Christ Church

“I have compassion on the multitude”

Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, we are gathered into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God and as standing upon the truth of God revealed in Christ Jesus. What are these organic images? They are the images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving. They follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray, too, that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks to us about the sacrament of Holy Communion: there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things,” through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” we are to live from that Word. It is a wonderful illustration of what Augustine calls the gemina sacramenta, the twin sacraments of the Church, baptism and communion which go together, an understanding that I fear we often forget.

This morning we have a wonderful practical illustration of these ideas in the Baptism of Alice Yvonne Profit. She is literally grated into the life of God through Baptism; She has a radical new beginning, a spiritual beginning that speaks to the dignity and truth of our humanity and its freedom. What begins in her incorporation into the life and death of Jesus Christ has its continuance in the life of prayer and praise, of Word and Sacrament.

“Graft in our hearts the love of thy name” suggests that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship with God as Trinity which has its continuing in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. Paul’s Epistle reading from Romans follows immediately upon last week’ reading from Romans about baptism as our being “baptized into Jesus Christ,” “baptized into his death,” and “buried with him by baptism into death,” but so as to be raised up in him that “we should walk in newness of life.” For being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” The Gospel today also complements the Gospel from last Sunday about loving our enemies. Such is the radical love of God which defines us. Here that love is shown in another register: Christ’s compassion upon the multitude in the wilderness, his compassion upon our awareness of our own emptiness and incompleteness. All these images speak to the meaning of baptism as “that which by nature [Alice and all of us] cannot have.” This challenges the tendency of our age to reduce things to ourselves, to our own projects and fantasies rather than to learn what God wants us to know.

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“Love your enemies”

How utterly improbable, how utterly impossible, and how completely nuts! But who says this? Jesus says it. Maybe, just maybe that makes us pause but maybe not. Yet this powerful moral imperative is based upon a profound theological truth. It signals what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility. This brings us face to face with the radical and awesome truth of the Gospel: as “baptized into Jesus Christ,” we were “baptized into his death”; as “buried with him by baptism into death,” so too we are raised up from the dead to “walk in newness of life,” being “also in the likeness of his resurrection.” That “newness of life” radically changes how we see ourselves and one another. We are no longer to be defined by the things that belong to division and animosity and, ultimately, death. Our life is both hidden and manifest in Christ.

How can we be commanded to do what we ourselves cannot do? Because God makes possible what is humanly impossible. In the commandment to “love your enemies” we see the real force and character of love; its truth and its reason. It is the radical overcoming of sin and evil through the reconciling power of Christ. This should shake us out of the soft sentimentalities and hard meannesses of our inconstant and divided hearts. We are shaken into a strong desire for the love of God, on the one hand, and into the conditions of its accomplishment, on the other hand. “Pour into our hearts such love toward thee,” we pray in the Collect, while acknowledging that “God has prepared such good things as pass [our] understanding,” and that his “promises exceed all that we can desire.” Obviously this is not just what we think we want but somehow a greater good which God seeks for us above and beyond us and yet belonging to the deeper truth and yearning of our souls for God himself.

The radical, uncompromising, and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what is beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more” so “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as the Epistle teaches. What is commanded by God for man is accomplished in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realised in us by the quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptised into Jesus Christ were baptised into his death?”, that being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

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