Christ Church

“Ye know not what ye ask.”

“April”, it seems, “is the cruelest month of all” (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland). Hardly the time for a pilgrimage, a journey unless it is like that of the Magi “with the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter” (Eliot, Journey of the Magi) all over again with more snow! Yet we enter into the deepest and most intense pilgrimage of all, the inward pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God and in God, the pilgrimage of Passiontide.

The Cross is veiled, present and yet unseen. Such is the paradox of Passiontide. We see but “in a glass darkly.” We know and yet, we do not know. We make our way to the Cross. The first word that we will hear is “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The darkness of our ignorance is so much greater than we realize. It embraces our willfulness, too, signaling our willful ignorance born out of pride and prejudice, born out of folly and pretense, born out of presumption and envy. Such are the realities of sin.

Yet, this is the way that somehow we must want to go, if nothing else than for the clarification of our desires and the purification of our wills. We are on a journey with Christ, only now to discover that he and he alone “by his own blood enter[s] in once into the holy place” to obtain “eternal redemption for us”. We can only follow. We can only be among the crowd, at once deceivers and deceived, and yet to learn and be changed. The Epistle reading from Hebrews presents the stark and uncompromising logic of the atonement. Christ is the Mediator between God and Man whose labour of love makes us at one with God despite ourselves, and even in and through the darkness of our ignorance and the danger of our arrogance, and even more because of our betrayals of his love. Passiontide is really the parade of our betrayals.

We want what the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons want. What is that? We want the very best for ourselves and for our children. But, inescapably, what we want for ourselves and for our children sets us and them at odds with everyone else. A benefit for a few is necessarily at the expense of the many. The poignancy of Passiontide lies precisely in the awareness of that paradox; our good is often sought for at the price of another’s hurt.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary often falls within the season of Lent. Indeed, there have been times even when it has fallen on Good Friday which moved a poet like John Donne to write a powerful poem about the nature of God’s comings and goings with us, a theme which Lancelot Andrewes develops over and over again as well. In Upon the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608, Donne explores in a rich and allusive way the comings of God to us and the goings of God from us in the double mystery of the Annunciation and the Passion. “At once a son is promised her, and gone,/ Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John.” As Donne wonderfully puts it, “All this, and all between, this day hath shown,/ Th’Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/ (As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)/ Of the angels’ Ave, ‘ and Consummatum est”, a wonderful contraction of the mystery of God’s turning to us and for us. It is a kind of circling.

The turning is about God’s turning to us and our turning to him. Such are the motions of God’s comings and goings to, with and in us. Redire ad principia, a kind of circling, is all about turning. It is the dominant feature of Andrewes Ash-Wednesday sermons entitled in the collection made by Buckeridge and Laud as Of Repentance and Fasting.

In the first of those sermons preached in 1598 before Queen Elizabeth, Andrewes reflects upon the nature of the turning. He takes as his text what might seem an unusual passage, the 34^th verse Psalm 78, “when He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned and enquired early after God.” The sermon undertakes to explore “the matter of repentance, expressed here under the terms of seeking and turning.” It focuses on the one to whom we turn just as the Annunciation is about God’s turning to our humanity in Mary and her turning to God in affirmation of the divine will for our salvation. Both Donne and Andrewes have a high regard for the significance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation. In poems and in sermons, they contribute to the tradition of Marian devotion in seventeenth century Anglican divinity, a tradition that is largely shaped by a strong commitment to the doctrine of Chalcedon and to the measured sense of adiaphora, things indifferent though not unimportant, that allow for a breadth of expression about Marian doctrine but without sacrifice to the principles of essential faith as measured primarily by Scripture and Creed.

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“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

March has been brutal, hardly a picnic. And as for there being “much grass in the place,” it certainly hasn’t been here unless in the Cannabis shops, legal or otherwise, or perhaps the Prime Minister’s Office. One way to escape the madness of March, perhaps, particlularly if you don’t like basketball. “Surely the people is grass,” withering away in the cold winds of March. Yet in contrast to the miseries of March we have these wonderful lessons which strengthen and refresh the soul in the things of God.

Our text speaks profoundly and eloquently about the nature of grace and about the meaning of our lives in faith. The gathering up of the fragments, κλασματα, literally, the broken pieces left over from the picnic in the wilderness with Jesus, signals the nature of redemption itself, the gathering up of the broken fragments of our lives, especially, it seems to me in our broken world and in the realization of our own brokenness. The gathering is about the coming together, literally, a συναγωγη, of our wounded and broken humanity in the wilderness of the world. But a gathering to what end? That nothing be lost. Such is the picture of redemption.

The gathering of the broken fragments of our lives is about our being gathered to God. Such are the Lenten mercies of Christ on this day variously known as “Mothering Sunday”, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians which identifies Jerusalem as “the mother of us all.” The nurturing, caring mother is the image of the Church that nurtures and cares for us with the things of heaven. It is also “Refreshment Sunday”, because of the Gospel reading from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness and the further provision for us in “the gathering up of the fragments that remain.” And finally, it is “Laetare Sunday”, because the Introit psalm for the day at Holy Communion is Psalm 122, which begins “Laetatus sum”, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘We will go unto the house of the Lord.’” That psalm belongs to what are called The Psalms of Ascent, the songs of the going up, the pilgrimage, to Jerusalem. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday just at the outset of Lent.

In the Christian understanding, Jerusalem has become less a physical entity, less a geographical city, and more the image of our spiritual homeland, more the city of God, in which the gathering up of our humanity finds its freedom and its fulfillment in God as a gathering, a συναγωγη, a synagogue, if you will, the place of being with one another in our being with God.

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