Category: Sermons

“This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our faith”

Peace and forgiveness flow from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the first-fruits of his resurrection in us, it seems, at least as this is signaled in John’s Gospel. Jesus appears behind closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear. He proclaims peace and forgiveness. He institutes the means by which his peace and his forgiveness continue with us – through the Holy Spirit breathed upon the disciples who will be the apostles of his church. They are sent forth to bestow the peace and the forgiveness of God to a fearful and an uncertain world, a world of darkness and deceit, a cruel and dangerous world, “as everybody knows”. “Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained”.

What an awesome charge! And, yet, how little understood. Sometimes known as ‘the power of the keys’, the proclamation of God’s forgiveness through the ordained ministry to his penitent people effects what it signifies. If we truly confess our sins and truly seek God’s forgiveness, then we receive the grace of forgiveness objectively proclaimed in the words of absolution pronounced by the priest and signified in the sign of the cross. We are forgiven. That is the grace which extends from the Upper Room “the same day at evening”, the day of the resurrection of Christ. It is as if we are there in that very moment and in that very room, as if time has stopped and we are caught up into eternity.

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“Christ is risen from the dead”

The truth of this day is that we are, actually, absolutely dead; dead in ourselves, that is to say. Why? Because we only live when we live for one another. And, yet, how can we live for one another? It is one of the great questions for our age.

The great insight of Holy Week is that our humanity, collectively and individually speaking, is dead when it lives only for itself. It is dead in the world’s conflicting demands; dead in the unceasing contradictions of all our souls; dead in its pretensions and follies; dead in its antagonisms and enmities. The pageant of Holy Week has shown this in all its fullness. “All is vanity,” an empty nothingness, as Ecclesiastes put it so long ago.  We have, of course, all felt this at one time or another. Yet, all this is nothing new, as “everybody knows.”

The further point is that we can’t live for one another unless we live for God. We are only alive in him. This goes down hard in our world and day and yet it is almost, we might say, an empirical statement. We do hurt those whom we love the most, and, no, we don’t always do what is even in our own best interest. To pretend that “it’s the end of the world and I feel fine” (with thanks and apologies to Great Big Sea) is just that, a pretense. We don’t feel fine whether it is or is not the end of the world.

If we are honest, we know that things are not altogether as we would like them to be, let alone what they should be from almost any kind of ethical consideration. If it isn’t scandals in the Church, both sexual and other forms of abuse, such as the abuse of power, all of which suggest a “lack of credibility,” it is scandals everywhere else. As the Leonard Cohen song suggests, there is nothing new about this. “Everybody knows that’s the way it goes,” the world’s way of deceit and betrayal, the way of self-interest and denial, whether in society or, sadly, in the Church. Yet precisely against this deadly cynicism stands something radically new. It is simply this.

We only live when we live to God. This is the burden of our teaching, for then, and only then, we live beyond ourselves, beyond the death of ourselves, beyond the death of the human community and beyond the death of the world. We live simply (and only!) in the unending life of God. Such is the teaching of the resurrection. We can only begin to learn what it means by running with the Word of the Risen One in the glory of the resurrection.

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“Consummatum est – It is finished.”

Is it over yet? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. But here is John’s last word from the Cross which says, “it is finished.” And yet we do more, you and I. After Christ dies, there is one final act of outrage, it seems, yet one more act. It belongs to our good on this day we call Good Friday to contemplate the ‘something more’ of our sinfulness and the even greater ‘something more’ of God’s love.

The dead Christ, having given up his spirit, still hangs upon the Cross; no longer dying but dead. The dead Christ is, then, pierced by the soldier’s spear. We have more to do, it seems, than just crucify him. We have more to do than just to kill him. It is, of course, perhaps, the customary procedure or test to see if he is dead but is it not also yet another gratuitous act of violence?

Yet God has far, far more than the more of our sins, something far, far more than the acts of our violence. And it begins here in this word of consummation, this word of finishing and ending. The great blessing of the Resurrection, Christ’s grand finale, we might say, already begins to flow out from the body of the broken-hearted Christ. Water and blood come forth from that stricken rock. It is the teaching of the Fathers that the sacraments of the Church flow out of the pierced side of the Crucified. Water and blood, the symbols of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist, flow out of the side of Christ crucified. There is at once the ‘something more’ of our sins – a final and unnecessary act, a violation of the sacred body – and the ‘something more’ of the act of God whose nature it is always to make something out of nothing. Creation and Recreation.

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“A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another”

The love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit is the moving force in the Passion of Jesus Christ. This divine love is the action which underlies the Passion of the whole life of Jesus Christ. John Donne reminds us:

The whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion, his birth and his death were but a continuall Act and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day.

The whole life of Christ is concentrated in the Passion. The Passion manifests the deep love of God – the love of God in himself and his love for us. Over and against this is our hatred and envy at the goodness of God and at God himself. For the Passion equally manifests the potentialities and actualities for evil in our hearts. We are on display in this week, too. Only the love of God makes it possible for us to contemplate this darkness within us and not be destroyed by what we see.

Were we to despair of the love of God, then we would be like Judas, whose remorse is not repentance and whose death, as a consequence, is simply the further denial of the love of God. We deny the truth that the love of God is greater than our hearts. But “if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts.” It is the lesson of this night. The new commandment to love one another is only made possible by the love of God moving in us despite our betrayals of that love. His love alone can set our loves in order.

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“How readest thou?”

And so it begins, and ends. We begin today with the exultant cries of “Hosanna”. We will end on Easter with the joyous cries of “Alleluia,” the alleluias that shall never end. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long continuous service, going from strength to greater strength, from joy to greater joy. And in between?

Well, that is the point of Holy Week. And, indeed, it is not too much to say that there is no going from the beginning to the end without going through the middle; no Easter that has any meaning apart from the events of this week which we call Holy Week. In a way, there is no beginning either without, at least, a glimmer of an awareness that there must be a continuing in what we have begun today. How could there not be? The contrasts of this day are just so great.

We who cry “Hosanna” are those who cry “Crucify”. The alleluias of Easter will be but the empty words of the hollow culture of empty souls and empty churches without the moving, heart-rending and mind-blowing spectacles of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday; in short, the triduum Sacrum of Holy Week. Such is the intensity of the Passion of Christ. There is no greater joy than the alleluias of Easter, but it is a joy that is borne out of the sorrow and the grief of this week.

The contrasts of this day are the contradictions of our souls. More than the mere fickle nature of mob culture that swings from one moment to the next in the madness of unreason, we contemplate the depths and heights of human loves and human hates in all of their disorder and disarray. It is not too much to say that in the pageant of Holy Week there is little, if anything, that is good about ourselves. We confront the contradictions of our humanity. That is, really, the good of Holy Week.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word.”

If there is a test for catholic orthodoxy, it invariably centers on Mary. Only through her do we understand the mystery of our redemption in Christ. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer, the mother of God. To begin to understand that is to begin to understand the wonder and the joy of our redemption.

Anglican divinity is not without its cloud of witnesses to the role and place of the Virgin Mary in our salvation and nowhere does that become more abundantly clear than in the Feast of the Annunciation.

We forget that this was the actual beginning of the year for over a thousand years. March 25^th points us to December 25^th. The ancients and the medievals were not so uninformed about the mundane and yet miraculous prosody of human reproduction as we might suspect. England, as reluctant as ever to be drawn into anything that smacks of continental superiority, held out until 1752 with respect to the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, adopted for the most part in most of Europe in 1582, which designated January 1^st as the beginning of the civil calendar year.

The older sensibility reflects the idea of our lives as marked spiritually by the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. That sensibility still underlies the ecclesiastical calendar. In this case, the Annunciation marks the beginning of the year by way of the commemoration of the entrance into creation and humanity of God himself. In short, Mary’s Annunciation is Christ’s conception, humanly speaking, in the womb of Mary. He who is “God of God” and “Light of Light” becomes incarnate in the womb of Mary. The event is the Annunciation.

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“What wilt thou?”

What do you will? Not simply what do you want but what do you will? What are you committed to? It is the question of Passion Sunday.

The Cross is veiled. Present yet hidden, its shape is only dimly seen. “We see,” at best, but “in a glass darkly.” What does this veiling of the Cross mean? Should not the Cross be fully and visibly before us? What do we mean exactly by the Cross?

The paradox of Passiontide is that the Cross is veiled precisely so that we might come to learn more fully just what the Cross means in itself and for us. The journey of Lent is concentrated for us in Passiontide, deep Lent, and then is further concentrated in Holy Week and then, again, on Good Friday. It is all the way of the Cross. The paradox of the veiled Cross is that we do not know and do not see as clearly and fully as we should. What stands in the way is the disorder of our wills and our desires.

Our passions, we might say, stand in the way of our understanding of the passion of Christ. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” The gospel story suggests that there is an element of ambition and self-interest present even in the most holy of situations. Theologically, the point is simply that our motives are never pure and clear; they are always mixed. Why? Because we neither truly know what we want – “ye know not what ye ask” – nor do we fully will that which we do know, let alone do what we should do. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” We are divided creatures, divided among ourselves and divided within ourselves. The veil is the fog of our desires.

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“The people which sat in darkness have seen a great light”

The Gospel says nothing about shillelaghs or about shamrocks or even about snakes. It does say something about places on a sea-coast, about the preaching of Christ seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, about all the things that belong to the evangelium – the good news that is the meaning of the word, gospel. Something of that sensibility belongs to the Feast of St. Patrick, the outstanding Apostle to Ireland, the bearer of the light of the Gospel to the pagan darkness of the Gaels.

It was Chesterton’s great quip: “For the great Gaels of Ireland [meaning the gaelic],/Are the men that God made mad./For all their wars are merry,/ And all their songs are sad.” Much of that remains true but through the missionary zeal and pastoral patience and understanding of Patrick, happy songs, the songs that belong to the divine comedy of Christianity are also heard and sung, known and loved. In How the Irish saved Civilisation, the writer, Thomas Cahill, notes that Irish and civilization are words which are “seldom coupled,” but if there is any justice in making such a connection, and I think there is, then much of the credit must go to Patrick.

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“For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come”

Rare are the occasions when we have a reading at Holy Communion from one of the major writings of the New Testament, The Letter to the Hebrews, but when we do they are of the greatest significance. Once in the Sundays in Lent, next Sunday, Passion Sunday, for instance, and twice during Holy Week, the epistle reading is from Hebrews. And, of course, it provides the great epistle for Christmas, too, and on a few other occasions as well, such as in the Octave of All Saints’. How splendid, then, is the course of the readings at the Offices which allow us to savour somewhat more fully the richness of this almost impossibly rich and perplexing epistle. In a way, it is one of the most theologically demanding works of the entire New Testament. And that’s saying a lot!

This year at Morning Prayer, we have had the privilege of reading from Hebrews a little more extensively as well as the great joy of reading one of the most outstanding narrative sequences in The Book of Genesis, the story of Jacob or Israel. In a way, The Letter to the Hebrews provides the most wonderful Christian commentary on the whole of the Old Testament and, indeed, particularly with reference to Genesis.

“Let brotherly love continue”, our reading from the 13^th chapter begins. Indeed, “let brotherly love continue,” and should we ever be under any delusion about how hard that is, we have only to consider The Book of Genesis! In a way, it is about the antithesis of brotherly love! Cain kills Abel; that’s just for starters; Abram and Lot, who are kinsmen, get into tussles over land; and, then, there is the most extraordinary sequence of stories dealing first with Isaac, the promised son, and then Jacob and Esau, twin brothers but at odds with one another; and then, the story of Joseph and his brothers who sold him into slavery. Apart from Isaac, it might seem that it is altogether about brothers. Upon closer examination, of course, there is the curious business of Ishmael, a step-brother to Isaac by way of Sarah’s servant, Hagar. In short, it is all about brothers whose relation to one another exhibits the greatest confusion, ambiguity, tension, and animosity imaginable. You would almost think it was Hants County! Or anywhere, really!

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