Christ Church

“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Such are some of the great ethical teachings that belong to the philosophical and religious traditions that once shaped our souls and our worlds. Are we alive to them and to their transformative power? That is the question which is set before us in today’s readings.

The year runs out in a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of judgement and forgiveness. In the Gospel, the servant whose ears are still ringing with the words of forgiveness refuses to forgive another. In the Epistle, Paul prays “that your love may abound yet more and more in all knowledge and in all judgement … being filled with the fruits of righteousness.” The pageant of the Trinity season is concentrated for us in these readings. These are all the motions of God’s grace towards us but is that grace moving and alive in us?

We come to the near end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. It marks the transition from the pageant of God’s grace which seeks our increase in holiness and virtue, the grace of sanctification, to the pageant of justifying grace in Advent through to Trinity Sunday. We come to an end only to be returned to our beginning. Our end and beginning are one and the same. We end and begin again with the grace of forgiveness. As always the challenge is about what is in our hearts with respect to the ethical teachings which in some sense or another belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God. The Gospel offers at once a strong warning and great mercy. The warning is all about ignoring the great mercy, the forgiveness which is really beyond number. It is, after all, the infinite quality of God’s grace given to us in the finite conditions of our lives.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

But is God’s word alive in us? Here is the Gospel story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again, and all without seeing. And its effects extend to define a community of faith, “himself believed, and his whole house”. “Faith cometh by hearing” has its illustration in this touching scene. But does his Word have its resonance in us?

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvelous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, and recalls to us as well the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and world.

They remind us of what so much of our culture and church is often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that, properly speaking, define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the empty barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness, what one theologian has called “metaphysical boredom”.

This is the modern disease of secular society which has denied the deepest questions of meaning. But banishing such questions leaves a God-shaped hole in our hearts and our culture into which run a whole plethora of false gods. George Steiner, in a largely forgotten Massey Lecture, called attention to this modern phenomenon as “Nostalgia for the Absolute”, noting that in the place of religion, the ideologies of secular atheism rushed in with such things as Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism and the social anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, all ideologies which have come and gone. They have left in their wake “the incredulity of meta-narratives”, as François Lyotard puts it, a defining feature of what is sometimes called post-modernism.

Yet in the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are altogether about the resonance of God’s word in human lives. Without them our churches, like our souls, are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, in Shakespeare’s poignant words.

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