Christ Church

“I have compassion on the multitude”

Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but they follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things”. That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.

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“Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you”

This morning’s Gospel ends where we began two weeks ago. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” The radical meaning of that mercy is expressed in our text: “love your enemies, do good to them which hate you.” Nothing could be more counter-culture. Nothing better expresses the ultimate ethical statement that belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity. And yet, this commandment, the impossible somehow made possible, is but the illustration of the Epistle reading from Romans about the nature of our reconciliation and life in Christ.

“Know ye not,” St. Paul asks us, with a rhetorical flourish, “that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” Death and resurrection lead to “newness of life”, having crucified “our old Adam,” having destroyed “our sinful self,” “that we should never again be slaves to sin.” Powerful ideas that belong exactly to the radical meaning of our life in Christ, “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What does that mean? Simply that Christ lives in us.

We are only alive when we live in the reconciling love of Christ. This transcends the oppositions of our souls and lives, our enmities and hatreds. For that is the real meaning of sin: our opposition and hostility to the deeper truth of our humanity as found in God. No one expresses this better than the great second-century theologian, Irenaeus: “The glory of God is humanity alive and the life of man is the vision of God.” God in man and man in God. To have a glimpse of this changes how we see everything. It signals the overcoming of all division and opposition, all animosity and enmity. This is truly radical because it is God’s truth and life in us. And it is equally the counter to the so-called ‘transhumanisms’ of our contemporary world which are really anti-human and anti-life, turning ourselves into machines and/or negating our embodiment as living beings.

This word challenges our world of endless divisions and strife both ancient and modern. Socrates in Plato’s Republic counters both the conventional views of justice and the ‘sophistic’ rejection of justice which is really anti-human as well. The conventional view, then and now, is that justice means “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” As Socrates points out with great clarity, justice as a virtue, a quality of excellence, cannot result in doing harm to anyone or anything. He also attempts to counter Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is “the interest of the stronger;” in short, that might equals right. That really means there is no justice, no truth, just power and domination which is predicated upon division and enmity; it is ultimately anti-human. Here we are opened out to a greater vision and a greater truth not simply about our being in the world but about our being in Christ, our life in the vision of God, to put it in Irenaeus’s terms.

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