Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for Tuesday in Holy Week

“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all unto me”

The office readings for Tuesday in Holy Week offer interesting insights into The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark and thus to the spiritual meaning of Christ being lifted up and our being drawn to him. At Matins, we have the first of the four suffering servant songs of Isaiah which signals the purpose of Israel’s mission as “a covenant to the people,” “a light to the nations,” “to open the eyes of the blind, and to bring out from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” These images all belong to the idea of human redemption and divine revelation recapitulated and made visible in the figure of Jesus Christ. The suffering mission of Israel for the world is fulfilled in Christ, too. This suggests complementary universalities rather than simply competing ones. The servant songs in Isaiah have contributed greatly to the Christian understanding of the person of Christ. The reading points to the sense of mission and purpose.

The first lesson at Vespers from Wisdom reflects profoundly on the nature of human sin in the forms of envy and resentment that are so prevalent in our world. The righteous man is inconvenient to us in our unsound reasoning. “He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us.” Therefore “let us condemn him to a shameful death.” The passage highlights our sinfulness which is visited upon him, ultimately upon Jesus who is made sin for us. In Wisdom our sins are about our reasoning as having gone astray and thus blind to the secret purpose of God, for we have forgotten or denied that “God created man for incorruption” and that we have been made in “the image of God’s own eternity.” Once again we confront the sad parody of the truth of our humanity; such is the twisted nature of our sinfulness.

The readings at Matins and Vespers from John’s Gospel, chapter 15, highlight the deeper communion between God and man that God seeks and makes for us. Such is redemption in our abiding in Christ as the branches in the vine. How? Through his word abiding in us, making us his friends and reminding us that we are not of the world but of Christ in his service and sacrifice.

These readings along with the lesson at Mass, the third suffering servant song of Isaiah, contribute to the deeper meaning of the Passion according to Mark. Christ is lifted up before our eyes on the Cross. We hear his agonizing word of desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” only to realize that he voices the desolating, despairing and contradictory nature of sin itself. It is made visible and audible in him. All of the forms of human injustice and the betrayal of all that is good and holy are concentrated in the figure of the Crucified and in his death. Nothing much good can be said of us in the events of Mark’s account of the Passion. But a great good comes out of this spectacle precisely in terms of what is lifted up before us. It is found in the words of the Centurion who beholding these things grasps its deeper meaning and purpose. “Truly this man was the Son of God,” he says. We behold Christ crucified bearing the wounds and marks of human sin, having been made sin for us, embodying all of the sufferings of our wounded and broken humanity, and yet we behold God. Sin and love are lifted up before us in the spectacle of the Passion.

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all unto me”

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2024

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Sermon for Monday in Holy Week

“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Monday in Holy Week sets before us the beginning of the Passion according to St. Mark. It begins with the story of an unnamed woman who breaks open “an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and anoints the head of Jesus. It is a touching act of compassion and devotion; an act of worship and an acknowledgement of Jesus. But this reading ends with the threefold denial of Christ by Peter and his tears of contrition when he recalls what Christ had said to him that “before the cock crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept.” An outpouring of ointment, an outpouring of tears. And all because of how Christ draws us to himself.

The compassionate act of the woman anointing the head of Jesus excites the indignation of some within themselves who “murmured against her.” But Jesus highlights the meaning of her action: “she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.” She anticipates the meaning of Christ’s Passion in his death for us. Her act is an act of love and is recognised as such by Jesus. The breaking of the box anticipates the breaking open of the body of Christ and the outpouring of his blood for us. Peter, in confronting his own weakness and his betrayal of Jesus, is moved to tears.

“Take with you words, and return to the Lord,” Hosea says. He is the great love-prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Hosea are read as the first lessons at Matins and Vespers respectively on this day. Hosea’s words convict us of having forgotten the Lord our God who “knew us in the wilderness” who cared for us and from whom we have turned away towards idols of our own making. But God turns us back to himself. “Take with you words and return to the Lord … Say no more, ‘Our God’ to the work of our hands” for “I will heal their faithlessness,” God says, “I will love them freely for my anger has turned from them.” Hosea concludes, “Whoever is wise let him understand these things.” It is a kind of commentary in advance on what Jesus says in the second lesson at Vespers from John 14 about loving Jesus by keeping his commandments and finding ourselves in him, embraced in the love of the Trinity. “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him.”

The woman is drawn to him in love; Peter who follows Christ albeit a far off denies him three times only to convict himself through recalling what Jesus had said. His tears are the tears of contrition; the tears of sorrow at having betrayed what he most loves. What flows out both from the alabaster box of ointment of spikenard and from the tears of Peter belong to our being drawn more fully to Christ. There is no hiding the failings and weakness of our humanity in its disarray and confusion.

Christ is lifted up before us in the reading of these Scriptures so that he may draw us to himself. Our hearts are convicted and convinced of his love for us, a love that moves us in spite of ourselves and draws us to him.

“And I, if I be lifted up … will draw all unto me.”

Fr. David Curry
Monday in Holy Week, 2024

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Sermon for Palm Sunday

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life,” John tells us in the 3rd Chapter of his Gospel (vs. 14). This text is further elaborated upon and intensified in another statement by Jesus voiced in the first person much later in his Gospel: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (Jn. 12.32). Together they provide a critical matrix of interpretation for the pageant of the Passion in Holy Week.

As a fragment from Heraclitus reminds us, “the way up and the way down are one and the same,” meaning, I think, that the way to the principle and the way from it are really all about the principle itself in its self-motion and in its movements in us, a kind of exitus and reditus, a going forth and a return. That pertains to the challenge of Holy Week, too. It is all about our looking upon the pageant of the Passion in all of its intensity and meaning, in all of the ups and downs that it presents. It is really all about a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around the essential mystery of the Passion in all of its moments. We immerse ourselves this week in all four of the Passion accounts in the Gospels. That is quite powerful and highlights an important feature of our Common Prayer tradition that honours the centrality of the Scriptures understood in terms of credal doctrine.

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of one long and continuous liturgy that culminates with Easter. We begin in joy and end in joy; the joy of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the joy of his Easter resurrection. But that beginning and ending are not equal for us: the joy of the resurrection is greater. Why? Because in Christ we go “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23.4), “through the vale of misery” (Ps. 84.6), the parade of the miseries of our humanity in all of its twisted forms, yet finding in that parade a greater good, even a blessing. Such are “the pilgrim ways” in our hearts, going “through the vale of misery” but using it “for a well,” finding in it blessings.

The point is the drama of the dogma of our salvation in which we participate through the liturgy. We are in this story. The Passion of Christ is about what he freely wills to suffer for us and for our good, thus the passions of our souls are equally on display in the spectacle of the Passion; in short, the lifting up of the Son of man and our being drawn to Christ as Saviour. The story of our humanity is recapitulated and completed in Christ’s Passion. The sorrows and joys that belong to human life find their radical truth and meaning in what Christ undergoes for us and with us in his Passion. “His whole life”, as John Donne remarks “was a continual passion”, “a continuous cross,” as Andrewes notes.

Holy Week is the further concentration of his whole life and of ours. What we contemplate in his Passion are the different and various forms of our twisted selves, our incomplete and partial loves that result in one way or another in our being less than who we are in God. “We are,” as Rowan Williams says in a recurring phrase, “because God is. And we are what we are because God is what God is”. Holy Week is the pageant of the redemption of who and what we are in God.

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“His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory”: Reading with the Fathers, Lenten Programme III

“Blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.”

Such is the hope for ourselves as we enter into the Passion of Christ. The joint commemoration of Benedict, the founder of Benedictine monasticism, along with Thomas Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer, suggests the legacy of the Fathers for the continuing life of the Church. Benedict (480-547) was the founder of Benedictine monasticism which has shaped the European world. It was in the Benedictine monasteries that the writings of the Fathers were largely preserved and passed on as living presences and voices in the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. What we have come to call ‘Anglicanism’ is itself an inheritor of that tradition with its attention to “the mind of the Fathers.” Diarmaid McCulloch observes that Gerlach Flicke’s iconic 16th century portrait of Cranmer (1545) captures the essential features of the English Reformation project: the reading of the Scriptures through the Fathers, principally, though not exclusively, Augustine. Augustine, however, is certainly the dominant and seminal figure for the shaping of Benedictine monasticism and its heirs.

The one, who founded the spiritual and intellectual traditions which remain with us, at least for those, who, as Jesus says, “have ears to hear,” complements the other who was an Archbishop and a martyr. Together they contribute to our Lenten reflections on reading with the Fathers especially with respect to Passiontide. I want to offer a few passages from Origen, Chrysostom, and Leo on the symbolic meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem which emphasize the centrality of the Passion. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (b. ? – d. 461) concentrates the doctrinal emphasis for us: “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” That marks the character of our participation in the Passion through the pageant of Holy Week.

Origen (185-254) the great theologian and biblical exegete par excellence, commenting on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, states what becomes a common approach of the Fathers to the Scriptures. “It is,” he says, “worth while in such places in the Gospel to apply our minds to the meaning and purpose of the writers, and to consider why, after they had related the wonders and portents of the Saviour’s actions, they should also record these things which reveal nothing of this sort.” Something is to be learned even in the seemingly minor details of the Gospel narratives. As he says:

It is understandable that the Evangelists should commemorate the restoration of sight to the blind man, the healing of the paralytic, the raising of the dead, the cleansing of the lepers, in order that those who would read their writings might be strengthened in Jesus. But what purpose had they in mind in this place in which it is recounted, that, after Jesus had with His disciples drawn near to Jerusalem, and had come to Bethphage close to Mount Olivet, He sent two Disciples with the command that they should loose and bring to Him an ass that was tied, together with its colt [?]; He Who frequently made long journeys on foot, and did not refuse to complete His sojourn here on foot, as when He had come to Jerusalem, and passing through Samaria arrived at the well, and being weary from the road had sat down by it? And what did Jesus also mean when He bade them loose the ass that was tied, and the colt with her, telling them to answer any man who asked them: ‘Why do you loose him?’ to answer, ‘that the Lord hath need of them: and forthwith he will let them go?’”

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Sermon for Passion Sunday

“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?

And so it begins. We enter into deep Lent, into Passiontide, which is nothing less than our participation in the Passion of Christ which enfolds us into the life of the Trinity. We enter into the radical mystery of God’s love which turns the world on its head. It is profoundly counter-culture, the counter to the culture of fear and resentment that seeks power and dominion at all costs and at the expense of the deeper truth of God and of our humanity in God. The paradox of Passiontide is set before us in today’s readings and on a Sunday which also marks the commemoration of St. Patrick. The conjunction is, I think, wonderfully providential.

Christ is “an High Priest of good things to come,” Hebrews states, but only in the paradox of being victim and sacrifice, for “by his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Priest and victim. The Gospel reading from Matthew emphasizes the same paradox: not power but sacrifice. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” This is a complete inversion of the power structures of the world and a complete counter to the victimhood culture of our day. Christ is priest and victim. God provides himself the lamb for the sacrifice that redeems us to eternal life; our life in God.

The medieval historian Jacques Delarun captures this in a book entitled “To govern is to Serve.” It chronicles some remarkable experiments in the ordering of monastic communities among a number of twelfth and thirteenth century orders influenced by the personalities of St. Dominic and St. Francis. They were attempts to embody the radical equality of Christ as the shepherd of the sheep who cares for one and for all equally; omnes et singulatim, all together and each one individually. To enter into the Passion is to learn the sacrificial nature of the divine life, the self-giving life of God as Trinity.

The mother of Zebedee’s children comes with her sons to Jesus seeking preferment and privilege for them, that they “may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” His gentle yet firm reply to her speaks to our humanity in its ignorance and presumption. “Ye know not what ye ask.” It is a striking indictment of our fallen humanity and anticipates his first word from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The privileges we seek for ourselves are invariably at the expense of others and negate our common humanity by treating some as better and greater than others. Jesus then addresses her sons. His questions point explicitly to his Passion and stand in complete contrast to the presumption in their quest and to that of the ten disciples as well. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”, he asks. The questions point to our sacramental participation in Christ’s own sacrifice through baptism and communion.

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The Blessings of Faith and Humility: Reading the Fathers in Lent II

“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

Our Lenten programme reflects on the Fathers of the Early Church in their reading of some of the Sunday Gospels in Lent. We have already touched upon who the Fathers are and their significance for the establishment of the Scriptures and the credal understanding of the Faith itself. I would like to offer a few brief passages from Augustine in particular that shed light on the Church’s general reading of the Scriptures in the liturgical patterns of Lent.

Here is Augustine on the powerful Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent about the encounter between the Canaanite Woman and Christ.

She “shows us,” he says, “an example of humility, and the way of godliness; [and] shows us how to rise from humility unto exaltation.” That is a pretty good summary of the spiritual teaching of this scene and its meaning for us in our pilgrimage. “Now she was, as it appears,” Augustine goes on to say, “not of the people of Israel, of whom came the Patriarchs, and Prophets, and the parents of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh; of whom the Virgin Mary herself was, who was the Mother of Christ. This woman then was not of this people; but of the Gentiles. For, as we have heard, the Lord “departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts,” and with the greatest earnestness begged of Him the mercy to heal her daughter, “who was grievously vexed with a devil.” Tyre and Sidon were not cities of the people of Israel, but of the Gentiles; though they bordered on that people. So then, as being eager to obtain mercy she cried out, and boldly knocked; and He made as though He heard her not, not to the end that mercy might be refused her, but that her desire might be enkindled; and not only that her desire might be enkindled, but that, as I have said before, her humility might be set forth.”

His interest is to bring out the universality of the Gospel of Christ for all peoples and yet as arising from the particularity of the people of Israel. His sermons, like many in the Patristic period, endeavour to distinguish between things Jewish and things Christian at the same time as showing their intrinsic connection. The task belongs to the larger aspect of an essential feature of philosophical religion in the idea of a necessary self-critique of religion itself, the awareness of a tendency to reduce God to the forms of human thought rather than recognizing how human thought is raised up into the divine thinking and thus redeemed from its follies.

Here is how Augustine approaches this question. “Therefore did she cry, while the Lord was as though He heard her not, but was ordering in silence what He was about to do. The disciples besought the Lord for her, and said, “Send her away; for she cries after us. And He said, I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As he says, “Here arises a question out of these words; If He was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel, how came we from among the Gentiles into Christ’s fold? What is the meaning of the so deep economy of this mystery, that whereas the Lord knew the purpose of His coming — that He might have a Church in all nations, He said that ‘He was not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’? We understand then by this that it behooved Him to manifest His Bodily presence, His Birth, the exhibition of His miracles, and the power of His Resurrection, among that people: that so it had been ordained, so set forth from the beginning, so predicted, and so fulfilled; that Christ Jesus was to come to the nation of the Jews, to be seen and slain, and to gain from among them those whom He foreknew. For that people was not wholly condemned, but sifted. There was among them a great quantity of chaff, but there was also the hidden worth of the grain; there was among them that which was to be burnt, there was among them also that wherewith the barn was to be filled. For whence came the Apostles? Whence came Peter? Whence the rest?”

Connection and differentiation. Are we not all and always being sifted, tried and tested, as it were? Do not these comments about Israel equally extend to all of us? The sermon highlights the themes of faith, humility and perseverance; the qualities necessary for the pilgrimage of Lent.

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves”

Paradise and wilderness are the complementary images that belong to the pilgrimage of Lent as the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Today’s Gospel wonderfully encapsulates the soul’s journey as imaged in other cultures, religions, and philosophies in one way or another, such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s ascent from the Cave (and the descent back into the Cave!), Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, and of course, Dante’s great poetic and theological master-piece, The Divine Comedy, to name but a few. Yet the story which informs this Gospel most completely is the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

We so easily forget that the Christian faith largely arises out of the Fathers reading of the Hebrew Scriptures first and foremost. That has shaped profoundly the doctrinal, devotional, and liturgical reading of the Scriptures as a whole in the life of the Church, and often expressed in the hymns of the Church. This Gospel story is essentially a recapitulation and intensification of the themes of the Exodus, the paradigmatic journey par excellence of the pilgrimage of our souls. This mid-Lent Sunday highlights the images of paradise and wilderness. For the pilgrimage journey to God cannot be accomplished simply by us on our own strength and merits. With this Sunday we begin, paradoxically, to enter into the deeper meaning of the Lenten pilgrimage: it can only happen through the provisions of God’s Providence for us in the way of our journeying. This Sunday sets before us ‘a taste of paradise’ in the wilderness of human experience. God provides out of our lack or little. Ultimately, God provides himself as Holy Week and Good Friday show us.

John’s Gospel begins with an emphasis upon God’s all-knowing and all-embracing will in contrast to our human limitations. Jesus in the wilderness sees a great multitude and asks Philip “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat.” John immediately adds parenthetically that this is to prove or test Philip “for he himself knew what he would do.” This already alludes to the Exodus in which Israel was put to the test while also presuming to put God to the test. Philip’s response is about our human limitations and inadequacy to solve the problems of the world through economic means. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may have enough.” It is a telling critique that extends to our modern world. The expansion of production in part through the techniques of industrialization and the false infinity of consumer desire haven’t and can’t solve the problems of the world to which they themselves contribute. The problems of our world and ourselves are fundamentally spiritual, not merely material.

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Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

“Christ shall give thee light”

Quite the readings, it may seem. They are rather challenging and not a little disconcerting, and yet most appropriate to the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Why? Because we have to confront the darkness of our souls and know the potentiality and reality of evil. Only the light of Christ can help us to “walk in love,” “to be giving of thanks,” to “walk as the children of light,” “proving what is acceptable unto the Lord,” and thus “reprov[ing] the unfruitful works of darkness,” learning in our journey that “all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light,” to gather Paul’s remarkable words into a kind of summary. But meaning what exactly? That Christ makes known to us the nature of evil in making known and accomplishing the things that belong to the absolute goodness of God.

And what is the evil? The tempter, Satan, the deceiver, is at once the principle of what opposes God and is us in our betrayals of Christ. In this story, it is us in calling Christ’s good, his act of healing, evil, on the one hand, and demanding further signs, on the other hand. Christ’s response highlights these contradictions. Lent, especially in Holy Week, is the pageant of our betrayals of the love of God, but God, and God alone, makes light out of darkness, good out of our evil. Today’s readings are a sober and honest assessment of the human condition in self-presumption and pretension. It is a powerful indictment of human pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and one which arises from the illusions of the self.

The Gospel speaks profoundly to our current dilemmas of a polarized and divided world which witnesses to a deep loss of self and the crisis of meaning. It may be as the neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist along with John Vervaeke suggest, the problem of the dominance of left brain thinking which results in the loss of any sense of wholeness. We are as T.S. Eliot says, “the walking dead.” There lies in this the false assumption of our own abilities to solve all our problems through technique and praxis forgetting that such things cannot create heaven on earth but more often than not, hell.

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Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

What do we want? Do we really know? This Gospel story speaks directly to those realities and concerns. The Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy captures the essence of this Gospel story in its application to our lives in our wilderness pilgrimage to God.

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely and yet so humbly. But not simply for herself. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.” The troubles of the daughter are also the worries of the mother. They always are.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access”. Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption – our trusting in our own righteousness, our feelings and self-certainties – but our humility; our trusting in the manifold and great mercies of God. Against all that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing: the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. To have a hold of that is humility – she presumes upon nothing else. It is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of ‘I can’t do that’ which really means ‘I won’t even try’. It is not the whine of the ‘poor-me’s’ which is really our grovelling for attention. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption and pride. We demand all the attention as if we were the centre of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the centre and that we have access to him.

“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down before him is not manipulation. It is not grovelling self-abasement. It is instead the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility. It is the condition of our access to God. The woman does not presume to be the centre of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks. “Lord, help me.”

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Reading with the Fathers I: Lenten Programme, 2024

“All men are seeking for thee”

These wonderful words from the Gospel for the Lenten Embertide capture the nature of our wilderness pilgrimage and complement the Temptations of Christ in the command from Deuteronomy that “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” All our longings, our seekings are for God. All of the freedom and dignity of our humanity as finite creatures are found in worship and service of God in his infinite beauty, goodness and truth. It is a central tenet of the Fathers and their teaching about our life in Christ.

But who are the Fathers? Reading what with the Fathers? Our Lenten Programme intends to take a brief look at reading the Scriptures with the Fathers without whom we really can’t even begin to make sense of what is meant by the Scriptures and the Faith. What follows is a brief consideration of the term “the Fathers” or Patres which gives rise to the concept of the Patristic period and Patristic studies. Their influence on theology and prayer is considerable and has contributed to the thinking of many subsequent theologians and ecclesial traditions, including Anglicanism.

The term has an almost magical hold on our imaginations. It evokes a larger world, a universe of doctrine, at once authoritative and compelling in spite of its strangeness, mystical in its remoteness and yet, like all things mystical, very near.

The point is that the Fathers are very much with us. If we are strangers to them, it is only because we have estranged ourselves from the “consensus patrum” (the consensus of the Fathers) so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” (the consensus of the Faithful) of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Fathers, in no small measure, are the definitive voices of the essential catholicism of the Christian faith, to the sensus fidei, the understanding of the faith, which they in large measure worked out and defined. We can only enter into the breadth and depth of their understanding and wisdom.

Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers. Without the Fathers, we cannot begin to say what the Faith is, let alone think it. They would have us think and to think in their company, the company of the Fathers. That includes reading the Scriptures with the Fathers.

Roughly extending from the end of the first century AD to the beginning of the seventh or the end of the eighth century, the Patristic Period or “the Age of the Fathers” is variously described. For some, it runs from Clement of Rome (c.100) to Isidore of Seville (d.636) in the West or to John of Damascus (d.749) in the East; for others, from Ignatius of Antioch (c.115) to Gregory the Great (d.604). The differences reflect differing sensibilities about the authority of the great “oecumenical” councils, for instance, whether one emphasizes four councils or seven: 1st Nicaea, 325; 1st Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; 2nd Constantinople, 553; 3rd Constantinople, 681; 2nd Nicaea, 787. For classical Anglicans one might recall Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) convenient mnemonic device: “One Faith, Two Testaments, Three Creeds, Four Councils and Five Centuries” which encapsulates a strong sense of the mind of the Fathers and their formative role in shaping the Anglican theological tradition.

In general, the theological and spiritual writers from the first to the eighth centuries are known collectively as “The Fathers”. They embrace a wide range of theological outlooks, intellectual abilities and interests and different schools of thought, but together they comprise a remarkable uniformity of understanding about the essentials of the Christian Faith. They are altogether critical for the establishment of orthodoxy – right belief or right worship.

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