Christ Church

“One turned back, … giving him thanks”

This Sunday marks a spiritual turn in the progress of the Trinity season, a turn towards thanksgiving as a profound spiritual activity with respect to our life in Christ. This quintessential thanksgiving gospel teaches us that in turning back and giving thanks we are made whole. It is read as we enter explicitly into the second half of the Trinity season which can be as long as twenty-six Sundays or as few as twenty-two depending on the date of Easter which determines the relative length of the Epiphany and Trinity Seasons. And this year the spiritual turn coincides with the autumnal equinox this week, the official beginning of Fall. We have already felt that turn, of course, in the changes of temperature!

This Gospel is also one of the propers appointed to be used “For National Occasions” such as “The Accession of the Reigning Sovereign. The Birthday of the Sovereign. Dominion Day and other occasions of National Thanksgiving” (BCP, p. 616).Thus it serves, perhaps, as a welcome prelude to the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II tomorrow as well as a segue to our thanksgivings to God for the accession of King Charles III.

Such things remind us of the web of interconnections that belong to our lives together in community in terms of the interplay of things sacred and things secular. They all belong under the umbrella of God’s sovereignty and its meaning for us in our lives. But the turn towards thanksgiving is particularly significant and suggestive and acts as a spiritual counter to some of our anxieties about the physical and material world.

Voltaire, the greatest wit of the 18th century Enlightenment, in his satirical novel “Candide”, provides a most concise illustration of the defining themes of the European Enlightenment as well as a compelling critique of its assumptions. The novel takes us more or less literally around the world, “around the world in eighty pages”, as the literary critic, Italo Calvino, nicely notes. At once euro-centric and euro-critical, it reflects something of the nature of the interchange of cultures. The only thing in the entire novel that is not European are humming-birds about which Voltaire has a kind of fascination. They are unique to the Americas and unknown in Europe.

In the novel, the character Candide at one point finds himself in Eldorado, the land of gold, fictionally located in South America. It is an Utopia – an ideal state that is at once a good place and no place. The point is that all utopias in literature and political philosophy function as criticisms of existing political communities. They highlight what should be in the face of what is which is less than satisfactory. Satire is a powerful literary device that points out the injustices and incompleteness of the status quo, of those in power; it calls our attention to problems about which we should not be indifferent while signalling ideas and principles that are greatly valued.

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“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Invenio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Invenio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified, as Christians believe? How would one know? Surely it is worthy of the kind of dismissive scorn of an Edward Gibbons to point out that the many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe would make for a veritable “Birnum Wood” of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, a moving forest of crosses. Which is the true one? And how would one know?

It is one thing to accept that there was crucifixion and that Christ was crucified. It is, after all, what we preach, says St. Paul. But it is another thing to say this piece of wood or that piece of wood was the Cross on which he was crucified. We confront the inescapable limits of historical knowing. Yet this feast, rooted and grounded in the subsequent history of the Church, bears witness to the theological significance of the Cross for the understanding of the Christian faith and to the understanding, too, for that matter, of the cultures and worlds that the Cross, it is not too much to say, has shaped, even a post-Christian world.

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“Go, and do thou likewise”

It is not too much to suggest that the remarkable seventy year reign of Queen Elizabeth II bears eloquent testimony to the ethic of compassion set before us in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. She was a uniting figure in the face of the culture of antagonism in the divisions and conflicts of our postmodern world. A Queen who was deeply devoted to her people who in turn were devoted to her, and “knowing whose minister she [was],” as the Collect puts it, Elizabeth sought in her own gracious way the honour and glory of God through her devotion to duty and her compassionate commitment to sacrificial service. We mark her passing with profound gratitude for her witness and life of service and commend her soul to God’s gracious keeping.

In the two hundred and fifty one years of the life of this Parish, first as the Parish of Windsor, and then, and now, as Christ Church, there have been nine monarchs, two of whom were Queens whose combined reigns, the reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, were the longest, totalling one hundred and thirty four years. The passing of Elizabeth marks the end of an era and the beginning of another under the reign now of her son, Charles III, the tenth monarch in the history of our Parish. Long live the King.

The passing of a monarch gives us reason to reflect upon the significance and nature of sovereignty whether in its republican or monarchical forms, whether diffused among the citizenry or concentrated in the person of the sovereign. As Queen Elizabeth’s long reign reminds us, all sovereign power derives from God, from what is greater than ourselves. When that is forgotten there is only tyranny and abuse. What is forgotten is the relation of mercy and truth and the necessary interplay of wisdom and power, of thought and action, we might say. This is what is set before us today in the Gospel story and its setting.

How do we face the troubling and difficult things of our world and day? Through the renewing of our minds upon the wisdom of the ethical. What is the Good and how does it live in us? It can only be through the opening of our souls and minds to “the fear” or wonder “of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom,” and which, even more, as Job says, “is wisdom” (Job. 28.28). This is equally about our being open to the epekeina of Plato, the Beyond, the Good which is beyond the being and the knowing of things as their ground in which the soul participates even in its suffering; this, too, is the insight of Job and Jesus. It is ancient wisdom. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the death of Enkidu moves Gilgamesh to embark upon the greater journey, the quest for wisdom. These reminders counter the spectre of “endism” which hangs over us and paralyzes us in our contemporary fears and anxieties about our world and one another.

The story of Mary and Martha, the images of contemplation and action respectively, bookends the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Christian ethic of compassion par excellence. We easily overlook how the parable is framed by the quest for wisdom; first, by the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is a question about ‘what is the good as something to be done’, and by Jesus’ response. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” and, then, at the end by the story of Mary and Martha which immediately follows it in Luke’s Gospel. In between is the parable given as illustration and answer to the cynical and dismissive second question of the Lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?”

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