Category: Sermons

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The cross is veiled. It is there but it cannot be clearly seen. We know and we do not know. We see but “through a glass darkly.” Such are the paradoxes of Passion Sunday, the paradoxes of the pilgrimage of our souls. Do we simply rest in these ambiguities? Or do we seek to see and know and to be seen and known by God? To love and be loved, too, we might ask?

Passion Sunday confronts all our ambiguities and names our uncertainties. Jesus so gently says to the mother of Zebedee’s children who “desir[ed] a certain thing of him” that “ye know not what ye ask.” How does one respond to that? And yet it signals the profoundest truth about our wounded and broken humanity. It will be signaled even more eloquently and more poignantly in the first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We don’t know what we want and we don’t know what we are doing. And yet we ask and we act.

What is needed then? Simply a change of the mind; in short, repentance. We are apt to think of that in terms which are far too limited, as if repentance was merely our saying sorry. But I think that this day opens us out to a deeper understanding of repentance. And it is signaled for us in the greater paradox of this day.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The cross is veiled. It is there but it cannot be clearly seen. We see but “through a glass darkly,” as Paul explains in the Epistle read on Quinquagesima Sunday. We know and we do not know, Jesus suggests on this day. Such are the greater paradoxes of Passion Sunday. We know and yet we do not know. Do we simply rest in these ambiguities, preferring the forms of indeterminacy and indefiniteness that belong to the culture of illusion? Or do we really seek to see and know and to be seen and known by God? To love and be loved, too, we might ask?

Passion Sunday confronts all our ambiguities and uncertainties. Jesus so gently, it seems to me, says to the mother of Zebedee’s children who “desir[ed] a certain thing of him” that “you do not know what you are asking.” How does one respond to that? Yet it signals the profoundest truth about our wounded and broken humanity. On Good Friday, it will be signaled even more eloquently and more poignantly in the first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We don’t know what we want and we don’t know what we are doing. And yet we ask and act as if we do.

What is needed then? Simply a change, a metanoia of the mind; in short, repentance. We are apt to think of that in terms which are far too limited, as if repentance was merely our saying sorry. This day opens us out to a deeper understanding of repentance that is rooted in the humility of the humanity of God in Jesus Christ. That is signaled for us in the greater paradox that belongs to this day this year.

Today is also Lady Day, the commemoration of the Annunciation of Mary. Christ’s Passion takes central place and so the celebration of the Annunciation is transferred to Tuesday. Yet, the conjunction of the Annunciation with the Passion arrests the mind, as it did the mind of the poet John Donne in 1608, contemplating the even greater conjunction of the Annunciation and Good Friday on the same day. Somehow the themes of the Birth and Life are inseparable from the themes of Death and Resurrection, Christmas and Easter. This is a critical feature of the Christian understanding. It concentrates the mind upon what he called the “abridgment of Christ’s story,” his coming to us and going from us into death, the Angel’s Ave and Christ’s Consummatum est, the one heralding the beginning, Hail Mary, and the other the sense of ending, “it is finished.” Such rich paradoxes illumine the glory.

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“Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?”

The sixth chapter of The Gospel according to St. John is sometimes known as “the bread of life discourse”. It is a fascinating and complex chapter and one which challenges Jesus’ disciples and the people of Israel in general, and, for that matter, all of us. As today’s Gospel reading makes clear the overarching theme is about the provisions God makes for us in the wilderness journey of our lives. Taken with the epistle reading from Galatians, the food of our wayfaring is food from home, “the bread of heaven,” as Jesus later names it. Jerusalem, as Paul makes clear, is our spiritual home, our alma mater, our nursing mother, as it were. The Gospel passage is about how we are sustained, nourished and refreshed in the journey with spiritual food. The teaching is the feeding on this day which is variously known as Mothering Sunday, Laetare Sunday and Refreshment Sunday, terms which are all derived from the readings in one way or another.

The word, wilderness, is used twice in the chapter and in both cases refers to the Exodus journey of the Hebrews. The text from Psalm 78 reflects on the trials of that ancient wilderness journey. A critical feature of the psalmist’s reflection is the complaint of the people in the wilderness. The question, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?” is a rhetorical question that challenges God; in short, puts God to the test. We are recalled instantly to the First Sunday of Lent, to the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations, too, belong to the wilderness, quite literally to the desert.

This Gospel story is the answer to the question but in such a way as to highlight our disbelief and distrust of the essential goodness of God. Here the Word by which we live and which nourishes and refreshes us is bread, food for our wayfaring souls. The bread in the wilderness is about the divine generosity from which we live; “twelve baskets” are taken up from “the fragments” of “the five barley-loaves that remain” a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, we might say, a basket for each of the twelve apostles of the new Israel, the Church, too, we might add.

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“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”

It is a terrifying and frightening picture, perhaps, the most terrifying and frightening picture of the human soul in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, this is where the ancient gospel with all of its perplexity and confusion about devils and demons meets the darkness and despair of contemporary culture. No set of readings, it seems to me, speaks more directly to our confusions and uncertainties.

There is far more to this picture than the postures of moralizing righteousness that, at first glance, we might think is the message of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians with his proscriptions against “fornication”, “all uncleanness”, “covetousness” which is idolatry, “filthiness”, “foolish-talking”, “jesting”, all of “which are not befitting”, and “whoremonger[ing]”, as he puts it, all of which are summed up as being “the unfruitful works of darkness.”

It seems like quite a list of the usual suspects of human sinfulness with more than a modicum of focus on sex which troubles our age so greatly. And yet, this list of “the unfruitful works of darkness” is based upon something deeper and more profound, and perhaps, most troublingly so. It will belong to the tradition of moral theology to rank and place the vices and virtues of the human soul in a kind of hierarchy, a kind of system, if you will, such as the seven deadly sins, for instance. And there is something right about that culturally, politically and socially. There is, we might say, the recognition that our peccadilloes, our little sins, as it were, are not to be compared with the ranker forms of evil potentially and actually in our souls and our communities and that are before us in the endless parade of injustices and violences in our world and day. But, be that as it may, there is also the deep spiritual insight that all our sins, from the least to the greatest, belong to the darkness. Paul claims that all of it must come to light.

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This is the second of four Lenten meditations on the Prodigal Son. The previous meditation is posted here.

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,
and take up his cross and follow me”

Matthew’s familiar words are complemented by Peter’s words from his First Epistle, “if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God in this name.” These scriptural passages are appointed to be read at the commemoration of a martyr; they speak of the meaning of our Christian identity and about the nature of the Christian pilgrimage. Tonight, in the week of The Second Sunday in Lent, we commemorate Perpetua and her Companions, third century martyrs. “Another lives in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said. It is another marvelous line that captures so much of the Christian witness and identity.

Somehow these readings also speak directly to our Lenten pilgrimage and connect to our meditation on the Parable of the Prodigal Son by way of Henri Nouwen’s reflection on Rembrandt’s 1668 painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Throughout the centuries of Christian thought, that parable has been the occasion of many commentaries. Rembrandt’s painting, we might say, is itself a kind of commentary on the parable and its significance with respect to the over-arching themes of repentance and reconciliation, themes which are specific as well to the season of Lent.

Self-denial and suffering are features of Lent that draw us into the mystery of Christ’s passion, into the mystery of human redemption accomplished through the reconciliation between God and Man in Jesus Christ. The parable, too, in the rich commentary tradition speaks to those themes explicitly.

We do not read the Scriptures in a vacuum. We read them as belonging to an interpretative community. The Parable of the Prodigal Son has been read liturgically at certain times of the Christian year in the different ecclesiastical traditions of the wider Church. It is read in our Anglican tradition at Morning Prayer in Year One of the two-year cycle of Office readings on The Second Sunday in Lent, for instance. In the traditions of the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, there is the Sunday of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the pre-Lenten season which gives high prominence to this parable as preparing us for Great Lent.

The consequence of this is that there is a rich commentary tradition among what are commonly called the Fathers of the Church, meaning the Patristic period, comprising roughly the first six centuries of the Christian faith. Archbishop Chrysostomos, a contemporary Orthodox archbishop, notes that Henri Nouwen’s meditation on the Prodigal Son by way of Rembrandt’s painting reflects the patristic understanding of the parable even if there are no explicit references to the commentary tradition of the Fathers in that work. Our interest tonight will be to highlight a few of the comments of the Fathers about the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

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“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” we heard last week. It was Jesus’ response to the first temptation of the tempter, the devil. It captures, really, an entire attitude and approach to the Scriptures, especially in our Anglican understanding. It belongs to an entire theology of revelation. It speaks ever so profoundly to the deeper meaning of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures who are not and cannot be defined simply by the things of this world. This whole outlook and way of understanding is, of course, profoundly sacramental. Jesus will make the connection between bread and word ever so clear. “I am the bread of life”, he says, the bread of the Passover which he says is his body, “this sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life” as the Prayer Book Eucharistic prayer so beautifully puts it.

This sacramental connection between bread and word is present in this Sunday’s Gospel, too. It tells the wonderful, though somewhat disturbing, story of the Caananite woman coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”. Some of the same themes present themselves here as last Sunday. The ensuing dialogue is about the strength of this woman who is an outsider, we might say, but who has an insight into who Jesus is for the whole of our humanity. The dialogue, which is initially so troubling, serves to bring out a tension within Israel about God only to conclude that through Israel God in Jesus Christ is for everyone. But it is not cheap grace. The importunity or perseverance of this remarkable woman is like the insistence of the blind man on Quinquagesima Sunday. It belongs to a remarkable insight into the power of God’s unconditional goodness in Jesus Christ. But it testifies as well to the necessity of our seeking what God wants for us. As the poet John Donne puts it in a marvelous and super-intense sonnet, “salvation to all that will is nigh”. You have to want it, to will it. But you can only will what God gives.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells his disciples and us. And he tells them and us exactly what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem.

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all thigs that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and the third day he shall rise again.

He speaks of terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts and words and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short; Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order.

Christ speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” It complements Paul’s phrase about how we “see in a glass darkly”. We understand so little. These things were hid from them and, in a way, they are hid from us. We can’t understand except through the journey of Lent.

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde;
To me, who took eyes that I might you finde:
Was ever grief like mine?
(George Herbert, The Sacrifice, 1633)

So the poet, George Herbert, drawing upon the words of Isaiah and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, confronts us with the mystery of Lent, the mystery of human redemption. Christ “took eyes”, became man that he might find you and me, even in our blindness, so that we might see and be changed by what we see.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

For centuries upon centuries Lent has begun with the story of the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the willed way of the cross, to the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

The text from Hebrews (5.8) makes the theological point that underlies the Passion of Christ which, in a very real sense, begins with the story of Christ’s temptations. To be tempted and to be pierced are etymologically related. The point on The First Sunday in Lent is that Christ is tempted for our sake even as he will suffer for us on the Cross. To be tempted is one thing; to give into it is something else. Christ suffers the complete package of temptation; in short, all our temptations are named in his. And we might add, too, that he knows the nature of temptation far more than we do precisely because he does not succumb, as we so easily do, but overcomes our temptations. The text from Hebrews makes a theological point about the Incarnation. “Although he was a Son,” meaning the Son of God and therefore Divine, yet “he learned obedience through what he suffered,” which is only possible through his humanity.

To succumb to temptation belongs to our sinfulness – to our falling away from the conditions of our creatureliness. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all the forms of our disobedience.

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