Category: Sermons

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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“For without me me ye can do nothing”

There is something rather terrifying about the feast of St. Matthias. He is the apostle chosen by lot to go “into the place of the traitor Judas,” as the Collect puts it. The Lesson from Acts is no less clear: one is chosen “that he may take his place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell.” That one is Matthias, now numbered with the eleven, making the eleven twelve.

We know virtually nothing about Matthias. Which is fine. It is more than enough to contemplate the idea that he has been chosen to take the place of the betrayer of Jesus. Yet it must seem an uncomfortable thought. Betrayals are difficult but necessary things to behold. To take the place of the traitor, it seems to me, must mean contemplating the betrayals in our own hearts. For it has to be said that we are all the traitors of Christ. We are all like Judas.

Such is the deep and grim reality of sin. Matthias is chosen to take his place. Not to be another traitor but in the face of human treachery and deceit to be a man of faith, steadfast and sure. “There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face” Shakespeare’s King Duncan, in the play MacBeth, says about the first Thane of Cawdor who was a traitor to the King. “He was one,” the King says, “upon whom I built an absolute trust.” At just that moment, MacBeth appears, MacBeth whom the King had just appointed the Thane of Cawdor in the place of the traitor. MacBeth would prove to be the far greater traitor. And unlike the first Thane of Cawdor who confessed and repented, it will not be said of MacBeth, as it was said of him, that “nothing became his life like his leaving it,” meaning a kind of nobility achieved through repentance and confession.

No. Matthias stands in the place of the traitor Judas but not as another traitor but one who knows the treachery of human hearts and the need for heavenly grace. And that, it seems to me, is the point of the Gospel reading that accompanies the lesson from Acts. Jesus says, “for without me ye can do nothing.”

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“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”

Where are our hearts? Ash Wednesday is the stark reminder that our hearts are in disarray, in darkness and confusion, in sin and folly. We don’t like to hear this perhaps and yet the message of Ash Wednesday is the strength and comfort of the Christian Gospel. It convicts us, to be sure, but only so as to set us on the path of redemption.

Year in and year out, it seems. The path is at once easy and hard, the ways at once difficult and yet altogether possible. It is about the grace of Christ in us and through us in the course of our daily lives.

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
But is compos’d of passion.

Wise words from the poet of the Anglican spiritual way, George Herbert. He has put his finger on the challenge of Lent. It is to be welcomed, even loved. Why? Because of the importance of temperance – one of the four cardinal virtues and the one which speaks directly to the matter of self-control – and because of the necessity of authority. As he rightly intuits, it is hard to imagine which we reject the most, the idea of temperance in the culture of self-indulgence, or the idea of authority in the culture of the tyranny of our own subjectivity; in short, “you are not the boss of me!” It is, I fear, the underlying mantra of the culture of arrested adolescence. Lent provides a counter to these disorders and disasters, a welcome counter, as Herbert suggests.

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“I will show you a yet more excellent way”

That more excellent way is Paul’s great love-song. The image of our lives together as a body encompassing diverse gifts and distinct parts where each works for the good of the whole has its ultimate perfection only through the activity of love, the perfecting virtue. Without love, we are nothing, he says, but “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, lives that are “full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing” as Shakespeare puts it in MacBeth. Charity is love, love in its profoundest sense, love as “setting love in order” and bringing to perfection each and every part of the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other body, both individually and collectively, finds its place and voice.

Love is motion towards another. It does not arise simply from ourselves. For in ourselves our love towards one another is always suspect and self-serving; in short, selfish. It is always less than what it should be, even less than what we want it to be. The poverty of our own loves convicts us. In ourselves, our loves, our desires are incomplete, dangerous, destructive and even quite deadly. “We see in a glass darkly”, incompletely and confusedly, especially about our loves, it seems.

We have to learn this in one way or another. At the same time, we have to learn the greater lesson of the perfecting grace of Christ. Christian love is not about comfort and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without the love of God – so clearly and strongly indicated on this day – there could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. Without love we are dead.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”

Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima are the three Sundays of Pre-Lent. They remain only in the Book of Common Prayer; no longer even part of the contemporary ecumenical landscape. And yet, they teach us something quite profound. They recall us to a moral discourse which is part and parcel of the larger life of the Church and which connects us to the traditions of moral philosophy in antiquity which is also part of the heritage of Jews and Muslims.

That moral discourse is about the four cardinal virtues, anciently understood to be the defining elements of human character in the pursuit of excellence. Those four cardinal virtues are temperance, courage, prudence and justice. They are activities of the soul with respect to every aspect of our lives; principles, we might say, that are cultivated within the soul and which guide and govern the whole of our lives. It belongs to the sophisticated wisdom of the ancient Greeks to understand that the inward aspects of our being determine our outward actions; these are the virtues that define the ancient sense of dignity and respect.

Temperance is about self-control, particularly of our appetites and emotions, “subduing the body” as Paul puts it. Courage is about our hearts in the face of each and every challenge and hardship of life. Prudence is about the right exercise of our reason; practical wisdom, as it were. Justice, the greatest of these four is about the right ordering of all the parts of the soul – body, heart and mind.

To ponder the four cardinal virtues themselves would be a wonderful thing but these three ‘Gesima’ Sundays (which are terms of temporal reference pointing us towards Lent and Easter; in short, the weeks of seventy, sixty, fifty days before Easter) are about something more and something greater. They point us to the radical transformation of these worldly or natural virtues of human excellence by God’s grace. In other words, the cultivation of the four classical or cardinal virtues in our souls and in our lives belongs to human redemption, to the ultimate perfection of our humanity as found (to use Augustine’s terms) not in ‘the City of Man’ but in ‘the City of God’ which of course becomes the pattern for our lives in the world. Jesus’s parable is about the kingdom of heaven, imaged as a householder hiring workers for his vineyard. This belongs to the Christian transformation of the ancient moral wisdom. The cardinal virtues all become forms of love; ways in which we participate in God’s love written out for us to read in Jesus Christ.

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“What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

“When icicles hang by the wall,/ And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,/ And Tom bears logs into the hall,/ and milk comes frozen home in pail,/ When blood is nipped and ways be foul” … “When all aloud the wind doth blow,/ And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,/ And birds sit brooding in the snow,/ And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,/ When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,/ Then nightly sings the staring owl,/ Tu-who/ Tu-whit, Tu-who – a merry note,/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” Ah, winter, at least as Shakespeare envisions it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a wee bit threatening but mostly manageable, even “a merry note”.

How do we think about winter? Is it something that we dread and fear? Something from which we seek to flee, seeking out some warmer clime, fleeing the bitter cold as if fleeing from discomfort if not from death itself? Or is winter, as another poet, William Cowper puts it, the “king of intimate delights”? Certainly, the season and experience of winter varies from place to place, from culture to culture, and even from age to age. “Winter in Venice”, Adam Gopnik observes, “is very different from winter in Whitehorse”, or, for that matter, Windsor! It is “a truth”, as Alden Nowlan, the Canadian poet from Stanley, just down the road from Windsor, puts it in a poem entitled “January Night”, “that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” Winter has to be respected.

But how we think about winter is part of a larger question about how we think about nature and how we think about the created order. In other words, it belongs to how we think about God and about creation and redemption. This Gospel story speaks directly to those ideas and extends them into the world of our hearts and minds as well. There is a storm at sea and all seems lost. Jesus is with them, asleep. He seems indifferent to the fearful fatalism of the men. They awaken him: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It isn’t a request for anything to be done; only a wake-up call to our imminent death and destruction in the storm.

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