Category: Sermons

“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”

For centuries in the Western Churches, the Passion Sunday Gospel was from John 8. 46-59. That passage highlighted two things: the identity of Jesus with the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am” (Ex. 3.14); and the rejection of Jesus by the Jews. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they took up stones to throw at him” (Jn. 8. 58,59). That conclusion of the chapter complements its beginning in the story of the woman taken in adultery which is a critique and an attack on Jesus through her. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Jn. 8. 7). The images speak to the deeper realities of human sin. We are meant to see ourselves in the beginning and the end as those who condemn others and reject God; in short, as sinners. That ancient Gospel reading also complemented the Epistle reading from Hebrews to highlight the nature of Christ as the Mediator of the new covenant. As Mediator he is both God and Man.

The thematic idea that lies at the heart of the Passion is atonement, the idea, as Paul puts it in 2 Cor. 5, “that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (vs. 19). That idea continues in the Gospel reading which is the Matthean  account of the Gospel from Luke read on Quinquagesima Sunday about going up to Jerusalem. With Matthew the focus is on two things: our knowing and unknowing about what we truly seek and desire, on the one hand, and the sacrificial service of Christ who has come “not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mt. 20. 29), on the other hand.

Atonement belongs to the rich seam of reflection about human redemption. It concerns the relation of the divine and the human, of God and the world, of divine justice and mercy, of human sin and evil. Thus it belongs to the core elements of theological thinking. Passion Sunday inaugurates deep Lent which is our attempt to ponder the mystery of human redemption as divine love, the love which seeks the reconciliation of all things to God. But this can only even begin to make sense only if we take seriously the idea of sin which is really about taking seriously human agency and divine truth. The awareness of our separation from God belongs to a deeper reflection about the reality of the human experience in a world of uncertainty and confusion and of our own hearts in disarray. The radical nature of this separation is the infinity of sin, if I may put it this way. Sin creates an infinite barrier between us and God and between ourselves, our world and one another. By infinite I mean a chasm, an abyss, which we make and cannot unmake, a negative infinite.

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“And this he said to prove him; for he himself knew what he would do.”

The traditional readings for The Fourth Sunday in Lent have given rise to a number of titles or terms for this Sunday in such things as ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ and ‘Laetare Sunday’. The first and third derive from the significance of Jerusalem in both the Jewish and Christian understanding; Paul in Galatians speaks of “Jerusalem which is above which is free; which is the mother of us all,” our spiritual homeland, while the Latin Introit for this day is from Isaiah 66. 10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her.” The second term, ‘Refreshment Sunday,’ derives from the Gospel story of the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness in John’s account. These folk titles and terms have a hold on the imagination yet are meaningless without these Scriptural references. Other folk customs and practices have grown up around them such as the tradition of Simnel cake eaten on this day, or Mi-Carême in the French Canadian tradition in which people put on disguises and go from house to house singing and dancing and looking for treats, a Lenten version of the Christmas traditions of mummering in Newfoundland and elsewhere.

These things all help to mark the midpoint of the Lenten journey. At best they serve to remind us that the pilgrimage of Lent is not just to God but with God in the wilderness conditions of human experience. They remind us of an essential feature of the pilgrim ways, namely that it is a blessing and a cause for joy and not some kind of grim and tiresome restriction. We might do well to remember that in the face of COVID-19 and the ups and downs of its restrictions. “Blessed are they whose strength in in thee,/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways; /Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well;/yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings,” as Psalm 84 (vs. 5,6) teaches. This is the counter to what N.T. Wright calls our “late-flowering Epicureanism,” which may or may not be the same as the rather restrictive nature of Epicurus’s teachings which are at some remove from contemporary hedonism.

Yet such things can also distract us from the way in which these readings connect us to the deeper meaning of Lent as the way of the Cross and to our participation in the Passion of Christ. The blessing of the pilgrim ways is in Christ and in his Exodus, or going forth into the wilderness of our sin and darkness. This Sunday is not a reprieve or a rest-stop on the way to a happy-clappy Easter. It looks back and it looks ahead, not only back to Exodus and to Numbers in terms of the wilderness journey of Israel which is reworked in Christ, but also back to the lessons of the last three Sundays. It also anticipates and so looks ahead to Maundy Thursday and to the Passion itself at the same time as it highlights for us the sacramental means of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice throughout the whole of the pilgrim ways of our life.

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“For ye were sometimes darkness”

How do we face the darkness of ourselves and the darkness of our world? Do we seek to deny the darkness of sin and evil, the darkness of despair and depression? Do we seek all manner of distractions to escape the things which we confront outside us and within us?

In a way, today’s Gospel is rather dark and disturbing. We are asked to think about evil not as something out there in some sort of Manichaean manner – as if COVID-19, or the world itself in the physical phenomenon of wind and storm, of disease and sickness is evil or that evil is other people. That is to divide the world into good and evil in a simplistic and dualistic way and to judge oneself to be good and others evil. We are challenged to consider the divisions and contradictions in ourselves and our relation to them and to ponder the darkness of despair and depression that are very much about how we think about ourselves and others.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act 2. 2) Everything turns on our thinking. C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, itself a neglected (or discarded!) book, nicely paraphrases the great insight of Boethius (6th century AD): “the character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the subject known but on the knowing faculty,” on us as knowers, as thinkers. How we face the darkness is about our thinking. That is what this Gospel story sets before us.

But the Gospel, as we have it in our Canadian Prayer Book, is incomplete; it is an abbreviated form of the slightly longer and more complete pericope which had been read for centuries. Paul in his Epistle reading says that “ye were sometimes darkness,” only to go on to say “but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” It is as if the Gospel, as presented in its abbreviated form, attends only to the first clause and ignores the second which is illustrated in the more complete version.

“The last state of that man is worse than the first,” the Gospel reading ends. A kind of ending, to be sure, about the deep darkness of our despair really, but that is not the real ending of the Gospel passage. As Luke tells us, “and it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Lk. 11. 27-28). These last two verses complete the reading and help us to face the darkness.

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“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

The Book of Leviticus is the least read and least known book of the Scriptures. And to be sure, it is a daunting task to make one’s way through its myriad of regulations and directions many of which are quite puzzling, though, perhaps, rather intriguing. What does it mean, for instance, “that they shall no more slay their sacrifices for satyrs, after whom they play the harlot”? (Lev. 17.7). In the Canadian Prayer Book lectionary system, readings from Leviticus are very few; never in the Sunday Office readings, and only four times in the appointed readings for the Daily Offices; three times in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Friday evening, Saturday morning and evening), and once in Holy Week on the Wednesday evening of Holy Week in the story of the proverbial scapegoat understood as an symbol of Christ bearing our sins in his Passion.

Chapters 17-27 of Leviticus is known as the Holiness Code, best expressed in Leviticus 19. 2. “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” The Holiness Code is a collection of injunctions dealing with a wide range of behaviours and actions: social, moral and ritualistic. Set within the context of Israel as God’s chosen people, they express the sense of Israel’s separation and uniqueness over and against other peoples and nations. Yet, while some of the injunctions seem culturally dependent, others are universal and ethically compelling. The injunctions about not trimming beards and not being marked with tattoos may seem trivial and irrelevant but other injunctions seem ethically compelling and binding for all times and in all places, such things as behaving honestly, treating workers fairly, the rights or duties towards those with disabilities, doing justice, loving your neighbour as yourself, working as much for others as for yourself, and fair trade. In the light of those injunctions other things such as reproving and correcting your neighbour and allowing not only the poor and destitute but also the resident stranger to gather the gleanings after the harvest offer an ethical vision of what belongs to the good of all over and against the interests of the few.

As one theologian (Mary Douglas) puts it, the code is the idea of holiness as order not confusion, as rightness or rectitude of behaviour, as honesty and straight-dealing in contrast to the forms of contradiction in double-dealing, theft, lying, false witness, cheating in business, dissembling in speech, degrading and putting down others, hating your brother in your heart; in short the contrast between what we seem to be and what we are, the hypocrisies that belong to all our lives.

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“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered”

Learning through suffering is hardly new. It is a central feature of Homer’s Odyssey, for example. Many people at different times have been graduates of the proverbial school of hard knocks. Necessity is one mother of a teacher. Perhaps, too, this is one of the lessons of the current pandemic in the various forms of suffering that it occasions.

But what is it that is learned through suffering? What is the lesson? For the ancient Greeks, it was to know the order of the cosmos and our place within that order. For modernity, the lessons are more ambiguous, mostly because of the abstract individualism of our age in the forms of autonomy, isolation, and separation from one another, like so many cosmic orphans cast adrift in an empty and indifferent universe. At best, there is the ambiguous quest for meaning but as bound up in the modern sophistic of our solipsistic selves – the idea that the self is the only knowable or existent thing (OED). Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID-19 may serve to awaken us to our care and concern for others and not just our fears for ourselves. Perhaps, just perhaps, it may serve to awaken us to our lives in community and to the limitations of our technocratic world and its assumptions. We make the machines that make or unmake us, after all.

The lessons of Lent go beyond knowing the order of the cosmos and the ambiguities of our contemporary confusions, self-obsessions, and assertions. The Letter to the Hebrews spells out the lesson which Lent illustrates. The lesson is mindful obedience. The illustration is the life of Jesus Christ concentrated into the intensity of forty days. Mindful obedience means obedience to an authority, in this case God as the ultimate author, the root meaning of authority. Somehow suffering belongs to this relation to authority. Not an easy lesson for our contemporary culture where authorities in every sphere, it seems, betray trust often in blatant forms of hypocrisy and arrogance.

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, “ Hebrews (5.8) tells us in what is one of the lessons for Morning Prayer on Lent I (Year 2). “Although he was a Son” – this is who Jesus is, the Son of the Father. The Son is defined by his relation to the Father. He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father – “there was not when he was not.” He is, therefore, always the Son of the father. His whole being is defined by his love of the Father’s will. Such is obedience. The obedience is not just doing what one is told, blindly and ignorantly. It means doing what he is in his love for the Father. A knowing and loving obedience is the nature of the eternally and only-begotten Son of the Father. As such, this obedience is not learned; it is simply who he is. It is not something acquired. He is what he is; he does what he is; his act is his being. A knowing and loving ‘obedience’ belongs to the act of his essential being.

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

Psalm 51 is the quintessential penitential psalm. One of the seven penitential psalms, as they came to be known (psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), it captures wonderfully the longing of the soul for God’s goodness out of the profound awareness of sin. “Against thee only have I sinned.” However exaggerated this may seem, it states the truth about all sin. All sin is against God. When we sin against one another and against ourselves, we sin against God and the goodness of his creation. It is in this sense that “against thee only have I sinned” is to be understood, much in the same way as we pray, “Almighty God of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. All sin is against God in the same way that all wisdom is of God. Every sin opposes the good that is God himself.

Such is the great insight of this penitential psalm which is front and centre on Ash Wednesday. Dust and ashes symbolise creation and redemption. Ashes are imposed on our foreheads, the seat of the rational will, as a sign of repentance. Repentance is our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed with the words from Genesis: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to the humble ground of our creation. We are the dust into whom God has breathed his spirit but whom we have spurned in the arrogance and presumption of all our sins. We are recalled to creation in the awareness of our separation from creation.

But as sinners who know that we are sinners means to embrace the disciplines of repentance, literally “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” (BCP, p. 614). That means the heartfelt turning back to God “by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 612). This is not a list from which we may pick and choose. It means all those things.  Together they signify the deep desire of our souls for the truth of our being in the rejection of all the things which stand in the way of ourselves in union with God and in the acquisition of what properly belongs to our life with God. Lent concentrates wonderfully the three-fold nature of the pilgrimage of the soul: purgation, illumination, and union or perfection. These are all present to us in the programme of Lent and in its beginning on Ash Wednesday.

We begin in ashes but not so as to end in ashes. Our beginning is with God even as our end is in God. We seek his will and power and truth to make us new. We only live in this divine activity of being renewed. But to be renewed is to know that we are broken, not whole. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.” Nothing could be more counter-culture; no greater contrast possible between this and the therapy culture of emotional well-being. We are meant to feel troubled and to know our brokenness; “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” Contrition, confession, and satisfaction form the underlying spiritual patterns of our liturgy in relation to the three-fold pilgrimage of our souls to God.

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“Charity never faileth”

There is a pleasing coincidence to the conjunction of Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly called Love Sunday, with Valentine’s Day, however dubious St. Valentine as Bishop and Martyr might be. In the Prayer Book calendar, this “ancient memorial” is bracketed indicating that its historical character is obscure, however popular its commemoration has been over many centuries. It has, of course, become highly commercialized and monetized in our secular culture. Nonetheless its coincidence with Quinquagesima Sunday is instructive and belongs to an essential feature of the pilgrimage of our souls concentrated in the season of Lent which begins on Ash Wednesday. Somehow these coincidences of commemoration belong to that pilgrimage.

Love is in the air, to be sure. But what do we mean by love? Paul’s great hymn to love in First Corinthians, one of the great literary and spiritual classics especially in the King James version, belongs to a long and profound tradition of spiritual and intellectual reflection on the nature of love. Coincident with the sentimental, romantic and sensual effusions of Valentine’s Day, it helps to redeem such aspects of love and to deepen them into something spiritual and intellectual. There is more here than simply the contrast between the sacred and the secular; there is the idea of a connection signalling the redemption of all our loves. “If I have not love,” Paul tells us ever so bluntly and strongly, “I am nothing.” Love is all. “Charity” – meaning love – “never faileth.”

What is this love? One of our hymns captures in a phrase Paul’s meaning: “Love Divine, all loves excelling/ Joy of heaven, to earth come down” (# 470). The divine love, the love that is God, is not only beyond and above, but perfects all and every form of love, from the lowest to the highest. Thus Valentine’s Day belongs to something greater than what appears in the sentiments and feelings of the day, something which the poets emphasize over and over again. The spiritual idea is that every form of love ultimately participates in that which is greater. Our all too imperfect human loves find their perfection and truth in God’s love. As our opening hymn teaches (# 475), the whole life of Christ is the story of love written out for us to read.

Thus the more challenging feature of this conjunction of Love Sunday with Valentine’s Day is that love is something to be known, to be grasped intellectually. We are meant to be like the blind man sitting by the way-side near Jericho, the Biblical image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem which becomes the image of the heavenly city. He knows three things: first, that he is blind; secondly, that he wants to see; and thirdly, that the restoration of his sight is a mercy, a grace or a gift from God which he ‘knows’ is in Jesus. Wanting to see is wanting to know. And it is about healing and thus wholeness or completeness. Knowing and desiring or loving, we might say, are intimately and necessarily intertwined, a point which Plato makes in the Symposium, his great dialogue on the nature of love as the eros, the passionate desire to know. This is what we see in the blind man. In a way, he sees, like us, “in a glass darkly.” His ‘seeing’ is in what he knows and seeks. Without that there is no healing, no sight.

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