Christ Church

“We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did
and were destroyed by serpents.”

Serpents in the wilderness; the serpent in the garden. Dust and death. And yet something redemptive and healing. The story of the Fall is a story told in the form of myth let conveying great truth. O felix culpa! O blessed fault! as the theological tradition puts it. And as for snakes and serpents, they, too, serve an arresting and symbolic purpose. I am always amazed at the cultural cross-overs and coincidences of images. The staff of Ascelpius is the symbol of the medical profession to this day. It is a serpent entwined about a rough wooden branch. The serpent as a sign of healing.

And in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a serpent figures there, too. Gilgamesh, having learned that there is no permanence from Utnapishtim, returns to Uruk, wiser to be sure. He has been allowed to return however with the plant of rejuvenation called “the old men are young again,” an ancient form of Viagra, I suppose. On the way homeward, he stops at a refreshing spring to go for a swim, leaving the plant on the bank where its odour attracts a snake who immediately eats it. A just-so story, told to explain the phenomena of snakes shedding their skin and growing a new one, it also illustrates the fatalism of that ancient culture. Gilgamesh loses a gift for his city simply through a kind of accident and not through any fault of his own.

How much more different is the biblical account of the serpent in The Book of Genesis! The serpent is said to be “more subtle than any other wild creature.” And what does that serpent do? It asks questions. Such is a feature of human rationality. The serpent is a symbol of an aspect of our humanity, for good and for ill. What kind of questions?

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” Good ground and a good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought forth with patience. How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of spring time and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! How wonderful to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be?

The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all this is a world of talking heads and talk, as is so often said, is cheap. Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, relates to two things in today’s Gospel: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart. There can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds but only because that Word has been planted and sown within us.

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“I saw a light above the brightness of the sun”

The story of Paul’s conversion is told to us three times, twice by Paul himself. All three accounts are given by the hand of another, namely, St. Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles. Three accounts might seem a bit much!

But only because Paul, it seems, is too much. It is the nature of strong personalities that they repel as much as they attract. They challenge our understanding and for some that is just too much. For many, whether within or without the Church, Paul is derided and despised, mocked and scorned. A figure larger than life, he is, at the very least, controversial; his epistles, challenging. There is a real struggle when it comes to the praise of Paul. And yet struggle lies at the heart of all conversion.

Without struggle there can be no conversion. The conversion of St. Paul is, above all else, a struggle. It is, in short, the breakthrough of the understanding that happens through the collision of opposing points of view.

The struggle concerns the integrity of the images of salvation in the Scriptures. How to reconcile the glory of the Messiah with the sufferings of the crucified Christ? The entire personality of Paul is taken up with this question. Something new has come into the world which challenges the older understanding of Israel. That something new is the Way of Christ.

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“Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive”

“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” we heard Mary say last Sunday in the story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, her imperative providing us with the form of her ‘yes’ to God in our lives. Now today, it seems we have another directive, this time from Jesus, in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. What does it teach us? Simply this, God is the master and lord – the householder of all creation. There is the freedom of the Creator in the ordering of his creation. Everything is subject to his will and purpose, to the divine justice, we might say. It is important to be reminded of this. And yet, here is a story which Jesus tells. Therefore, it is equally a story of redemption which picks up and carries forward the story of Creation through the story of the Fall, a story of the restoration of the divine justice for all, of the hope of heaven, we might say.

Ultimately, then, it is a story about the grace of God towards us but as within the higher justice of his purposes for his human creation in spite of sin and folly, in spite of indolence and indifference, in spite of a sense of entitlement and expectation. God desires our salvation in the freedom of his will and that is always something which exceeds the limits of human reason; it is always more though not less than what we think we know. The parable highlights the primacy and the rightness of God’s grace, the justitia dei. What God gives freely, he gives according to the perfect rightness of his will.

This collides with our sense of justice. The point of the collision is to open to view the freedom, the grace and the higher justice of God. There is the essential rightness of what he does according to the purposes for which he made us and that is all grace. It arises entirely out of the sovereign freedom of God.

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