Christ Church

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth

Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.

Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.

And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.

It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.

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I have called you friends

St. Barnabas is sometimes known as “the son of consolation.” Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation from one another? To be sure. And what is our consolation? Simply our abiding in the love of God the Blessed Trinity. The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which we have heard on these past two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. And this Gospel follows directly upon one of the greatest Scriptural images of our abiding in the love of God; namely, the idea of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” Jesus says, “abide in me.”

Yet the most powerful statement about our abiding in the love of God appears in this astounding statement where Jesus says “ye are my friends.” Somehow in Christ we are made the friends of God and so, too, friends of one another.

It is a powerful idea and one which has an ancient and profound pedigree. It reaches back to the story of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is created by the gods to be a second self to Gilgamesh so that in respecting and honouring the other he will be no longer a domineering and brutal king, a bad king but a good king who seeks the good of his people. Friendship appears as the solution to the problem of bad kingship, to the misuse and abuse of power.

And sometimes the Greeks, too, can imagine a kind of commonality between the gods and men. “Two of a kind are we, deceivers both,” Athena says to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, implying a kind of commonality at least of character. And in the Old Testament there is the wonderful friendship between Jonathan and David, a kind of kinship of the soul.

One could go on but the point is that in Christ, God declares himself our friend. This shows something of the deeper meaning of the Trinity mantra that “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a beautiful treatise that takes up the ancient theme of friendship, such as in Cicero’s treatise de amicitia, Aelred of Rievaulx’s 12th century work, Spiritual Friendship, goes so far as to suggest that “God is friendship”.

What does friendship mean? It means our attention to the good of one another in the goodness of God. The divine friendship shapes our fellowship, our care and concern for one another. That is our consolation and strength. It is about the goodness of God in us making us good and, indeed, good for one another. Such is the power of the Trinity. It is altogether about our abiding in the love of God intentionally and thoughtfully, attending to the Good that is God in all things.

I have called you friends

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Barnabas, June 11th, 2018

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Hereby we know love

God invites us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” That is at once a privilege and a wonder. To what are we invited? To love imaged as a banquet but as signifying the real meaning of our lives. In the Christian understanding it is about our life in Christ. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love in which we abide is sacrificial love. That love is active and alive in seeking the Good, the goodness of God and that self-same goodness for one another.

Do we accept the invitation? Do we embrace the demands, indeed, the commands of the divine love in which is all our good? Well, that is the problem and the challenge. It is the problem of sin. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?” This is the problem of our indifference towards one another which separates us from the love of God, illustrated so powerfully for us in last Sunday’s parable, the parable of Lazarus and Dives. It is really all about what is alive in us.

Those lessons are again concentrated for us and developed more fully in this Sunday’s readings. The Epistle instructs but also convicts; the Gospel illustrates profoundly our refusals of the invitation to love and live yet emphasizes the divine commitment to our good. As such they are powerful persuasives to the truth of our lives in Christ.

The paradox is that we are commanded to love. This seems counter-intuitive. How can love be forced or coerced in us and still be love? It can’t. What we encounter is the absolute nature of God’s love as the truth for us. That love is constant and unconditional. It is not changed by our refusals; we are. We encounter simply what God seeks for us even in the face of our disorderly and distracted hearts. Yet “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” It is one of the great teaching insights into the nature of God opened out to us in John’s First Epistle, itself a veritable treatise on love as Trinity and our abiding in that love. “And this is his commandment, That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” Notice the double emphasis on commandment. What does it mean? Simply that we should want what God wants for us.

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