Category: Sermons

When Jesus heard it, he marvelled

Epiphany is the season of marvells, of wonders, the season of signs which teach us something about God and about what God seeks for our humanity. “Be not wise in your own conceits,” Paul advises us because what is wanted is to be wise about God and about the will of God for our humanity. That is always a check on human presumption, being wise in our own conceits, and a check on that equally dangerous and destructive aspect of our fallen humanity, our anger and our desire for revenge. All such things arise from our pride and conceit which deny the wisdom of God wherein alone we find grace and healing and peace. We are to act out of what we learn about divine wisdom and divine power.

This challenges human wisdom and human arrogance and conceit. The lessons of the Epiphany show us what God seeks for our humanity. Not just the healing of our bodily infirmities but the healing of our souls, not rendering “evil for evil” but “overcom[ing] evil with good”. That means acting out of the grace of God’s goodness made manifest in Christ Jesus. In that way there is even the possibility of our becoming a wonder and a marvel not to ourselves but to God.

Today’s Gospel reading presents us with two healings: the healing of the leper from within Israel and the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a healing of someone from outside Israel. Such healings show us the universal aspects of the Epiphany. The things of God are made known for all. God cannot be the possession of simply a few; God is God and so for all. And so he must be made known to all. Such is the necessary missionary impulse of the Christian Faith. We cannot keep God to ourselves and our relationship with God shapes the quality of our relationships with one another. The word gets out as the second miracle clearly shows.

The Epiphany Gospels teach us something about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. The healing miracles are just that, things which have to do with divine wisdom and divine power made manifest in Jesus. God who is the author of all life is the God of the healing of all life, sometimes indirectly through human arts and skills, and sometimes directly as in the Gospel miracles. These miracles show us that God seeks our good as found in him. Both the Jewish leper and the Roman Centurion understand that power and goodness in Christ. They both come to him with a desire, the one for himself, the other for his servant.

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I could not see for the glory of that light

He was blinded into sight, we might say. Conversion is the paradox of radical transformation. The Conversion of Paul is a striking example of that kind of paradox. He who persecuted “this Way unto death,” meaning the followers of Jesus who are not yet called Christians, becomes himself a follower and even more the outstanding “apostle to the gentiles”. With Paul’s ‘conversion’, Christianity will become Christianity, we might say, and goes global. In that sense, it complements wonderfully the Epiphany season. Something is made known and what is manifest changes us. And sometimes in dramatic ways.

Paul, his name itself is a consequence of his ‘conversion’, tells us his story three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a book which might equally be called the Book of the Acts of Paul. He was Saul of Tarsus, a learned Jew, “born” as he says “in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city”, Jerusalem, “at the feet of Gamaliel”, a learned rabbi, “and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers,” a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He is laying out his credentials before the Jews on the very steps of the Temple in Jerusalem. They have sought to kill him because of what he is saying about Jesus as the Messiah. The ensuing riot and commotion has resulted in the Roman legion intervening to keep the peace.

But before being taken away by the Roman soldiers, Paul speaks to the tribune, the commanding officer, Claudius Lysius. We actually learn his name. To the surprise of the tribune, Paul addresses him in Greek. The tribune, who is apparently Latin speaking but knows Greek, is surprised because he had thought that Paul was an Egyptian and indeed one of the Sicari, a group of Jewish zealots opposed to the Roman occupation and dominance of the Jewish people. Sicari refers to the daggers which they would use to assassinate both Roman soldiers and Jewish collaborators with the Roman authorities. It is the only time the word is used in the New Testament, an hapax legomenon.

Paul asks to be allowed to speak to the Jewish people. He speaks to them in Hebrew. The entire scene shows us something of the interplay of cultures and languages that belongs to the emergence of Christianity. What is his story? It is his famous account of his ‘conversion’ on the road to Damascus. It becomes iconic; ‘a road to Damascus experience’ signals the idea of a radical change of direction in thought and character.

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“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come”

This, too, is an Epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. This, too, is a scene of wonder and amazement. This, too, is a matter of disquieting questions put to Mary. Here he says in response to her observation that they have no wine, “O woman, what is that to thee and to me?”A strange and disturbing question, not unlike the one we heard last Sunday. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Such questions might seem to border on the impertinent and the rude, perhaps even a tad disrespectful! But no.

In the context of the Epiphany, we are to see these scenes and hear these questions as belonging to the two natures of Christ, to the union of the divine and the human in the person of Christ. Only so can we begin to see that the making known of the things of God makes certain things known to us and our humanity. Last week, it was about the vocation of our humanity as students in matters of things divine. This week it is about the presence of God in our lives sacramentally and spiritually, but only through the awakening to human limitation that opens us out to the abundance of grace in God, the God who seeks the very best for us in our lives which is more than we can desire or deserve. Such is the radical significance of the miracles of the Gospel. They have to do with two things: the miracle of creation itself as the work of the Creator and the miracle of God’s redemption of our humanity. The miracle stories of the Epiphany all show us what God truly seeks for our humanity.

This is “the beginning of signs,” John tells us, the beginning of the miracles that belong to the understanding of human redemption. This beginning is most instructive. Most of the miracles are anything but mere displays of power. Most of the miracles of the Gospel are about human healing and salvation: “the blind see, the deaf hear, the lepers are cleansed, the lame walk, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” To be sure, and yet the beginning of all such signs is this miracle story of the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee, a story which has, I think, an inescapable sacramental quality and significance. What does it mean?

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Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased

“There came a voice from heaven”, Mark tells us, just after Jesus “com[es] up out of the water” “baptized of John” in the river Jordan, and sees “the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him”(Mark 1. 10). The Baptism of Christ is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ, thus an epiphany, too, of the Trinity. As such The Baptism of Christ is an integral feature of the Epiphany; its propers provided for within The Octave of the Epiphany (BCP, p. 119).

Epiphany is the season of teaching, hence the imagery of light. Advent, too, is the season of teaching with an equal emphasis upon the imagery of light. The difference is that Advent focuses on the Light of Godcomingdown to our world of darkness; Epiphany focuses upon the Light of Godnowin the world. The emphasis is on the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The “voice from heaven” is the Father’s voice which proclaims “Thou are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”(Mark 1.11). This is the beloved “servant, whom I uphold, mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth,” God says in Isaiah, the one upon whom “I have put my spirit” (Isaiah 42.1).

On the one hand, the servant here is Israel in her divine vocation as  “a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles” tasked “to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42.6,7). Powerful images that signal human redemption as grounded in God. On the other hand, the servant is the Son in whom the Father is “well pleased” because the vocation of Israel is only fulfilled in Christ.

The Gospel for The First Sunday after the Epiphany, which this year is also The Octave Day of Epiphany, is the unique story of the boy Jesus engaged with the doctors of the Law in the temple at Jerusalem, “sitting in their midst,” “both hearing them and asking them questions”(Luke. 2. 46). It is a scene of wonder. “All they that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers”(Lk. 2. 47). It is unique in one way because it is the only story in the New Testament about the childhood or boyhood of Christ. But it is uniquely important in another way. Here is Jesus as Divine Teacher and human student. It is an epiphany about who Christ really is. His question to Mary and Joseph highlights his mission and divine identity. “Wist ye not” – did you not know? – “that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Lk. 2. 49). Some translations have “in my Father’s house.” Literally, it is “the things of my Father.” In any event, it is a telling phrase which points to the temple, to the church, as a place of teaching. Teaching and learning, and living the teaching that is learned. That is the Epiphany in us.

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“They saw … they came … and worshipped him”

Unlike Caesar who proverbially came, saw and conquered, the Magi-Kings saw, came, and adored. They were conquered by what they saw. They “fell down and worshipped.” They beheld, through the leading of a star, the child-King of Bethlehem. In their adoration, they “opened their treasures and presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” ‘sacred gifts of mystic meaning,’ as one of our hymns wonderfully puts it. Such really is the real origin of gift-giving, the giving of gifts in honour of the gift that is given in Christ’s holy Nativity.

Epiphany marks the completion of Christmas. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally gathered together. The imaginary of Bethlehem is now a crowded place of images derived at once from holy scripture and from holy imagination. With “the adoration of the magi”, the pageant of Christmas is now wonderfully complete.

And over. At least, the account of what we have come to call Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different consideration. The Journey of the Magi impels, in fact, another journey, one that conveys a profound sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” T.S. Eliot suggests, because they are profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and has its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. As Eliot’s poem, the Journey of the Magi, puts it:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

The awareness of our limitations, of which death is the greatest and ultimate limitation, is the birth of philosophy. It is an ancient theme, constantly reworked and replayed in myriad ways. The death of Enkidu gives birth to Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom in The Epic of Gilgamesh and launches him on a journey through the realms of the deep darkness of death, the home of the sun which in the ancient understanding arises out of the darkness and sets into the darkness. The death of Patroclus occasions a philosophical crisis for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. And so for Plato, for Augustine, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Descartes, the list goes on and on, but in one way or another, the awareness of human limitations gives birth to reflection and wisdom.

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And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were
told them by the shepherds.

I hope that we are among those who having heard it, wonder at those things told to us by the shepherds. Even more, I hope and pray that we will be like Mary and “keep all these things, and ponder them in [our] hearts.” Such is, I think, the radical meaning of the Christmas of the Shepherds.

Things told to them by angels set them in motion to “see this thing which is come to pass,” they say, and with a proper theological sophistication of the kind which belongs to the little ones of the world, they know that this is something “which the Lord hath made known unto us.” They come and find it so. Splendid. Good on them but even better, even a greater good is that they do not keep this to themselves. It is not “good tidings of great joy”, just for themselves. No, it concerns us all. “They made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” We know that saying. We heard it on Christmas morn. The “good tidings of great joy” is that “unto you is born this day in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord.” And as a sign of this truth, “ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

All this has remained with them and belongs to their conversation among themselves. It sets them in motion, moved by more than what they or we can possibly conceive. They come and see and it is as they had been told. They wonder at what they behold and made it known abroad and others wonder too. But how many keep all these things and ponder them in their hearts? The shepherds “returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” There is the constant emphasis upon the idea of what has been told and seen and then told to others.

All of this belongs to the sweet wonder of the Christmas mystery. On The Octave Day of Christmas it all comes to a kind of crescendo, paradoxically enough not with the Angels nor with insight of John but with the lowliness and humility of the shepherds. They have the kind of rural honesty that used to be part of our communities. A way of simple directness and humble honesty. It is much needed in our age of smug arrogance and ignorant assertions. The Octave Day gathers up the fullness of images that Christmas presents and concentrates them on our thinking about Jesus, especially about his being named Jesus by angels, by Joseph, and now, wonderfully by Mary.

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The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise

This is how it happened? Well, at least in Matthew’s account. But more importantly what Matthew and Luke and John offer us is a way to think about the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. We might say that how it happened and how we think about what happened are inescapably intertwined. In fact, we really don’t have any other way to think about the mystery of Christmas than what we are presented with in the Gospels.

To be sure, there are the traditions of representation and reflection upon these mysteries that belong to our thinking. But what is most striking and most important about the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation is the idea of God being with us which is simply another way of thinking about the radical nature of God as the principle upon which the being and the knowing of things utterly depends. From such a view, God is always with us. Christ’s Incarnation is the instantiation of that idea simply in its most radical guise. No cause for Christian triumphalism however; only for humility and wonder.

Matthew’s account complements John’s outstanding theological vision more than it does Luke’s economical and bare bones story which at face value has nothing really extraordinary about it other than that in the light of John’s Christmas Gospel we are made aware that is what is extraordinary. The ordinariness of the extraordinary event, if you will. Matthew offers us an insight into something he shares with Luke. It has entirely do with angelic sight, the raising of our minds from the linear and divisive thinking of ratio to the unitive reasoning of intellectus into which everything is gathered together.

Matthew’s account focuses wonderfully, I think, on the role of the angels in directing the conscience of Joseph. He confronts a conundrum, a social scandal. Espoused to Mary, yes, but lo, and behold, she is with child and not by him! Something of the character of Joseph is suggested to us in Matthew’s equally laconic account, equal to Luke’s concision. “Joseph her husband, being  a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily,” discreetly arrange for things, as it were, and not go viral on twitter in the manner of Trudeau and Trump. There is in Joseph’s thoughts – something which we are allowed to see – a question, a sense of mystery, that has to do, perhaps, with his sense of the character of Mary. Simply put, he is perplexed about what exactly is going on. There are, to say the least, questions.

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These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

There is, perhaps, no feast more troubling than The Feast of the Holy Innocents. Yet it belongs to the Christmas mystery and helps to illumine the deeper realities of God’s intimate engagement with our world and our humanity in the child Christ.

The story simply shows us what is a continuing feature of our own world; the horrible sufferings and deaths of the little ones in so many parts of our world, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of war, the sufferings and deaths of the little ones because of what is expedient and useful for the interests of others. In other words, there are a myriad of innocent ones. Innocent simply means those who are not able to harm.

In the Christian story, the little ones of Bethlehem are destroyed by Herod in his attempt to get rid of a potential rival to his throne. The story, too, draws upon the Egyptian captivity of Israel and God deliverance of Israel by God. The Hebrews are drawn out of Egypt and learn to be defined by the Law in the wilderness. So, too, Christ with Joseph and Mary flees Bethlehem and goes into Egypt from which he will return. Fuga in Egyptum, “the Flight into Egypt,” as the Matthaean story is called has excited the imaginations of the artists. The angel of the Lord alerts Joseph in a dream about the danger the young child and his mother are in. They flee into Egypt.

Meanwhile back in Bethlehem, we have the slaughter of all the little ones just because they are little ones. It is a policy of infanticide enacted for a political purpose. Sadly, there is nothing new in that: think about the horrors of the Rwandan genocide or the present horrors of the Syrian civil war, of the flood of refugees, etc., etc.

What is the point? What is there to celebrate? What are we celebrating? The meaningless and cruel deaths of little children? Cruel deaths, yes, but The Feast of Holy Innocents makes the strong theological claim that such deaths are not meaningless, that such deaths actually participate in Christ’s coming, including his death. Their lives have their meaning entirely in Christ. It means, too, that the sufferings that arise so directly from human folly and wickedness in all its forms are known to and in God. The simple “givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, embraces the suffering of all things, both gentle and violent. The suffering of all things belongs to the being of God.

The unspeakable grief of the mothers of the world at the loss of their little ones is part and parcel of the Christmas story, “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.” The only comfort is found in the comfort of the Christmas story. God himself becomes a little one so that he might redeem all the little ones of the world. Without guile, in other words, innocent, “they are without fault before the throne of God.”

Think about how poignant and powerful this story might be precisely for those who have lost little ones. I have had occasion in the priestly and pastoral ministry to deal with those who have lost a child at childbirth or shortly thereafter. What comfort can there be except to recall this feast which makes it clear that the little ones ultimately are those who “follow the Lamb,”a reference to Christ in his sacrifice for us, “whithersoever he goeth”? He goes ultimately to the Cross for us and for our salvation. The holy Innocents are “they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” There can be no other comfort.

Fr. David Curry
Holy Innocents, 2018

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That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist complements powerfully the essential Christian mystery of the Incarnation expressed in The Prologue of John’s Gospel on Christmas Eve. The reading from John’s first letter underscores the essential insight into the Incarnation. It is written to emphasize the reality of God being with us in the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ. It counters what will become the earliest Christian heresy, docetism, which argues that God could not become flesh, could not engage the world intimately; he only appears to have done so but not really. As such it plays into all the forms of gnosticism, ancient and modern, which see the world in largely dualist terms: spirit, good, matter, evil.

Our own culture is riven with dualisms of this sort both politically and environmentally. We have, I think, the hardest time understanding and appreciating the essential goodness of everything in the created order and end up attributing to the goodness of creation an evil which actually belongs to us and to our “thoughts, words and deeds”. How we use the created world is the real question. Christ’s Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the goodness of the world, of matter, of the flesh, of the body. But even more, the Incarnation is the strongest possible affirmation of the truth of God in whom the truth and being of all things radically depends.

The Gospel too complements the point of the Epistle. Not only is Christ’s Incarnation and all that follows from it, such as the Resurrection, real and not merely an appearance, a kind of divine play-acting, as it were, but “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” John says, about the “many other things which Jesus did.” In other words, the Incarnation does not mean that God is collapsed into the world, rather the world is gathered into the radical truth of God. This affirms the goodness of the created order but only in relation to God.

Christ is “God and Man,” the creeds say, and that union contains a wonderful insight into God and to God with us. Christ, as the Athanasian Creed puts it, is “God and Man, yet he is not two, but One Christ, One, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking Manhood into God.” Such an insight proclaims a deep truth that counters all the forms of our dualism. It is what Christmas proclaims and celebrates, the deep meaning of Emmanuel, God with us. John emphasizes in his Epistle what he shows in his Gospel. “That which was from the beginning” is the Word, “the Word [which] was with God and was God,” “the Word [which] was made flesh”, the Word “which we have heard, and seen, and looked upon and handled”. The Word of Life.

That Word “we declare unto you”, John says, “that you may have fellowship with us” in “our fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” This is our Christmas joy, and the fullness of joy. This is the light that overcomes all darkness. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Such is the great and radical witness of the Christmas mystery. We celebrate the double mystery of God and of God with us only to realize that God with us is precisely the mystery of God himself.

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you

Fr. David Curry
St. John the Evangelist, 2018

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