about ourselves in relation to the truth of God. We are, yet again, learning the great lessons of sin and love in their interrelation.

Thus Tenebrae draws us dramatically into the Passion through the power of the psalms and the canticles, scripture songs which comment on the things of the Passion and human redemption. We are meant to find ourselves, our own souls, in these psalm prayers and hymns at the same time as we are meant to find ourselves in the deep embrace of God’s love for us and for our good.

The psalms of Tenebrae complement the first Mattins lesson for Maundy Thursday from The Lamentations of Jeremiah understood as the voice of Christ addressing us from the Cross revealing to us our rejections of God’s Word and truth made visible in the crucified. Thus it is Christ speaking directly to us about our evil and our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.” Powerful words and images that reveal Christ as bearing our sins in his own body, words that convict us.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

What words? The Nicene Creed says that “he suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” By Scriptures, the Creed does not mean the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament but the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament. Luke’s text however is about the words of Christ. Holy Week sets before us the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity and complexity. Yet the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures help us greatly in grasping the radical nature of his Passion, Death and Resurrection. They provide the ground for the credal witness to Christ crucified.

Thus on Tuesday in Holy Week at Matins we read the first servant song of Isaiah, a passage which is understood in reference to Christ in the Christian understanding and to Israel in the Jewish understanding. Christ unites both, we might say. He accomplishes or fulfills what belongs to the vocation of Israel as “a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” even as Simeon identifies the child Christ in exactly the same language based upon exactly the same passage. And the redemptive nature of Christ’s work is also signaled here: opening the eyes of the blind, bringing out the prisoners from the dungeon and from the prison those who sit in darkness. These are the pilgrimage themes of illumination and purgation, of liberation from the prison of ourselves.

The reading from Wisdom tonight complements the first servant song from Isaiah and highlights the theme of Christ as the victim, the righteous one whose very being excites the wrath and envy of those who seek his destruction. For wherever the good is sought there too is the devil hard at work but always as a negative force, always as negating the goodness of being but as such reasoning blindly and foolishly. These texts throw light on the continuation of Jesus’s farewell discourse in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel.

Even more they complement and deepen our understanding of the continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark which is a pretty full picture of human evil and the miscarriage of justice, of human cruelty and abuse and mockery which culminates in the crucifixion and the word, the one word of the crucified in both Matthew and Mark. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” We are meant to hang on that word of the one who hangs on the Cross and feels to the fullest possible extent the reality of sin and evil, feeling it more that we can imagine because of his greater goodness. We are meant to feel his sense of utter abandonment and alienation which is nothing less than what we have visited upon him in our abandonment and alienation from God.

What, then, is the good for us in the face of this awful spectacle of suffering and evil, of sin par excellence in several different registers? Simply this. The one word that comes out of the Centurion in seeing the crucified Christ. We are to hang upon the words of Christ that we might be able to say with the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” That is to profess what we proclaim in the Creed about the crucified Christ who “suffered and was buried, and the third day rose again from the dead.” But only if we hang upon his word of desolation and know ourselves as its cause and truth.

“All the people hung on his words”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2023

“All the people hung upon his words”

The readings at Morning and Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week complement in wonderful ways the Eucharistic readings. We hang upon the words of Hosea, the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. He bids us tonight to “take with you words and return to the Lord,” having reminded us this morning of God’s words to us in our disobedience and folly.

I am the Lord your God
From the land of Egypt;
You know no God but me,
And beside me there is no saviour.
It was I who knew you in the
Wilderness,
In the land of drought.

But in our prosperity, he says, we forget God. It is from Hosea that we have the lines from 1 Corinthians 15 used in the Burial Office about “Death being swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But God does not forget us. In the awareness of our sins we learn the love of God. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them.” These passages contribute to the beginning of Christ’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel (ch. 14) which is really about preparing the disciples for his passion & death, his resurrection and ascension; in short, the radical meaning of Christ’s going to the Father and about our learning the love of each for the other. The Passion teaches us the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” through our being gathered into his love for the Father. That is the underlying principle of the Passion.

These office readings inform our understanding of “the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark” framed by the broken alabaster box of ointment of spikenard poured out upon Christ’s head – a sign of love in repentance – and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. The focus is on Christ in our midst bearing the faults and follies of our betrayals whether explicitly like Judas and Peter or through our weakness in not being able to watch even one hour with him in Gethsemane. The alabaster box that is broken open prepares us for the breaking of his heart and body on the Cross. This beginning of the Passion convicts us of the limitations and the outright betrayals of our love of God and one another but only to move us to contrition and tears of sorrow. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.”

“All the people hung upon his words”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week
April 3rd, 2023

On the Holy Spirit

The Second Book of Homilies (1563) contains a number of homilies which are attributed to Bishop John Jewel (1522-1571). Among those is “An Homily concerning the coming down of the Holy Ghost; for Whitsunday”. It establishes a number of the basic themes which would be taken up and enlarged upon by others after him, such as Lancelot Andrewes’ remarkable series of fifteen sermons on the sending down of the Holy Spirit prepared and preached before King James I in the first three decades of the 17th century. As with Cranmer, Jewel’s homily complements the Articles of Religion, in this case, Article V, “Of the Holy Ghost”.

Jewel first locates the Scriptural sources for the liturgical Feast of Pentecost or Whitsuntide in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament; in each case highlighting their divine authorship. It belongs to the Exodus story of deliverance and to the giving of the Law, on the one hand, and to the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples in Jerusalem, on the other hand, both observed on the same day, the fiftieth day after Easter and the Jewish Passover. Jewel then considers “what the Holy Ghost is” and what the Holy Ghost does, namely, “his miraculous works towards mankind”.

This establishes the classical Anglican teaching about the Holy Spirit, emphasizing first, the essential divinity of the Holy Spirit, as attested by Scripture and Creed understood in tandem, and, secondly, the western understanding of the double procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (filioque). This, too, is the burden of Article V.

The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.

Thus Jewel states that “The Holy Ghost is a spiritual and divine substance, the Third Person in the Deity, distinct from the Father and the Son, and yet proceeding from them both,” as witnessed by “the creed of Athanasius,” and by the witness of Christ’s baptism in Jordan and by the dominical injunction “to baptize all nations, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Jewel notes that “his proper nature and substance … is altogether one with God the Father, and God the Son; that is to say, spiritual, eternal, uncreated, incomprehensible, almighty; to be short, he is even God and Lord everlasting … the Spirit of the Father” who “is said to proceed from the Father and the Son.” From this consideration of Deus in se, he moves on to the works of the Holy Ghost, Deus pro nobis, “which plainly declare unto the world his mighty and divine power”.

The first of those works concerns the illumination and inspiration of the Patriarchs and Prophets by the Holy Spirit. Prophecy comes “not by the will of man;” but “as they were moved inwardly by the Holy Ghost.” Secondly, there is the work of the Holy Ghost “in the conception and nativity of Christ our Saviour.” Thirdly, there is the work of the Holy Ghost “by the inward regeneration and sanctification of mankind.” The works of the Holy Ghost are understood in connection and communion with the Father and the Son. “For, as there are three several and sundry persons in the Deity; so have they three several and sundry offices proper unto each of them: the Father to create, the Son to redeem, the Holy Ghost to sanctify and regenerate.” This echoes the instructions in the classical Prayer Book Catechisms about the Apostles’ Creed.

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The Homily of Justification

The First Book of Homilies published in 1547 predates the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the Litany of 1545, it anticipates and establishes the essential features of English reformed catholicism. The Homilies are connected to the Articles of Religion as in Article XXXV which mentions both Books of homilies and names the titles of those in the second Book and in Article XI which names the Homily of Justification.

From the outset, the Homilies were intended to provide a programme of teaching on matters of doctrine and on matters of morality and practical concerns. The first five homilies of the First Book address matters of doctrine; Homilies 1, 3, 4, & 5 are from the pen of Cranmer. But the First Book of Homilies ends with a direction by Cranmer that other homilies were to follow dealing with such things as “Fasting, Prayer, Alms-Deeds; of the Nativity, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of our Saviour Christ; of the due Receiving of his blessed Body and Blood, under the Form of Bread and Wine; against Idleness, against Gluttony and Drunkenness, against Covetousness, against Envy, Ire, and Malice; and with many other matters as fruitful as necessary to the edifying of Christian people, and the increase of godly living.” Some of these topics are taken up in the Second Book of Homilies along with other concerns, particularly against the Peril of Idolatry and against Rebellion.

The Books of Homilies undertake to position the English Reformed tradition as distinct from Popery, on the one hand, and Puritanism, on the other hand; the first is more a concern of the First Book and the second of the Second Book published during Elizabeth’s reign. Both concerns speak to the polemics of politics at the time but also serve to highlight certain defining features of the English Church.

Article X1 of the Thirty-nine Articles is “Of the Justification of Man” and goes to the heart of the reformation itself. That Article explicitly names the Homily of Justification. What is that? The third, fourth and fifth homilies probably authored by Cranmer all deal with the question of justifying righteousness. They are entitled as follows: “Of the Salvation of all Mankind”, “Of the true and lively Faith”, and “Of good Works.” It is probably the third homily, “Of the Salvation of all Mankind” that is referred to in the Article. In a way its content is summed up in Article XI.

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

Justification by faith alone was one of the rallying points for the reformation in general and in general opposed any kind of thinking that suggests a human power or work on our part that is essential to salvation independent of grace. At issue is the idea of “works righteousness” as distinct from “faith works.” At the heart of it all is a profound sense of the sovereignty of God that cannot be reduced to any kind of man-made morality. Instead, the idea is that our hearts and minds and actions need to be radically grounded in God. The restoration of our humanity cannot be accomplished by ourselves. It has to be the grace of God at work for us and in us through Christ.

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1. “Hear, Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest”

One of the stained glass windows in the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School depicts Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. It is based on Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. The painting captures the theological intent of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer.

Cranmer is pictured reading a volume of the Epistles of St. Paul while before him on a table are two books, one title of which can be clearly seen. It is Augustine’s treatise De Fides et Operibus, on Faith and Works. As Diarmaid McCulloch suggests, this expresses the nature of the theological programme that underlies the enterprise of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. It would be about the primacy of the Scriptures understood through the best of Patristic scholarship, particularly Augustine; in short, a Protestant Augustinianism, as Ashley Null terms it, a distinct feature of the Reformed Theology of the Book of Common Prayer. Stephen Hampton argues that “the Reformed theological tradition is an essential ingredient in any conception of Anglicanism.” The Anglican Reformed tradition, he says, “continued to insist upon the evangelical teaching of justification by faith alone, upon the established scholastic way of expressing Trinitarian doctrine, and upon the broadly Thomist understanding of the divine nature which was shared by both Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.”

That same intellectual and spiritual intent appears in a rather remarkable phenomena, the two Books of Homilies. Homilies refers to discourses delivered publicly; in short, sermons. The terms are more or less synonymous. These homilies or sermons were provided for the use of the clergy who were encouraged to read them at Divine Service. They are part of the reformed project in its sense of the centrality of the Scriptures and Doctrine. They also witness to a problem about literacy and education among the clergy and the desire to provide teaching in sound doctrine.

Article XXV of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is unusual among reformed documents about doctrine and order in naming Homilies as belonging to doctrine and thus to the teaching life of the Church. It names the two books of homilies and provides the titles of the homilies contained in The Second Book of Homilies, though not the first. The First Book of Homilies was published in July 1547 just after the death of Henry VIII and thus in the early months of the reign of Edward VI; the second in 1563 during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Article speaks of them as containing “a godly and wholesome Doctrine, and necessary for these times” and judges them to be read in the Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.” The phrase echoes Article XXIV about how “it is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God” for Public Prayer and the Sacraments to be administered “in a tongue not understanded of the people.” We are however not talking about street talk or slang but about what can be grasped and understood through instruction. Article XI, “Of the Justification of Man”, also refers to the Homily on Justification which is the third sermon in the First Book of Homilies, though entitled “a Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind, by only Christ our Saviour, From Sin and Death Everlasting.”

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The Great ‘O’ Antiphons of Advent

December 16: O Sapientia

O Wisdom, which comes out of the mouth of the Most High, and reaches from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordereing all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

December 17: O Adonai

O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, who appeared in the bush to Moses in a flame of fire, and gave him the law in Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

December 18: O Radix Jesse

O Root of Jesse, which stands for an ensign of the people, at whom the kings shall shut their mouths, unto whom the Gentiles shall seek: Come and deliver us, and tarry not.

December 19: O Clavis David

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel; that opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens: Come and bring the prisoners out of the prison-house, them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 20: O Oriens

O Dayspring, Brightness of the Light Everlasting, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 21: O Rex Gentium

O King of Nations, and their Desire; the Cornerstone who makes both one: Came and save mankind, whom thou didst make of clay.

December 22: O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all ‚nations and their salvation: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

December 23: O Virgo Virginum

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any seen like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? The thing which ye behold is divine.

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