Christ Church

“Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts; / Show the light
of thy countenance, and we shall be whole”

It is, to my mind, a most intriguing scene. It belongs to the beginning of John’s Gospel and yet we read it at the very end of the Christian year. It is the first scene in his Gospel in which Jesus speaks directly. Quite apart from the miracle of John’s Prologue, which speaks to us from the eternal heights of heaven, as it were, and which we will hear at Christmas, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, this is the first scene in which Jesus comes out of the background and into the foreground of the Scriptures. But has he been in the foreground of our lives in this past year of grace?

The prophetic finger of John the Baptist points to Jesus directly. “Behold the Lamb of God,” he says, twice actually. The first time is just before our gospel reading here. It is followed by the Baptist’s profound reflection upon the meaning of the one whom he sees and whom he has pointed out. He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” something we hear and pray repeatedly in our liturgy. The second time is followed by Jesus stepping out into the centre which he is and around which everything turns. John points him out to us again with the words: “Behold the Lamb of God.” In some sense the ministry of John the Baptist is already fulfilled even as it seems it has only begun. As he says in a related passage, Christ “must increase but I must decrease”(Jn.3.30) He gives place to him who is “the Alpha and the Omega” of our lives and who must have his increase in us.

The witness of John the Baptist is all the more remarkable because it points to the Revelation of God in our very midst. As he says, “I myself did not know him; but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel”(Jn.1.31). And again, “I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit” (Jn.1.33).

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“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

They are, perhaps, familiar words. They adorn many an empty tomb, a cenotaph, around which we gather on Remembrance Day just past. But what do we remember and how?

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation to holiness. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our political and social freedoms .

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

We remind ourselves of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. But if, and ‘if’ is the big, little word here, if we can remember in a spirit of forgiveness, so much the better. For then our remembering will be joined all the more surely to God’s forgiving remembrance of all our follies, all our sufferings and all our griefs. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world, a remembering that enters in to all we do in our liturgy.

What we are remembering are the sacrifices for the rational freedoms of our political and social life, to be sure. But what underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns thousands of cenotaphs throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

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“Rejoice with me”

Repentance leads to joy. There is something powerful in that idea. It is splendidly illustrated for us in the second lesson this morning in the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

Repentance is redire ad principium, a kind of circling back to the truth from which we have turned. The idea of turning back to the truth in the awareness of the ways in which we so easily turn away from it, is one of the recurring lessons of the Scriptures. It is an important part of the good news, the good news that results in rejoicing actually.

Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Jesu Ben Sirach, is one of the Books of the Apocrypha. It belongs to an ancient tradition of “wisdom literature” and, indeed, offers many a profound instruction on moral and spiritual ideas. In this morning’s first lesson, we are reminded about the destructive effects of anger and wrath. They are “abominations.” They are possessed by the sinful man and woman and they possess us. The desire for vengeance arises from anger and wrath and is set in explicit opposition to the idea and concept of forgiveness and healing. Ecclesiasticus would recall us to the commandments of God, to their positive force for the good that redeems us from our rage to lash out and destroy.

These are profound lessons and show something of the wisdom of the wisdom literature and how important a place they have in the reading and thinking life of the Church. In many ways, the Books of the Apocrypha, books written between the time of the writing down of the Old Testament and the emergence of the New Testament, anticipate some of the central themes of the Christian Gospel, especially in terms of moral instruction. In this case, the themes of forgiveness and joy are juxtaposed with the destructive forces of anger and wrath.

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