Category: Sermons

Holy Tuesday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The lesson read at Communion on Tuesday in Holy Week is the third of the four so-called Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah. It is the only one read in the eucharistic readings this week. At Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday, the fourth of the Servant Songs was read (Isaiah 52.13- 53.end). In today’s office of Morning Prayer, the first of Servant Songs, Isaiah, 42. 1-9, was read. The third song will be read again at Evening Prayer on Good Friday. In the Christian understanding, the suffering servant is both Israel collectively speaking and the unity of all human suffering concentrated in the person of Christ. The songs belong to the revealing of “the thoughts of many hearts” and thus to our being pierced in our souls.

The Continuation of the Passion according to St. Mark depicts the trial of Christ at the hands of Pilate who gives in to the wishes of the people who seek his crucifixion. We hear again the cries of “crucify” even though Pilate knows that the chief priests of Israel “have moved the people” against Jesus. He has him scourged or beaten and delivered to be crucified. It is a betrayal of human justice in the name of convenience and complicity with the mob, a betrayal of truth and human compassion. Such is the madness of crowds.

What follows are the indignities of being mocked by the Roman soldiers before being led out to be crucified. Simon, a Cyrenian, is compelled by them “to bear his cross.” Not freely and willingly but under compulsion. He is crucified and cruelly scorned and berated on the Cross by the people, by the chief priests and scribes. Their words of insult mock the idea of “Christ, the King of Israel,” even as the words of his accusation, “The King of the Jews,” are superscribed on the Cross. If all this were not enough to disturb us, “they that were crucified with him reviled him” too. We behold him whom we, in these aspects of our humanity, have betrayed and nailed to the Cross.

All this is what he suffers and suffers silently before Pilate and on the Cross. Mark then tells us that “there was darkness over the whole land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour,” something seen, as it were, that is symbolic of the darkness of men’s hearts. “At the ninth hour,” Mark, like Matthew, gives us Christ’s cry of dereliction. It is the only word from the Cross in their accounts of the Passion. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, interpreted as “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These words from Psalm 22 cry out simply to God and not, as in Luke, to God as Father.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And a sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

And so it begins and ends, in the ending that never ends. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week yet looks to the end or purpose of the journey in Christ’s Resurrection but only through the Cross and Passion of Christ. It is really a week-long liturgy. We greet Christ as he enters Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna”. But our cries of rejoicing quickly turn to shouts of “Let him be crucified”. Yet the shouts of violence give place to sorrow and sadness. Are we to be left simply in the sorrows of our hearts? Or does sorrow or contrition lead to the possibilities of repentance? Holy Week takes us from the cries of rejoicing to the sorrows of our hearts but then to the glorious songs of Alleluias. Such is the pageant and wonder of Holy Week, if we have the hearts and minds to think and feel; in short, to be pierced.

It has been my custom to take a Scriptural passage as the matrix for all our Holy Week and Easter meditations. Simeon’s prophecy, which we heard at Candlemas, anticipates the Passion and its meaning. He says to Mary, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;” then to her he says, that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary, as the Annunciation this past week shows, is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As Augustine teaches, she is the symbol of the Church. Her vocation is the vocation of our humanity in its purity and truth: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That means our complete attention to all of the words of the Passion as indicated in Simeon’s prophecy. Only so can we feel the thought of the deep meaning of Christ’s Passion; in an image it means being pierced.

There are, the poet George Herbert says, “two vast spacious things” that we are meant to learn and contemplate, “yet few there are that sound them.” What are they? “Sinne and Love”. The challenge of Holy Week for us is to sound the depths of sin and love in our own hearts as revealed through Christ’s Passion. Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the spectacle of the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. We are bidden to contemplate the dialectical motions, the to-and-fro of our hearts, in going from joy to sorrow and then to glory. Hosanna, Crucify, Alleluia.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s response to the divine will announced to her by the Angel Gabriel is the epitome of the Christian Faith, a firm but emphatic “yes” to God through whom God becomes human. It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ or Christ apart from Mary. She is “the pure source of his pure humanity” (Irenaeus) as ordained from before the foundation of the world; in other words, divinely ordered. She is, in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Council of Ephesus (451), Theotokos, “the Mother of God.” What that means goes to the heart of the understanding of Christ’s Incarnation.

The Annunciation is the moment in time of Christ’s conception. He is made man through “the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, Theotokos, according to his manhood”, his “human nature (κατα την ανθροποτητα),” just as Christ is the eternal Son “begotten of his Father according to his Godhead” (κατα την θεοτητα) (Chalcedonian Definition). She is not the mother of the Godhead, the source of divinity, the maker of God, as it were, for that would negate humanity itself. Mary as Theotokos, literally God-bearer, belongs to the gathering into unity of all of the images about Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity understood in their mutual integrity and revealed to us in Christ. Mary is the chosen vessel of his becoming human and incarnate, that is to say, in the flesh, while remaining absolutely and eternally God. The maker of God to us, it could be said, in ways that belong only to poetic licence.

The emphasis on Mary as Virgin and Mother is the witness of Scripture and Creed to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and the Trinity; the two are inseparable. Mary plays an essential role in the economy of salvation and in the life of prayer. Her “yes” to God is the inverse and the overcoming of the sin of Adam and Eve. Ave is, as the Fathers note, the reverse of Eve. But she is not passive or unengaged in the work of human redemption. She “conceived by the Holy Ghost”, as the Apostles’ Creed states, yet, in Luke’s account, the Angel clearly says “thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son,” echoing the lesson from Isaiah. She conceived but without the aid of a man. She did not simply receive like a passive vessel, a mere conduit. She is an active agent in the work of human redemption that looks back to creation itself as spoken into existence by God. What comes from God to her is actively embraced and engaged by her. In her “yes” is the proto-evangelium of Genesis fulfilled, a prophecy of the hope and longing for redemption that “her seed shall bruise thy [the serpent’s] head” even as he “shall bruise his heel,”a reference to Christ and his Passion. Nor is this some sort of gnostic deception, a matter of her and our being deceived. Her Annunciation is non recipiet et non decipiet sed concipiet, as Andrewes summarizes.

(more…)

Print this entry

“He is the Mediator of the new covenant … by means of death”

Venantius Fortunatus’ hymns, Vexilla Regis and Pange Lingua, were originally written for the commemoration of the relics of the true Cross brought to Poitiers in southern France in the 6th century. They have become an integral part of Passion Sunday which marks the beginning of deep Lent or Passiontide. His hymns are a commentary on the Cross and Passion of Christ particularly as expressed in the readings for this Sunday. They contribute to the Paradox of the Passion that is before us.

In Percy Dearmer’s version of Vexilla Regis, “The Royal Banners forward go,/ the Cross shines forth in mystic glow,/ where he, the Life, did death endure,/ and by that death did life procure … Fulfilled is all his words foretold … He reigns and triumphs from the Tree” (Hymn # 128). The Tree, symbolic of the Cross and Christ’s crucifixion, is not shame or ignominy but “proclaims the Prince of Glory now”. Its branches bear “the priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” The Cross is the emblem of salvation, personified in Pange Lingua as the “Faithful Cross … the noblest Tree”, the express “Symbol of the world’s redemption” (Hymn # 129).

The hymns illustrate the meaning of the Passion of Christ. They comment in part on the readings from Hebrews and the Gospel from Matthew today. Hebrews is a theological treatise on the mystery of human redemption concentrated in this passage. Christ is both priest and victim, “the High Priest of good things to come” who “by his own blood entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” By his blood outpoured and his death on the Cross, he is “the Mediator of the new covenant” that “they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” He is Mediator not because he stands between but because he unites in himself God and Man. Here is theology in its most proper sense as a form of our thinking upon and engaging with the images that belong to the language of Scripture.

The images in Scripture and hymn highlight the paradox of salvation. The focus is on the Cross, yet in the liturgical traditions, the Altar Cross is veiled, present but not fully seen, there but not fully understood. “We see but in a glass darkly” and yet we see something. “The Cross shines forth in mystic glow,” literally, fulget crucis mysterium. Such is “the mystery of the cross,” but what is at issue is the understanding. We sing in Pange Lingua “that engagement of the struggle glorious” that results in the “triumph on the trophy of the cross” which proclaims “how the world’s redeemer was, sacrificed, victorious.” His kingdom is not a worldly kingdom of human making but the redeeming of our humanity through his embrace of human sin and death. His death is ‘the death of death.’ It makes visible the triumph of life over all and every culture of death such as our own. This is the paradox of death becoming the means to eternal life. How? we might ask.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

A figure of the late 4th and mid 5th centuries, Patrick belongs to the story of Celtic Christianity. He is the bearer of the great light of Christ to the Irish, the Apostle and Patron Saint of Ireland, having lit the paschal fire on Tara’s hill to drive away the pagan darkness of the Druids, perhaps just a few years after the death of Augustine (430AD). That light of faith has a powerful and transforming power, then and always, beyond the tales, myths, and legends of shamrocks, shillelaghs and snakes.

Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilisation, juxtaposes the image of a silver cauldron and a silver chalice to capture the transformation of Ireland’s conversion to Christianity; the one, beautifully carved and deliberately broken, symbolic of the culture of pagan human sacrifice; the other beautifully engraved and whole, inscribed with the names of the Apostolic Fellowship. The one, dated a century or two before Christ, is known as the Gundestrop Cauldron and depicts animal and human sacrifice; the other, late seventh or early eighth century is known as the Ardagh Chalice and is symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice and our participation in his sacrifice sacramentally. The juxtaposition of cauldron and chalice captures the transformation of a culture.

No celebration of The Feast of St. Patrick can overlook the wonderful hymn attributed to him, the poem known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”(Hymn # 812). The hymn offers a wonderful collection of images dealing with the power and grace of God in relation to us through nature and scripture, through spirituality and theology, and even psychologically, we might say. Yet all these images are contained within the Trinitarian understanding that embraces and frames the entire hymn. It begins and ends with the invocation of the doctrine, the teaching about God as Trinity. The doctrine is at the heart of our devotion and worship of God.

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.

(more…)

Print this entry

“What are they among so many?”

Five barley-loaves and two small fishes. Not much to feed a crowd and hardly much in the way of festive delights. No mention of any simnel cake! Andrew’s question is very much to the point, yet, in what follows, so much more is made out of so little. But is that the point simply? What are we to make of this story?

The Fourth Sunday in Lent seems to mark a reprieve or at least a bit of a respite, a break, as it were, from the rigours of the Lenten discipline, especially after the challenging readings from last Sunday. Its various names highlight this apparent shift: Laetare Sunday meaning rejoice from the traditional Introit from Isaiah, Refreshment Sunday alluding to the Gospel story, Mothering Sunday in reference to the Epistle about Jerusalem as “the mother of us all,” giving rise, as some say, to the custom of visiting one’s mother or their mother church. All these terms belong to a kind of ‘folk wisdom’ that arises entirely from the readings.

Yet they belong very much to the journey and logic of Lent, to its deeper meaning and purpose. As we saw last Sunday, we are not to be left desolate and empty through the shattering of our illusions, so here we are reminded about what going up to Jerusalem really means: namely, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus in whom and with whom is the joy of human redemption, regardless of vagaries of human experience.

Fr. Crouse observed that this Sunday allows us “to catch our breath” from the Collect, ut respiramus, “that we may be relieved.” Such is “the comfort of thy grace.” In other words, this Sunday strengthens us for the journey – the true meaning of comfort – reminding us of the blessings that belong to those “whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are the pilgrim ways;/ Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well, “ as the Psalmist puts it. “They go from strength to strength,/ and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Sion”(Ps. 84. 5,6). That conjunction of the “Vale of Misery” and “Sion” or Jerusalem is very striking in terms of the Epistle and the Gospel which concentrate for us the dynamic interplay between Paradise and Wilderness.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

It is not enough, as this Sunday shows us, simply to be “delivered from evil,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. The purpose of Lent as the Penitential Service says is “To decline from sin and incline to virtue; that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore.” “Walk in love,” as Paul puts it, means to act in ways that “becometh saints,” in the pursuit of holiness. That is the love of Christ for us in his sacrifice and his love active in us. But that requires the overcoming of all sin and evil.

But what is it that overcomes sin and evil? What are we to make of the language of devils and Beelzebul, the prince of the devils, of Satan and his kingdom in the Gospel and the language of darkness and light, of all uncleanness and covetousness in the Epistle? Such language may seem strange and foreign to us but speaks profoundly, I think, to the experience of devils in our times and, perhaps, nowhere more clearly than in these readings that confront us with the reality of sin and evil.

They bring to a certain clarity what we have already seen in the story of The Temptations of Christ by the devil, the tempter, Satan, on the 1st Sunday in Lent and to the story of the woman of Canaan whose daughter is “grievously vexed with a devil” last Sunday. “Ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul rather gently but firmly reminds us this morning about our thoughts and actions that are contrary to “all goodness, and righteousness and truth,” all the things that run counter to the love of Christ and his sacrifice for us.

We know only too well in our own world the problem and power of obsessions and addictions, of the disorders of hearts and minds, that can sadly lead to extreme pathological states of dysfunction, and of being imprisoned in ourselves. What are such things except tendencies, in varying degrees, of the fixations of the will upon some finite thing or person, whether ourselves or some agenda, as if it were absolute? Treating finite things as if they were God is why Paul can speak of idolatry as the underlying principle of all the forms of attachment to the lesser things of the world. False absolutes, as it were, treated as if they were divine.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

“Little dogs,” an intriguing term. Dogs are rarely mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. Sinners are said to be like dogs returning to their vomit, an image of our besetting sins; dogs lick the blood of Jezebel, another unattractive yet compelling image. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats. None here!

Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. More than a thousand years later that phrase was turned on its head to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that do bark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves,” the heretics that threaten “the sheep,” the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking?! Just saying.

Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans, sometimes wrongly punned as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord. But that is just bad Latin, a mistaken translation, and not historical except as an insult; in short, another myth. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Dominican order. And scripturally, at least in terms of the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, Tobias’ dog is mentioned twice as accompanying him.

It is the sole biblical instance of dogs viewed as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.

In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. The dogs “came and licked his sores”. A moving image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table which is the insight of this most powerful and yet disturbing story. Silence and rebuke and finally insult give way to mercy and grace. But how hard, how disturbing this must seem! The breakthrough moment is this remarkable woman’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.

(more…)

Print this entry