Christ Church

“I have compassion on the multitude”

It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat, even given the endless shadows of COVID-19 and the sense of outrage in the culture against the churches.

But this is to lose sight of the guiding wisdom of the Spirit in the Scripture readings in terms of the balance and interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification which ultimately speak profoundly to our current distresses.

Sanctification is about our taking ahold of the redemptive work of Christ’s justifying grace; it is the active reception of what has been given. This Sunday’s readings highlight this idea in terms of our lives sacramentally which is nothing less than our living in the love of God.

They open out to us things that we need to hear, things which have to do with a larger, more complete, and more honest view of human life  and in its relation to the natural world of which we are an integral part. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. Ours is the culture, to some extent, of full bellies and empty souls, notwithstanding the grotesque inequalities of wealth in the global world where famine and poverty still rule. The greater question is about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view of orthodox Christianity suggests that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. And that is wonderfully illustrated for us in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.

“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak to the human condition, “in times of adversity and prosperity,” we might say (echoing the marriage service). They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of that spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of baptism, on the one hand, and holy communion, on the other hand. Baptism is about nothing less than our personal and individual incorporation into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “being made free from sin and become servants to God” and to what further end? That we may have our “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” This we cannot earn and do not deserve. It is not something to which we are entitled. It is, precisely, “the free gift of God.” Yet, it is meant to be lived. If we have the beginning of our spiritual life personally and individually in baptism, then we have the continuation and growth of that spiritual life in us through holy communion and by its extension into our lives.

In a way, it is as simple as that. And as hard. Why? Because we have to think it and will it. We cannot take it for granted or assume that we deserve anything that is good.

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“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you,
and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man!”

Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel from two Sundays ago began. “Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” Both Gospel readings belong to Luke’s account of what is known as Christ’s Sermon on the Plain, a remarkable set of ethical teachings, some of which are utterly unparalleled in the Scriptures and are particularly challenging.

Perhaps, there is nothing more challenging than Christ’s commandment to “love your enemies” and to “do good to those who hate you,” words which mark the beginning of today’s Gospel. You did not hear in that reading that “blessed are you when men hate you,” but those are words which are part of this remarkable sermon. In between this text and the demand to love your enemies are four unique statements by Jesus, four ‘woes’ which complement the four ‘blessednesses’ or beatitudes in Luke’s account. “Woe to you that are rich for you have received your consolation (in the sense of getting what you called for or sought); woe to you that are full or satisfied for you shall hunger; woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep; and finally, woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” These call into question how we define ourselves in relation to others: as rich, as self-satisfied, as self-content, as highly regarded in the eyes of others; in short, how we compare ourselves to others and how we want to be seen by others. These ‘woes’ precede today’s Gospel reading which is in effect a kind of commentary on the blessings and woes that Luke records.

As commentary, it complements as well the Epistle reading about the radical nature of baptism not simply as rite but as the symbolic and sacramental reality of our life in Christ. Baptized into Jesus Christ means baptized into his death without which we are not alive. “If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him,” “be[ing] dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Powerful statements which belong to the equally powerful demands of the Gospel about loving those who hate us, loving those who are our enemies; in effect, saying that this may actually be a blessing. But how do we make any sense of this? It seems so completely impossible and so completely counter to our experiences.

In truth, these words belong very much to the confusions of our age and to the empty rhetoric of apology. The American writer and social, gender, and racial activist, Roxane Gay, rightly notes a feature of our contemporary world in which, as she puts it, we have made “a fetish of forgiveness”. In other words, we talk the talk but that doesn’t mean we walk the walk, if you will ‘forgive’ the cliché. There are important questions about what exactly is apology and by whom is it made, to whom, and for what. What does it mean to apologize for the sins of others, for instance, (about which some have made a particular fetish)? We may regret any number of things which have happened in the past but that is not the same as apologizing for our own thoughts and actions and their consequences, nor is it the same thing as repenting.

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