Category: Sermons

“There was war in heaven”

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives; it is particularly a feature of our life as students and teachers and as priest and people. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak as well, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The Angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good. We are part of a larger spiritual community, the community of Angels and humans. “The services of Angels and men”, the Collect notes, are “ordained and constituted” by God “in a wonderful order.” We pray to God that “they may succor and defend us on earth”.

Angels? But you can’t see them! True. You can only think them. That, of course, is exactly the point. We can only think them and we can only think with them. We can even learn from them. The outstanding theologian, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, asked the question, “Can a man be taught by an Angel?” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q.11, art. Iii). The Angels can teach us, he shows, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the forms of violence and abuse, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Perhaps we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know.

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“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”

Paul’s words in today’s Epistle stand in stark contrast, it might seem, to the spirit of the Gospel which seems to suggest that we should not worry about the things of the body – “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” After all, “is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Jesus recalls us to the primary and necessary consideration of Providence. “Behold,” he says, “Consider,” he says, and above all, “Seek,” he says.

It is not that the things of the body and of the world don’t matter. They do. At issue is in what way and to what extent. Jesus in the Gospel puts his finger on a perennial issue in the human story and one which is even more pronounced and even more of a problem in our modern dsytopia. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Anxiety is a relatively modern word, largely derived from the German “angst” and freighted with a whole lot of baggage from the psycho-philosophical traditions of Nietzsche and Freud. It captures a certain unease about the world in which we find ourselves. Since the twentieth century it has displaced the word which Tyndale and the Translators of the King James Version of the Bible used in this passage from Matthew. The English word was “carefull” – be not so full of cares or encumbered, burdened with cares. In a way that describes our world a bit better and in a more concrete way than the various therapeutic descriptors that are part of our contemporary landscape, literally littered by a plethora of conditions and symptoms. We miss, I fear, the deeper spiritual understanding which today’s readings offer.

Suffering is real and the forms of suffering are endlessly diverse and individual. Today’s readings belong, I think, to important questions about good and evil, about suffering and redemption that need to be explored more deeply, especially by the Church. Why? Because of the essential question about ‘redemptive suffering’.

Jesus is not saying that there won’t be hardships and suffering. There will be. And that is the point of connection to the Epistle. To bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus” is to bear the marks of redemptive suffering. It is to bear the marks of the profoundest form of the Providence of God imaginable.

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“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

It is a story of conversion but without anything of the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Yet the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why then the association with sin?

There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome, perhaps, was the first imperial power to outsource tax collecting! Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities.

The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to every one of us. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.

At issue is the relationship between the forms of our spiritual identity and the forms of economic life. What is overlooked in all forms of economic determinism is sin and evil, in the form of our “covetous desires” and “inordinate love of riches” and the willful destructiveness born out of deep hatred and animosity. What is overlooked is how all forms of economic determinism are essentially materialistic and atheistic.

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“And one of them … turned back … giving him thanks;
and he was a Samaritan”

Last Sunday we had the powerful and familiar story of the Good Samaritan. Today we have another gospel story in which a Samaritan figures also most prominently. It is an intriguing aspect of the Christian Scriptures, particularly of St. Luke’s Gospel, that the Samaritans are often used by Jesus to teach us about what belongs to the truth of our common humanity. At once an implied criticism of religious divisions, particularly among the Jews but by extension to other religions, Jesus talks about what transcends the differences between and within religious cultures. In these back-to-back Sunday Gospels we are reminded about the true nature of our obligations to God and to one another as well as our failings.

Both Gospels, the one a parable, the other an encounter, reveal to us something of ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ about our humanity at the same time as they remind us of the necessity of God’s grace as the operative principle in our lives. There are our failings but there is the triumph of God’s grace in us compelling to “go and do likewise” both towards our neighbour and towards God. “A certain man” is wounded, lying half-dead on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. “A certain Priest” and “Levite” “look and pass by”. There were “ten men that were lepers,” ten that were healed by Jesus.

Only “a certain Samaritan as he journeyed”, who having seen the man who was wounded, “had compassion on him” and “came where he was”, “tak[ing] care of him.” Only one of the ten who were healed “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.” In the Jewish context of the Gospel, the Samaritans were a despised sect, outcasts, the proverbial “other.” The area of dispute between the Samaritans and the Jews is about the place where the Law of Moses was delivered and about what books truly comprise the Scriptures. In the encounter in John’s Gospel with the woman at the well of Samaria – the most intense Gospel story of Christ in his engagement with the Samaritans – Jesus is very clear about how they have erred on these doctrinal points at the same time as drawing them into conversation, even into communion with him.

Outsiders such as the Samaritans provide a corrective lesson to all the forms of religious self-righteousness and division. Jesus uses the Samaritans to show us our failings and to show us the setting right of our hearts and minds. No one lies outside of the reach of the Gospel.

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“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

Our Prayer Book provides a Collect for Holy Cross Day and appoints the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday for its commemoration. There is something quite wonderful and powerful about that sensibility. We are being recalled through a non-biblical feast based upon a set of post-biblical events to what is central and essential to the Christian faith. We are simply recalled to the centrality of the Cross.

Why? The Cross is at once the meeting place of lovers and the betrayal of all our loves. We crucify Christ. The Cross confronts us with the failings and failures of our humanity, of the disorder and disarray of our hearts and minds that lead to devastation and destruction in every age. But the Cross confronts us with the greatest betrayal – our betrayal of God and his friendship with us. To be recalled to the Cross is to be recalled to the Passion of Christ – to what he wills to endure for us. It shows us the divine love which is greater than all and every human love and which overcomes all our sin and folly. Such is the power of forgiveness.

Forgiveness. The Cross is the sign of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the reconciling love that makes all things new out of the violent nothingness of our sins. Forgiveness is made visible and audible on the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christ carries us in our ignorant folly and violence into the hands of his Father, into the reconciling love which is his Passion and Death. Such is the radical meaning of the Cross. It is then in turn required of us to live and act in the same way. What is that way? It is the way signaled in the Collect. God’s grace is given so that we take up the Cross and follow Christ through life and death.

The Cross speaks to us about death and resurrection and about the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice is about Christ’s life in us. Another lives in me and I in him and only so can we live for one another. It means a dying to ourselves and living to God and one another in the body of Christ, the Church.

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“And when he saw him, he had compassion on him”

We know it as the parable of the Good Samaritan. A familiar story, a familiar concept, even in our secular world, it suggests the powerful influence of religion on culture and society. We want to think that we can and should do good towards our neighbours, towards our fellow human beings. But we know, too, that what we want to do and even what we do is never fully complete, never fully enough. We even know at times that our efforts to do good have precisely the opposite effect. We make things worse.

Such reflections do not take away from the power and the truth of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Quite the opposite. They help to make us think more deeply about the Good and to realize that the power of doing good does not simply come from us. It is really altogether about God in us, not as if we are merely ‘passive vessels,’ but as moving our hearts and minds as active agents towards certain actions that arise from a certain kind of thinking. In a way, the parable is more about a certain attitude of mind that is needed in us and which is illustrated so beautifully, so powerfully, and so poignantly in the parable which Jesus tells.

What we see is the radical nature of love itself, the love that is God himself and God in us without which we are not lovely and without which we can only ‘look and pass by’ those in need. The divine love moving in us allows us in the journey of our own lives to come near to those in distress. It allows to see, to have compassion and to act. But it does not allow us the presumption to think that it is all our doing or that we have all the answers to the world’s problems. The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us about what I would call, the humility of compassion.

What that entails is the realization that we ourselves are like that “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead”. And we ourselves are like that “certain Priest” and “Levite” who “look and pass by”. But we are also to be like that “certain Samaritan” who, “as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” In other words, we ourselves are in this parable in every way both in our intentions and actions and our sufferings and failings. Yet we are called to be compassionate towards one another, both the stranger and the friend, because of the divine compassion which has been bestowed upon us. That is the deeper meaning of the parable, I think, and the only way in which we can understand it in relation to the questions which precede it.

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Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.

It is an Aramaic word translated by Mark into Greek and by extension for us into English, all the while keeping before our hearts and minds the original word, Ephphatha. Aramaic was probably the language which Jesus himself spoke. The Christian Scriptures as a result retain a handful of Aramaicisms.

The story in which it occurs is unique to Mark, though the Greek word translated into English as “Be opened” is the same word used by the other Evangelists, especially by Luke in the Resurrection accounts about how Jesus opened the minds and opened the understanding of the Scriptures to the disciples. And so too something is being opened to us.

Guarda è escolta. Look and listen, Beatrice tells the pilgrim Dante in the poet’s great poem, the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy. Look and listen to what? The pageant of Revelation in a sacramental form. It is not too much to say, perhaps, that Mark’s story here is the scriptural fons et origo of such imagery. For here is a story which speaks directly to the meaning of the Scriptures and in a way that is inescapably sacramental. In other words, we are being reminded of an essential feature of our own Catholic and Reformed Christian tradition, namely, the interplay between Word and Sacrament, the Word audible and the Word visible.

There is a kind of wonder in encountering this story in the midst of the Trinity season. It is one of the few Gospels from St. Mark in the classical eucharistic lectionary during the Trinity season; there are only three Gospel passages from Mark out of twenty-four or twenty-six Sundays. It speaks, I think, wonderfully and directly to our current confusions and uncertainties which are really about a kind of closing of our hearts and minds. “Ears have they and hear not; eyes have they and yet they see not.” Here we are being opened. Opened to what? What is it that we do not hear and see? What is it to which we are closed in our hearts and minds? To the presence and truth of God in our lives. We are closed to the very principle of all life, God. Here we have a powerful story about what God seeks and wants for us: our being opened to his transforming grace in our lives.

Here is a story, too, which reminds us of both the power and the limitations of language. You might say that the power and the truth of language actually is found in our recognition of its limits. Such is the meaning and nature of translation. Translation opens us out to the Word behind the words, if you will. It is an important feature of Judaism and Christianity that there can be and must be translation. And yet that doesn’t excuse us from appreciating and even learning other languages, even ancient languages. It means, however, that truth is not the sole property of any one language.

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“How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?”

It is a good question and one which haunts our age of extreme affluence, on the one hand, and extreme poverty, on the other hand, an age of extremes despite the claims to the reduction of universal poverty overall which may indeed be true but tell that to those in radical need! But the Gospel speaks to another kind of poverty which underlies each and every other form of poverty. It is spiritual poverty, the poverty that belongs to our neglect of God and as a consequence to what God constantly provides for us.

In a way, the Gospel presents to us a fairly common biblical theme, the idea of God feeding his people in the wilderness journey. What is that journey? It is about our life to God and with God in the learning about the will and purpose of our life with God. This Gospel story explicitly recalls the provisions which God makes for his people in the wilderness of Sinai. Tough lessons actually. There is a certain reluctance among the children of the Hebrews to accept the discipline, the learning. The lessons are more intellectual and spiritual, we might say, than simply material.

And therein lies the difficulty. It is the constant temptation to measure the reality of God by way of our immediate material concerns. It is not that they don’t matter; they do. It is just that they are subordinate and depend upon something far more radical. The physical and material world is not nothing but neither is it everything, a point which the teaching of the Law of Moses makes clear as does the Gospel of the Resurrection. It is in the light of those ideas that we best make sense of this Gospel pericope. It recalls Deuteronomy’s claim that “man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.” That does not deny the need for bread – for food – but it conditions that need by placing it squarely within the providence of God revealed in the Word of God as Law. There can be no bread without the Word of God in creation.

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“Love your enemies”

It remains to be seen for whom this shall be harder, for Silas, for you, for the grandparents, or even a great grandmother? It is, after all, all theology, as it must be. At least there is a party after!

“Love your enemies.” Is this one of the so-called values of the so-called West? If so then hardly one which we live up to in a world of ‘them’ and ‘us’, whoever ‘them’ and ‘us’ are. A hard saying, and yet one which articulates with remarkable directness and clarity an insight fundamental to the various traditions of philosophical religion. It speaks profoundly to our common humanity, to what transcends the tribalisms of culture, nation, family and religion and to the problems of identity and belonging that divide us into ‘them’ and ‘us’. A hard saying but no less true for being hard. Hard sayings are de rigueur.

The hard sayings of Jesus challenge us about belief as distinct from belonging. “I am the bread which came down from heaven”, Jesus said but the response? “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, they said. The consequence was that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.” Enmity and division where truth and unity are sought. Yet, “love your enemies”!

Hard sayings trouble us. But they belong to the truth of our humanity. “Ye must be born again”, Jesus tells Nicodemus in the great gospel for Trinity Sunday. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks. Is not birth hard enough on its own? But to be born again? “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus takes the statement literally to which Jesus responds by explaining the difference between flesh and spirit and their relationship. “Ye must be born again” means something of another order just as the wind blows where it wills and you cannot tell “whence it cometh and wither it goeth; so is everyone born of the Spirit.” This, it seems, is the hard saying. “How can these things be?”

And so for Silas Barry King today. He is born again. Born into the mystery of God with us. And such a rebirth, such a new birth, is of another order and one which transcends all of the divisions and enmities of our world and day. “Love your enemies” is the Scriptural phrase which captures the great and powerful logic of reconciliation and unity that belongs to philosophical religion. It means an entirely different outlook, an entirely different way of thinking. It has entirely to do with our incorporation into the mystery of God. It means being born upward into what has come down to us. Such are the motions of grace about the heavenly things that have been told to us. “No one has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven,” as Jesus patiently but firmly explains to Nicodemus.

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“Love your enemies”

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, not “Don’t worry, you don’t have any enemies”. For he knows only too well about our enmities and hatreds. Yet, “love your enemies”, he says. How absolutely impossible! How utterly improbable!

Why, we have the hardest time imaginable loving the more obvious and, dare one say, more ordinary objects of love: our friends and family, our country and world, our God and Saviour. How can it be that we should be commanded to love those that have set their faces, even their hearts, and souls and bodies against us? Yet, the demands of the Gospel are precisely impossible because our ordinary loves are equally impossible. They are all the places of our enmity, too.

Our enemies, after all, are rarely far-off and faceless. They are frequently only too close at hand. Their faces are only too often mirrored by our own. It is we who are at enmity with ourselves, with one another and with God. It is no good pretending that our hearts are not touched by such enmities when our hearts are precisely the places of enmity. But it is precisely in the face of these enmities – these animosities in the soul – that we are bidden, indeed, commanded to love.

The demands of the Gospel are just so radical because they take us to the root of all love without which we cannot love. They take us to the root from which we must learn to love. And that is why Jesus can demand such impossibly high standards of perfection for our lives – because he takes us to the root of all love which must blossom into the perfection of fruitfulness in our lives.

The command to love our enemies is not just an heightened expectation, something more added on, an optional extra, as it were. To the contrary, it belongs to love’s very nature. It is where love most shows itself to be love; where love shows itself to be most free; where love shows itself to be most perfect and complete. For as the Epistle reminds us, “love your enemies” takes us to the Cross as the place of death and life; “love your enemies” recalls us to our baptism by which we are identified with Christ in his Cross-given grace for us. This radical love is nothing less than Christ’s love in us. What is impossible for us on our own account is made possible in us. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

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