Category: Sermons

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist is part of the mystery of Christmas. It echoes and amplifies the meaning of the great Christmas Gospel from the Prologue both in the reading from his first Epistle and from the last Chapter of his Gospel. They illuminate the deeper teaching and understanding of what we have come to call the Incarnation.

The Epistle reading testifies to the humanity and divinity of Christ: “that which was from the beginning” echoes “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It is the Word, he says, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled,” the word which he terms here “the Word of life.” It is a strong affirmation of “the Word made flesh,” an affirmation at once of Christ’s essential divinity and his essential humanity. In that Word, he says is “eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us.”

This captures the meaning of Christmas in terms of our fellowship with one another through our fellowship with God. What is declared unto us by John is for the sake of our fellowship with one another and with God. The Epistle goes one step further and states that “these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” God seeks our joy in our fellowship with him and with one another. The reading ends with an echo of the light that shines in the darkness “and the darkness overcame it not.” Here God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. All a kind of commentary on the Christmas mystery and its witness to the true humanity of Jesus united to his true divinity. But it also underscores for us its meaning for us: our fellowship and our joy.

The Gospel reading for this feast is John’s witness to his writing about Christ but with a certain note of humility and caution. He does not pretend to have captured all the things which Jesus did (and said), suggesting that “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” Christ, the Word and Son of the Father, cannot be contained or exhausted in the writings of even the evangelists. What they open out to us are the truths to which they bear witness and the teachings which illuminate our souls in grace. They belong to the fellowship of the Church, which is itself, as John himself indicates elsewhere, the body of Christ in which we participate sacramentally. “Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

Word and light. Word made flesh. Word as eternal life. These all speak to the true meaning of the Church and our fellowship in the body of Christ; he in us and we in him as we pray in the Prayer of Humble Access.

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. John the Evangelist
Xmas 2023

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“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

Christ’s “whole life was a continuall Passion,” John Donne notes, echoing perhaps Lancelot Andrewes’ observation that “all his life long was a continuous cross.” We forget that we really only come to Christmas, paradoxical as it might seem, by way of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ; “a continuall Passion,” “a continuous cross.” We easily overlook this in the sensuous and sentimental features of our contemporary hedonism that overwhelm the festivities of Christmas. The three great holy days that follow Christmas Day are a great wake-up call and a necessary reminder of the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth.

He comes as redeemer and saviour because of the darkness of our sinful hearts and world. Our refusals of his grace are made part of the Christmas story. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” a reference to his Passion. Thus the rejections of grace are made part of the story of grace and one which we desperately need to hear. Archbishop Thomas à Becket’s sermon in T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, highlights the profound point that “we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of our Lord,” and so too “in the death of martyrs.” “Is it an accident, do you think,” he asks rhetorically “that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ?” A martyr is a witness to another, to Christ. “A martyrdom is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God.”

“Not my will but thine be done,” as Jesus prays in Gethesemane. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” as Jesus teaches us to pray. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” as Mary prays.

St. Stephen’s day can only be celebrated in the context of the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. He has come to redeem and save through his Cross and Passion and those who are his followers and witnesses participate in his Cross and Passion. St. Stephen is the great proto-martyr who illustrates the meaning of that participation in Christ’s self-giving and sacrificial love. He is persecuted and stoned to death for being a follower of the way, of what will later become known as the Christian Faith. To be a Christian is to be a witness to the love of Christ. The story of his martyrdom in Acts illustrates this beautifully even as the Gospel reading from Matthew highlights Christ’s lament over the desolation of Jerusalem in its sinfulness and violence.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

The hustle and bustle of Christmas Eve gives way to the contemplative quiet and wonder of Christmas Morn. What seems long ago and far away is present and now. Everywhere is Bethlehem. “And so it was, that while they were there” – in Bethlehem – “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son,” Luke tells us. Here is the son who is “the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth,” as we heard last night from the heights of heaven in John’s Prologue. From the heights of heaven to the lowliness of little Bethlehem. This is the wonder of Christmas morning.

The wonder is the unity of God and Man in Christ with the whole of creation. The three great masses of Christmas present to us the fullness of this wonder and delight. There is the Christmas Eve proclamation and celebration of the eternal Sonship of Christ who is the Word made flesh. There is the story of his actual birth made known in the angelic “tidings of great joy” in this morning’s Gospel. There is the Christmas of the Shepherds to whom the angelic news from heavenly heights is proclaimed and made known to us in Christmastide. Bethlehem is the place of these great wonders. It is paradise restored but also something more. It inaugurates a new vision and a new life.

The new vision and the new life is what has been made known to us in God’s self-giving love. What is made known is God with us and God for us. “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord,” the Angel says to the Shepherds. “The glory of God,” as Ireneaus says, is vivens homo, our “living humanity” but alive only by beholding the vision of God; for “the life of man is the vision of God.” Bethlehem is the place of the vision of our humanity alive in the shining glory of the Lord. Alive in Christ, “the word made flesh” whose glory we behold, “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.”

But it is not our humanity alone in itself. It is not just us. Nor is it just the mighty and the powerful of the world, the privileged elite. In the quiet of Christmas morning, we are in the company of shepherds and angels with “a multitude of the heavenly host.” And only so are we with the holy Child who comes to us, the one who is the union of God and Man and who “defines for us what it is to be God and what it is to be human, in one, at the same time”. The Angel proclaims something great and wondrous; strong words of proclamation that point to a wonder and mystery. Through what the Angel proclaims and makes known we see the unity of the whole of creation with its Creator. The Angels, too, are part of that order. They do simply what belongs to their office and being, to their ministry. They are the messengers, the audible and visible thoughts of God made known to us.

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“And we beheld his glory”

We beheld. Yet we can only behold what we are given to see. What we are given to see is something made. It is not the Word but “the Word made flesh”. The shepherds say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened, this Word that is made flesh. For God is the poet of Christmas night. In Greek, the poet is maker.

The poet makes and makes known. We can only see “this thing which is come to pass,” because “the Lord hath [it] made known unto us.” We can only see in the light of God himself. Where God is, there will his light be also. By the light of God we are caught up into a greater understanding. We are born anew “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God;” born from above into the company of the one whom we behold now with us. His light perfects our light.

For by our own lights, we see but do not see. Our light is darkness. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Our seeing is often without a beholding, without an embracing in faith and understanding what we are given to see; it is without a receiving. But by this greater light – the light of God’s Word – our light is taken up into something more. We are received into what we receive. “We beheld his glory”. The greater light is the light of grace, the grace to behold “the Word made flesh.”

What do we behold? It is almost as an after-thought that we are told in parenthesis that “we beheld the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” We behold the glory of the Word and Son of the Father who is Light and Life. As the 2nd century theologian Irenaeus says, “the glory of God is man alive,” but only because “the life of our humanity is the vision of God.”

Word, Light and Son. These are the three great images which belong personally and essentially to Jesus Christ. They are the trinity of his essential divinity, as it were, without which all our celebrations are really nothing but our vain pretensions and protestations against the dying of the light – our light, our dying.

Yet, here is something more without which we are ever less than ourselves, less than what we ourselves would be, less than who we are in God’s sight. Here is God’s Word now with us. Here is God’s Light now illuminating our understanding. Here is God’s Son now become God’s Son for us and with us. For “unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Not that we may possess him and keep him for ourselves, salvation cannot be so selfish, but rather that he might possess us and keep us with himself. He gives himself to all that all might receive him. Such is the divine mystery of love that Christmas makes known to us. Word, Light and Son are the essentials of love.

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“Who art thou?”

The questions reverberate with great intensity in today’s Gospel. “Who are thou?” If not the Christ, then “Art thou Elijah?” If not Elijah, then “Art thou the Prophet?” If not the Prophet, then “Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?” Only then do we learn what Jesus told us last Sunday about John the Baptist as “more than a prophet”. He says of himself “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah.” Ego vox clamantis in deserto. This in turn leads to the last question. “And Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

This parade of questions might seem to correspond to our contemporary obsessions about personal identity. Rather it counters and corrects such tendencies. The whole scene is known as “the record” or “the witness of John,” meaning John the Baptist. It complements wonderfully the Epistle reading from Philippians that “the Lord is at hand.” And wonderfully so since this day, the Fourth Sunday in Advent, is also Christmas Eve. Both the readings and this day itself bring us to Christ in the meaning of his coming to us.

The questions of the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem”, later identified as Pharisees, point us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, namely, the desire to know. They show us that universal quest for knowledge, for meaning and understanding, not information. In a way, they anticipate and are like the “Magi from Anatolia,” seekers all. They are from Jerusalem, not in Jerusalem. They have come into the wilderness of “Bethany beyond Jordan” in the quest to know who John the Baptist is. The Christ, Elijah, the Prophet? “Who art thou?” The passage comes immediately after the Prologue of John’s Gospel, part of which is read at Christmas Eve. It focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist who prepares for the coming of Christ in us.

How? What is John’s ministry? Mark tells us concisely just after quoting this same passage from Isaiah that “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” But the baptism of John with water through the confession of sin is not the forgiveness of sins. Yet it signals the profound desire for forgiveness, a metanoia, a change in outlook and understanding in us. In other words, it highlights our desire for something more, for wholeness and truth. Thus, John the Baptist points us to Jesus. That is the point of this Gospel. As John the Baptist explains, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not: he it is who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” And the very next day (as it will be literally for us}, “John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

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My Lord and My God

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

These are the last three verses from John Betjeman’s poem, “Christmas”.

Thomas is the Advent Saint who brings us to the mystery of Christmas. John Betjeman’s poem captures perfectly the underlying impulse of Thomas’ so-called doubting; it is really a kind of questioning and, as such, in pursuit of understanding. A Resurrection story, it recalls the appearance of Christ to the disciples who were huddled in fear behind closed doors on the evening of Easter Day. Thomas was not present with them. When he hears their report that “ we have seen the Lord,” he famously says, “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

The Feast of St. Thomas falls just before the festival of Christ’s Nativity. The Resurrection and the Nativity are completely intertwined and it is the same question, a question about the reality of Christ’s embrace of our humanity, soul and body, that belongs to the radical truth of the Incarnation. Thomas’ question helps us to think about its radical meaning. The birth and passion of Christ reveal to us both the nature of God and a fuller view of our humanity. In a way, Thomas’ question is about the reality of Christ’s humanity and in turn his divinity.

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“What went ye out into the wilderness to see?”

The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on the last two Sundays of Advent. They begin today with John’s great question to Jesus: “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” That, in turn, leads to the rhetorical questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asks, with triple intensity. “What went ye out for to see?” “But what went ye out for to see?” In a wonderful paradox, Jesus’ questions to us point us to John who in turn points us to Jesus. Likewise, next Sunday the questions about John the Baptist by the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem” lead to John the Baptist’s proclamation in “Bethany beyond Jordan” about Jesus as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

What are these advent questions really about? They awaken us to the redemption of our desires by placing our desires, what I am tempted to call the ‘bad infinity of our desires’ (schlechte unendlichkeit – with apologies to Hegel), with God in Christ . Such is the redemption of our desires. Our desires belong to prayer in the sense of longing but our longing itself is essentially tragic because it is a longing for what we do not have and cannot attain. It is a desire for this thing and that thing in an effort to find the truth of our desires which is always beyond us. Dante captures this sense of the endless restlessness of desire in the Convivio:

the infant intensely longing for an apple; and then, later on, for a little bird; and then, still further on, fine clothes; and then a horse; and then a mistress; then modest riches; then more; and then still more. And that is because in none of these things does it find that for which it ever seeks, and it believes to find it further on.

It belongs to human desire, as he puts it, to be always reaching out in one way or another. “And the reason is this: the deepest desire of each thing, arising from its very nature, is to return to its principle. And because God is the principle of our soul, and has made it like himself (as it is written, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’), the soul mightily desires to return to him;” in short, to God. Prayer, as George Herbert wonderfully says, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” essentially encapsulating the same understanding.

All this is profoundly beautiful and true and yet it is both forgotten and denied in our contemporary world. Radically incomplete and reductive forms of thinking such as psychology, economics, and the social sciences, collectively captured in the term ‘sociologism’, displace theology and philosophy as the primary forms of thought. We have lost a sense of God and our humanity in their intrinsic and necessary interrelation. This leads to the reduction of all authority to “mere power detached from any intrinsic ordination to truth and goodness”. As the Italian philosopher and statesman, Augusto Del Noce observes, sociologism effectively “reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures or forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life”. Reducing all conceptions of the world to a kind of ‘social constructivism’ not only negates the transcendence of God and the givenness of creation but also itself since all human and social constructions depend upon principles prior to themselves. It is as if we are gods, making the world and God in our own image.

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“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

There are things which, perhaps, we would rather not think about that belong to the wisdom of the Advent season. What are those things? They are things like death, judgment, heaven and hell, the proverbial four last things or eschatology which for centuries were served up as the basic preaching fare during the Advent season. They are things which we would rather ignore or forget. We do so at our peril because such things really belong to hope, the great advent teaching of the Second Sunday in Advent.

Scripture speaks to Scripture, opening out the Word to us that carries hope in its breath. The Holy Scriptures are “written for our learning,” St. Paul exclaims, and Archbishop Cranmer prays the same in the wonderful Collect that adorns this day and this week, a Collect that embodies a whole attitude of mind and approach to the Scriptures. It encapsulates a way of understanding the Scriptures. They are writings that teach us “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Comfort here is not simply hygge suggesting a quality of coziness and material comfort making us hyggelig. Comfort here is much stronger and deeper; it relates entirely to our life with God in his word coming to us that challenges us and redeems us from ourselves.

Hope is one of the great lessons of the Scriptures. Why? Because hope is precisely something which is not dependent upon us. The hope to which the Scriptures awaken us is real hope, the hope that has realized the utter limitations of human endeavour, the hope that has faced the empty abyss of ourselves and the vanity of our actions, the hope that has considered the reality of sin and death. Looking into the things of judgment and condemnation, hope also looks up to God and to the coming of God into our midst.

The coming is hope itself. We look for what we do not see. We wait for it. In the coming of Christ we look for what we do not see in ourselves but see in him, namely, the redemption of our wounded and weary humanity. But it takes the Word proclaimed and celebrated to awaken us and to sustain us in the hope of the Gospel and in the hope that we might begin to see this even in ourselves.

For what do we hope? Simply for the accomplishing of the good will and purpose of God in our lives. Big deal, you might be thinking. What will be will be. Que sera, sera. Yes, but why assume that that will be good? Why not assume misery and suffering? Plenty of that to go around, after all. Such an attitude is fatalistic. It leaves the individual completely and conveniently out of the equation – what will be will be whether I act or don’t act, whether I do something or nothing. That is sheer hopelessness. Fatalism is ultimately our despair of anything good; it is, really, a denial of hope. The denial of hope is our despair of God and his love. We consign ourselves to victimhood. It belongs to the culture of depression and dependency; the culture of despair. It is ultimately anti-human and negates the truth of our humanity as found in God.

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