Category: Sermons

“The Son of man came … to give his life a ransom for many”

The Lenten Sunday Gospels may be seen to anticipate and to prepare us for the intensity of the Passion in Holy Week. For then we read through all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion, a remarkable feature of the eucharistic lectionary in the classical Books of Common Prayer. It begins on Palm Sunday with Matthew’s account of the Passion.

The Temptations of Christ on the First Sunday prepare us for the reading of the Passion from Mark’s Gospel, beginning on Monday in Holy Week, which is framed by the breaking of the alabaster box of ointment by which Christ is anointed and by the tears of Peter at his betrayal of Christ. It includes Christ’s further temptation in Gethsemane and the betrayal of both Judas and Peter who succumb to the forms of human weakness and temptation, we might say. On the Second Sunday in Lent, the Gospel story of the Canaanite Woman, a testing of the disciples and a testing of her faith in perseverance, anticipates in some sense the continuation of the Passion from Mark in Christ’s cry of dereliction in the depth of the Passion, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me,” but which nonetheless leads to the faith profession of the Centurion that “truly this man was the Son of God.” As the woman said, “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”

The Gospel for the Third Sunday of Christ’s casting out a devil only to be accused of being demonic himself anticipates the beginning of the Passion according to St. Luke on Holy Wednesday with all of its intensity not only in the picture of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane but also in his remark to Peter about the temptations of Satan in Peter’s betrayal and, even more, his look of compassion that brings Peter to the tears in repentance in recalling Christ’s words to him. A powerful story powerfully told. The story of the miraculous feeding in the wilderness last Sunday, set in the context of the Passover, anticipates the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum on Maundy Thursday which explicitly connects the last supper to the Passion of Christ. The continuation of Luke’s Passion presents us with three of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross, especially the last word: “Father into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” He who carries himself in his own hands in the institution of the eucharist commends himself and our humanity into the hands of the Father.

Today’s readings on Passion Sunday anticipate Good Friday with its emphasis on the theology of the atonement. Throughout Holy Week in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read the Passion according to St. John in all of its fullness. The Sunday evening Office readings in Lent immerse us in the Passion according to St. Mark and St. Luke (Year I and Year II respectively). In every way, Lent and Holy Week concentrate our attention on the Passion of Christ and the nature and meaning of our participation in that Passion. It is about human redemption understood in terms of the theology of the atonement, our being made at one with God. But that doesn’t mean that God becomes less or other than God or that we become less or other than human.

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“Five barley-loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?”

So little and yet so many in need. Andrew’s words echo Mary’s statement about the human condition. “They have no wine,” she said about the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. That was the story of the first miracle that Jesus did, “the beginning of signs” which pointed us to the thing signified, namely the Passion of Christ. “Mine hour,” he said to Mary, “has not yet come” (Jn. 2.3-5). The turning of the water into wine with its apparent eucharistic emphasis is really about the centrality of the Passion in the understanding of Christ as the Word made flesh. The Orthodox theologian, John Behr, notes that the Prologue of John’s Gospel which we read at Christmas is also the reading for the paschal midnight liturgy of Easter Eve.

The various feasts of the Hebrews contribute to the structure and meaning of John’s Gospel, particularly the Passover which is mentioned three times. The first time follows upon the wedding feast at Cana and introduces John’s account of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple; in short, our misuse of the holy things and holy places of God as well as a pointed reference to “the temple of his body”, which he says “in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2.19); passion and resurrection but in the context of purgation of our sin and evil. “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for thy house will consume me’” (Jn. 2.17).

The verse which immediately precedes today’s Gospel is the second reference to the Passover: “now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand” (Jn. 6.4). Thus this passage, too, is read in terms of the centrality of the Passion. It belongs to the strong teaching of the sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel sometimes known as the Bread of Life discourse; in short, the theme of illumination. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn. 6.35, 38-40). This occasions murmuring among the Jews (Jn. 6.41) about the identity of Jesus, and, as well, the murmuring of many of his disciples about Jesus as “the bread of life … which comes down from heaven” (Jn. 6.48, 50), “the holy bread of eternal life,” as the eucharistic prayer says (BCP, p.83).

For them it is “a hard saying, who can listen to it?”(Jn. 6.60) and results in “many of his disciples [drawing] back and no longer [going] about with him.” But it also is the setting for the ending of Chapter Six with Simon Peter’s great profession of faith: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6.68, 69). And yet, the context is again the Passion in Jesus’ reference to Judas, “one of the twelve” who “was to betray him” (Jn. 6.71). This ends the chapter but already points us to the third reference to the Passover in John’s Gospel; Christ’s own Passion read on Good Friday.

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“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it must seem that there can be no greater contrast than that between the Epistle reading from Ephesians and the Gospel reading from St. Luke. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us, while bidding us to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us,” bidding us to “walk as children of the light,” and not the darkness, the light which is given us by Christ, the light which reproves the things of darkness, the light which overcomes the darkness of sin and death. It signals hope and life, light and love. But the Gospel sounds a more sombre and disquieting note where the goodness of Christ is called evil and where, ultimately, “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Where is the light in that?

It is, I think, in naming the darkness. The Gospel speaks prophetically and powerfully to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It is really a telling portrayal of nihilism, the sense of the empty meaninglessness of life. Why? Because of a despair of knowing, a despair of God that results in an intellectual and spiritual emptiness. There is, as is commonly noted, the problem of information overload in the digital culture of our time that only contributes to something more serious, a knowledge deficit, and even more, a loss of wisdom. T.S. Eliot’s verse pageant-play “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” (1934) offers a sustained critique of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our world.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Information is not knowledge, and wisdom is more than knowledge, and while this is ancient truth, it is truth which we have forgotten. It is not simply that the Church is forgotten and no longer wanted but that the churches, too, have forgotten or ignored or denied what belongs to their essential being.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying
within and attacked from without;
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while
there is time of prosperity
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity
they will decry it.

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1. “Hear, Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest”

One of the stained glass windows in the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School depicts Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. It is based on Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. The painting captures the theological intent of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer.

Cranmer is pictured reading a volume of the Epistles of St. Paul while before him on a table are two books, one title of which can be clearly seen. It is Augustine’s treatise De Fides et Operibus, on Faith and Works. As Diarmaid McCulloch suggests, this expresses the nature of the theological programme that underlies the enterprise of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. It would be about the primacy of the Scriptures understood through the best of Patristic scholarship, particularly Augustine; in short, a Protestant Augustinianism, as Ashley Null terms it, a distinct feature of the Reformed Theology of the Book of Common Prayer. Stephen Hampton argues that “the Reformed theological tradition is an essential ingredient in any conception of Anglicanism.” The Anglican Reformed tradition, he says, “continued to insist upon the evangelical teaching of justification by faith alone, upon the established scholastic way of expressing Trinitarian doctrine, and upon the broadly Thomist understanding of the divine nature which was shared by both Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.”

That same intellectual and spiritual intent appears in a rather remarkable phenomena, the two Books of Homilies. Homilies refers to discourses delivered publicly; in short, sermons. The terms are more or less synonymous. These homilies or sermons were provided for the use of the clergy who were encouraged to read them at Divine Service. They are part of the reformed project in its sense of the centrality of the Scriptures and Doctrine. They also witness to a problem about literacy and education among the clergy and the desire to provide teaching in sound doctrine.

Article XXV of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is unusual among reformed documents about doctrine and order in naming Homilies as belonging to doctrine and thus to the teaching life of the Church. It names the two books of homilies and provides the titles of the homilies contained in The Second Book of Homilies, though not the first. The First Book of Homilies was published in July 1547 just after the death of Henry VIII and thus in the early months of the reign of Edward VI; the second in 1563 during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Article speaks of them as containing “a godly and wholesome Doctrine, and necessary for these times” and judges them to be read in the Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.” The phrase echoes Article XXIV about how “it is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God” for Public Prayer and the Sacraments to be administered “in a tongue not understanded of the people.” We are however not talking about street talk or slang but about what can be grasped and understood through instruction. Article XI, “Of the Justification of Man”, also refers to the Homily on Justification which is the third sermon in the First Book of Homilies, though entitled “a Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind, by only Christ our Saviour, From Sin and Death Everlasting.”

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“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”

There is all the difference in the world between wrestling with God and wrestling against God. And, perhaps, nowhere is that better illustrated than in this outstanding and yet disturbing Gospel story. Wrestling against God, we might say, belongs to the Temptations of Christ presented to us last Sunday. Wrestling against God is really about putting God to the test either by presuming to manipulate the natural world at the expense of its truth and integrity, turning stones into bread, as it were, the technological idolatry of our times that contributes to a kind of denaturing and a dehumanizing of ourselves, or seeking to be ourselves the ultimate authority and power of all reality, itself a repeat of the Fall, and a denial of our creatureliness and of God as creator, and, finally, as in Matthew’s account, the worship of ourselves which is really the worship of Satan, the worship of what is simply the negation and denial of God himself, the worship of what opposes God in its self-delusion. Wrestling against God is profoundly anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-God.

The Temptations of Christ are all a reworking of the great exodus themes of the trials of Israel in the wilderness. Exodus is the Greek term for going forth and is the Greek name for the Second Book of Moses, known in the Hebrew as Shemot, or Names. Numbers is the fourth Book of Moses but its Hebrew name means simply “In the wilderness”. The whole point of the exodus as recounted in the Torah and re-presented in Christ’s being “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness. to be tempted by the devil” is about learning through suffering; in particular, our learning through the sufferings of Christ for us and with us. He suffers our temptations to teach us the overcoming of temptation in him and not simply in us. It is an illumination at the same time as it reveals what needs to be purged in us, namely our false attachment to the things of ourselves and the world that negates their truth and being. It is only through our going with Christ into the wilderness that we learn the radical truth of ourselves as found in him.

Exodus complements The Odyssey of Homer which is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes from Troy. That homecoming is about discovering the order of the cosmos, the intellectual and spiritual structure of reality, in which we find our place. For the Greeks, our place in the cosmos is found in the polis, the community or city-state, so to speak. For the Hebrews, it is not so much about a place but about creation as grounded by definition in the will of God. The exodus journey is about an education that brings us to the Law, concretely and concisely expressed in the Ten Commandments. The Temptations of Christ recall us to the Law in countering the various forms of idolatry which are always about confusing the created with the Creator. In the Temptations we see the radical meaning of that confusion. It is Satan, the devil, the accuser and the tempter, who is defined by opposition and denial of the very principle of his own being and nature. He exists in contradiction to what is prior to himself.

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“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”

Lent begins, we might say, with the temptations of Christ as set before us in today’s Gospel. It ends on Good Friday with the crucifixion of Christ, with his being pierced on the cross. Between the Greek verbs for being tempted, πειραω, and for being pierced, πειρω, there is, we might say, merely an ‘alpha’ of difference. The words are closely similar; each alludes in some sense to the other. They belong to the radical nature of the Incarnation in terms of the pageant of human redemption. God’s engagement with our humanity includes the whole range of the human condition and thus its brokenness.

The Litany is the earliest part of the English liturgy translated largely from Latin litanies into English by Cranmer in 1544. It marks the beginning of what would culminate in The Book of Common Prayer. In the Litany, we pray to be delivered from various forms of sin and evil, from disorders both natural and human that belong to the fallen world and to ourselves, but we pray for deliverance only by the grace of God in Christ. The obsecrations or sacred entreaties in the Litany begin as follows: “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation, Good Lord, deliver us.”

The Litany is a way of praying the Scriptures as credally understood. In these petitions there is the unpacking of the essential doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. The “Incarnation” is the collective term and principle of all that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ as the Word made flesh, such as his “holy Nativity” which is the Christmas theme, followed by his “Baptism,” an Epiphany theme, but then immediately associated with his “Fasting, and Temptation,” the themes of early Lent. They, in turn, give way to his “Agony and bloody Sweat” recalling Gethsemane, his “Cross and Passion,” his “precious Death and Burial,” the themes of Holy Week. Out of those moments comes his “glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” his “sending of the Holy Spirit,” his “heavenly Intercession,” and his “Coming again in glory.” It is essentially a way of praying the Creed and highlights the inescapable interrelation of these themes.

“By thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.” It is a powerful triplet of complementary and interrelated ideas. Christ is baptized for us even as his baptism is also an Epiphany of the Trinity and thus baptism incorporates us into the life of God through his being with us, even to the point of his being “made sin for us.” But what about his fasting and temptation? How is that an essential aspect of the Incarnation? Because it belongs to the larger pageant of redemption which is about God entering into our broken world and our broken lives to bring us back to himself. That turning back is repentance expressed and embodied in the activities and disciplines that belong to our being, as the Epistle puts it, “co-workers” with God in Christ.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me.”

‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,’ as one version of a children’s rhyme puts it. Yes, but only so as to rise up. And no, it has nothing to do with the Great Plague or the Black Death. That is a meta folkloric myth or invention of the 19th century.

Dust and ashes are the symbols of the beginning of Lent. They recall us at once to creation and to repentance which has to do with our awareness of having turned away from God. As such dust and ashes belong to the idea of our turning back to God from whom in sin we have turned away. They belong symbolically and in a sacramental fashion to our seeking God’s will for our re-creation rather than remaining in separation. But it is about the seeking. That is why Lent is really the pilgrimage of love, our loves seeking the divine love which seeks our good. We seek the good which God seeks for us and which belongs to his essential nature as the All-Good, we might say. We can only seek the goodness of God for us through God’s love.

The exhortation in the Prayer Book Penitential Service is a masterpiece of doctrinal minimalism. It speaks about the custom “in the primitive Church” – a phrase which is intentionally unspecified but refers in general to the early Patristic period which witnesses to the emergence of three interrelated things: the Holy Scriptures; the Creeds, and the ascetic patterns of the Church’s life of devotion. One forgets that the books of what we mostly mean by the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, to use Christian language, were only explicitly named by St. Athanasius in a letter in the early 4th century but as bearing witness to what had been received and recognised much earlier. Thus the emergence of the Canon of Scripture parallels the establishment of what Irenaeus and others called the Rule of Faith, namely, the Apostles’ Creed, and, then the emergence of the Nicene Creed in the 4th century first at the Council of Nicaea and then at Constantinople, 325 and 387 AD respectively. What we call the Nicene Creed is properly speaking the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Later there came into use the so-called Athanasian Creed. These are the three Creeds of the Church Universal.

All that the exhortation says in its modest way is that it was “the custom to observe with great devotion the days of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, and to prepare for the same by a season of penitence and fasting.” It is not only minimalist but highlights the essential features of the Gospel narratives. To put it somewhat cryptically: Just as there can be no Easter without Good Friday so too there can be no Good Friday without Easter. The accounts of the Passion which are set before us in Holy Week are only possible through the mystery of the Resurrection. And so, too, with Lent as a time of discipline. It is only possible through the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection which never hides or conceals the marks of the crucifixion. Indeed, as Lancelot Andrewes emphasizes rather beautifully, “Christ crucified is the book of love opened for us to read,” liber caritatis. Lent is really about our reading that book of love.

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“Charity never faileth”

“Love bade me welcome”. So begins George Herbert’s poem, “Love (III),” which concludes a wonderful collocation of poems known as The Temple. They are poems that continue to attract across the spectrum of ecclesial identities. As the Puritan theologian, Richard Baxter notes, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his Books.”

Today is Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly known as ‘Love Sunday;’ in part because of Paul’s powerful hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13, and, in part because of the Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. Like Herbert’s poem, it is an invitation to love. The journey is the pilgrimage of love. Love is God.

This challenges many of our assumptions about love as something personal, emotional, sexual, and psychological; in short, our all too human loves are incomplete. What Paul sets before us is Divine Love, the love which seeks the perfection of our human loves by gathering us into the life of God himself. It is very much about a kind of wisdom in love, about the divine knowing and loving which is greater than the partial, fickle and limited forms of our human loves and our human knowing. We “see in a glass darkly.” Even more, we are meant to see ourselves in the “certain blind man” sitting by the way-side near Jericho, itself the image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city.

Without charity, we are nothing, and, as the Collect says, all our works without charity are “nothing worth,” drawing upon the language of the Epistle. Charity is the Englishing of one of the several words for love in Latin, namely, caritas, itself the Latinising of one of the several words for love in Greek, namely, agape. Charity means more though not less than the idea of providing for the poor and needy. The point is that through the recognition of the limitations of our human loves we are awakened to the Divine love which seeks our good in the motions of the Goodness of God himself.

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. (Sonnet # 141)

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