Christmas Eve
December 24, 2022
 
And we beheld His glory, as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of Grace and truth.
(St. John i. 14)
 
         In Holy Advent you and I have been endeavoring to prepare our hearts and souls for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ on Christmas night. But in order to truly welcome Him, we must beware of missing His coming Life which St. John tells us is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. (Ibid, 9). Tonight, we shall learn that He shall be hidden from us if we continue to live in the darkness of the spiritual night. So on this night we must endeavor to be illuminated and enlightened by Christ the coming Light of God the Father. On this night we must endeavor to embrace the Holy Spirit of this Light, that this Life may not merely irradiate our minds with God’s truth but may enkindle the fire of His Love in our hearts, so that Christ the coming Light may be made flesh in us.  
         But first to the darkness. St. John is one who has heard the call of Jesus in his fellow Apostle Paul: The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. (Rom. xiii. 12) What Christ has told him in darkness, he must now speak in the light. (St. Matt. x. 27) For the people who sat in darkness have seen a great Light, and to them that sat in the region and shadow of death, upon them hath the Light sprung up. (St. Matt. iv. 16) St. John knows that the Light of God has shone into the darkness of man’s fallen world. He knows also that if Christ is to give Light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide their feet into the way of peace (St. Luke i. 79) the Light must shine from the heart of God into his own. He sees that those who follow Christ shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of Life. (St. John viii. 12)
         So, St. John reminds us that we are called out of darkness into Christ’s marvelous Light. (1 St. Peter ii. 9) To grasp this vocation, to heed this call, he will take us through the stage of spiritual conception in the first bright beams of the Light to fertility and maturity as the Life and Love of the same Light perfect our lives. But to begin to be touched by the Light, our minds must move out of primordial darkness to the space and place that is before all beginnings, into the source and origin of all that comes to be and passes away. St. John draws our minds up and into what is beyond and before all things. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Same was in the beginning with God. (St. John i. 1) Before the possibility of any birth, old or new, earthly or heavenly, there is the Father, His Word, and the Spirit, one God who exists forever and without any change. With John we are invited to come out of the spiritual darkness to see God’s Word, Christ the Light, whom the Spirit of Love begets eternally from the Father. Before we are spiritually born again, we must see that Christ the Son of God comes from the Father before all beginnings.
But as soon as our minds come into this Light, we begin to see that this is the Life who longs with everlasting Love to make all things other than Himself. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was Life; and the Life was the Light of men. And the Light shineth in darkness; and the darkness overcame it not. (Ibid, 3-5) The Father’s Eternal Word is the Life that not only enlivens and quickens all of creation but gives Light or lends meaning to all that He has made. He with His Word commanded all to be/ and all obeyed Him, for that Word was He! (Davideis: Cowley) This Light shines in the darkness and so calls us forward into the new birth of a knowledge that sees all meaning and purpose as coming from God and made to be returned to Him also. John knows that the minds of the wise are lucid by reason of a participation in that Divine Light and Wisdom. So by the lack of it they are darkness. (T.A. Comm. John, 1)
         Yet there is more to this Living Light of Love. This is that true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew him not. He came unto His own and His own received Him not. (Ibid, 9-11) The Light intends not only to be known but to be embraced as the brightness of God’s Glory, the express Image of His Person. (Hebr. i. 3) The Word of God, Christ the Light, has never ceased to desire and long for His people. In His Light, we come to see his meaning and purpose for us. In His Light, we come also to see our failure to receive His Love and cradle it in our hearts. The world knew Him not...His own received Him not. (Idem) In His Light we see that while we were made to partake of His Life and to receive His Love, our sin forever frustrates His will. This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. (St. John iii. 19) In the Light of His Life, God is Love. In the darkness of sin’s death, we reject it. We have become wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. (2 Peter ii. 17) Still, with John we realize that God has never ceased to desire man’s new birth and new life in the Light of His Love.
         The birth of John’s new knowledge generates within him a deeper gratitude for the longing and yearning that is forever being reborn from this Life. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (Ibid, 12, 13) He writes with earnest hope: A new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in Him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true Light now shineth. (1 John ii. 8) In this Light, John sees that for the invisible, incomprehensible, and inconceivable Word of God to be born, man must welcome His Life and Love from the depth of the human heart with faith. For John sees that we cannot do it from passions born from the desires of the flesh, nor even from the will of man’s human heart. The generation of the sons of God will not be carnal but spiritual, because they are born of God. (T.A., idem) John understands that he is born again by the Grace of God alone. So, in the everlastingly-begotten Light of God’s Love, he realizes the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.( Ibid, 14) The reason that compels his conclusion is that we beheld His glory, as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of Grace and Truth. (Idem) John looks back over a very long life and kno nws that the Jesus who first loved us and to whose Love John makes a good return is the same Christ who has been made flesh and dwelt among us. (Idem) John sees too that the same Life whose Light has imparted nothing but God’s Love to him is the same Word of God who, in the flesh, has redeemed our flesh and shall enliven our souls once again.
         John reveals to us his experience of Jesus Christ. This experience endured throughout the earthly life of his Master, the Messiah. This experience persevered through the Lord’s Ascent back to the Father and into Pentecostal rapture and transformation. What John experienced was the Glory of God in Jesus Christ. What John experienced were signs and evidences that this Jesus was not merely another well-intentioned human prophet. Rather, in Jesus he found the wellspring of eternally-begotten new birth that was being imparted to all men as the trigger and catalyst of the Love that would return all men to God. He found in Jesus the desire to share new birth and new life. He found in Jesus one who would make all things new through redemptive passion that would save the whole world. In Jesus, John discovered that the desire to create and redeem are but two names for that one uninterrupted eternal Love of God through which He returns all men to Himself.
         John traces the Light -the Glory of God, from Jesus’ earthly existence back to Heavenly Love.  Through the innocent suffering and death of Jesus who made Atonement for man’s sins in His Crucifixion, in the new Life that His Resurrection and Glorious Ascension establish, and in the coming down of Love again to be born again in the hearts and souls of His newfound friends, John sees nothing but God’s the Light of God’s Glory. He writes:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life…that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.   
 
The joy he shares with us is in the birth of His Eternal Life and Love because God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all. (1 St. John i. 5) The joy he shares with us, under the light of the North Star, is the birth of the babe of Bethlehem. The joy he shares with us is born of Virgin in a place of little to no significance, in poverty and unknown to most men. In awesome wonder, then, on this Christmas night, with St. John and the poet, let us sing of this Light that even now intends to be born in our hearts as new Life and Love as He was born for us in Bethlehem.
Welcome to our Wondering Sight,
         Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in Winter, Day in Night!
Heaven in earth! And God in man!
Great little one, whose glorious birth,
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth!
                           (R. Crashaw)’
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 

Hear now this in the House of Jacob, and publish it in Judah, saying, 
Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; 
which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not;
fear ye not me? Saith the Lord….
(Jeremiah v. 20-22)
 
      
There is a truth about life nowadays that seems to escape most people. For whatever reasons and due to whatever causes, people these days seem to live on the surface of existence. Perhaps they are pursuing their carnal appetites; what matters most to them is the fulfillment that comes by way of eating, drinking, and sex. Perhaps they are feverishly pursuing mammon; the acquisition, retention, and multiplication of earthly riches consume them habitually. Perhaps they are determined to perpetuate earthly existence and so spend their every waking moment trying to find the fountain of youth; they are obsessed with dieting, eating just the right foods, and drinking just the right drinks. They fear death. Or perhaps earthly life is just so unbearable that they are caught in the grips of one addiction or the other that deludes them into thinking that they are embracing a solution rather than exacerbating a problem. Whatever the false god people are worshiping, and it is probably a combination of more than one, post-modern man does seem to be in a very precarious and dangerous spiritual place. Jeremiah describes them in today’s first lesson: They are without understanding; which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not (Idem), and who do not in any way fear the Lord. These people have forgotten that they have souls, have failed to discover the meaning of human nature, and thus have never pursued the highest form of spiritual perfection.
      
Of course, the problem of the soul is as old as creation. Not only ancient Jewish but also ancient Pagan civilizations were busy with the discovery of the soul’s existence and meaning. For them, this was an exercise in self-examination because the desire to know about the nature of the soul is a pursuit only found among those who have reason. We take our reason for granted and we abuse it. To a greater or lesser extent, even carnally-minded men who are compulsively gorging, drinking, texting, or trading are using their minds to pursue an end. The glutton uses his mind to overindulge his body in eating. The alcoholic uses his mind to drown his fears and sorrows in drink. The text-addict thinks for just long enough to blather on into his cell phone.
      
So it would seem that not a small percentage of human beings have forgotten about the existence and purpose of the soul. They refuse to use their minds to stop, contemplate, and judge what they are doing with their lives. They deliberate poorly and so their choices are poorly made. Many of them, these days, haven’t ever heard of the great ancient pagans, like Socrates who taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Apol. 38a) He believed that rational creatures ought to search for the ideas and first principles that move the universe. Only then could man use his reason to discover the permanent things or the unchanging forms that can perfect human nature and carry us up and above the brute beasts without understanding. Socrates knew that man’s perfection does not consist in the pursuit of animal appetites and passions. Man is created to examine the universe, find its truth, and to apply its goodness to the soul. For Socrates, man is made to move from sense perception to imagination and then from imagination to intellect in a journey of discovering the truth. Socrates is sure that there is a transcendental truth whose goodness has meaning for human existence. Man has the capacity to see and understand what promises to ennoble and purify his soul. The good that man is made to come to know is the cause of all life but is also the source of his true happiness and joy.
      
Socrates’ philosophical method was on the way back to God. So too was Jeremiah’s. What both exhort us to pursue is the kind of thinking that searches beneath the surface of reality to discover the Divine truth. This thinking begins in inquisitive wonder rather than in making. Socrates starting point in the quest after knowledge begins with the words, I know that I know nothing. (Apol. 21d) Jeremiah is brought to a parallel sense of futility and impotence in the presence of the living God. Do you not fear me? says the Lord; Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the bound for the sea, a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail, though they roar, they cannot pass over it. (Jer. v. 22) If we think that we create and make reality, we are sadly mistaken. At most, we perpetuate it. Even our scientific inquiries create nothing; they investigate and discover what is already there. Do we think that if we hadn't found it, it never would have been found?  Foolish man. Creation is made so that truth can be found in it. Don’t we realize that God rules and governs the universe? Cannot we see with the soul’s eye that the rules and principles that nature obeys have nothing to do with us? Creation is made, moved, and defined not by us but by a transcendental logic which every creature depends on in order both to live and to live well. The whole of the universe is packed full of God’s thinking of it. This is what we are made to discover! A denial of this truth is idiotic. We neither create nor perpetuate our own thinking. We use our souls without any thought of where our thinking comes from. God patiently awaits not only our discovery of our souls but also His plan and purpose for them. 
      
Socrates and Jeremiah knew that God is waiting for us to find Him. He intends that we should come to our senses as we learn to acknowledge humbly that we know nothing and that we are neither the creators nor definers of the world or ourselves. That we have souls should be evident in the very fact that we are thinking. That our souls persist beyond death can be seen in this morning’s Gospel. The young son of a widowed mother is dead in body. His decomposing corpse is being borne from the walls of Nain to its burial ground. His soul lives on. Christ addresses the living soul that no longer inhabits the body. Christ intends that his body should be brought back to life in order to house his soul for its extended spiritual journey. Why? Jesus wants us to see that bodily existence has no meaning and definition without the soul. If man were merely a soul or merely a body, Christ would not have bothered to reconcile the two. But Christ shows us today that He intends to give life to the embodied soul forever. The real proof for God’s existence and governance of the universe is found in the soul’s being and knowing. Christ addresses the dead man’s soul. The soul lives on and is called to account by Jesus. This is a portent of what every soul will do on Judgment Day when it will give an account of the quality of life it has lived. The real evidence for God’s power and promise is found in the soul that knows Christ and obeys His call.
      
This is the kind of soul that Jesus finds in the Widow of Nain. Her soul is so present to her because it is filled with anguish and sadness. The pain and heartache of losing her only son consume her soul. She is not running away from reality or attempting to deny the truth. She is overwhelmed by it. She is precisely where Jesus wants to find all of us. Because of her spiritual sensitivity, she is ripe for Christ’s visitation. She has no words, pleas, supplications, or demands for Him. She weeps silently because words cannot conquer creation’s cruelty. She knows the futility and vanity of human wishes. She is Rachel weeping for her children who are no more…. (Jer. xxxi. 15) She is a figure of the Blessed Virgin who will mourn the loss of her only Son, Jesus Christ. She is the figure of Mother Church who weeps until her wayward children are found by Christ. Her mourning is sincere and pure because her soul has found the truth of all things. She will become the fulfillment of the Beatitude: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. (St. Matthew v. 4) 
      
The Widow of Nain’s soul is open to the Lord. Jesus commands her to Weep not. (Ibid, 13) She obeys, for in knowing herself she knows her Maker and Redeemer. The passion of her heart is wholly vulnerable to the Lord’s healing touch. Jesus came and touched the bier: and they that bare the dead man stood still. (Ibid, 14) Her soul, along with those of the mourners, must be still, dead with the young man, so that Christ might breathe new life into all. God’s compassion in Christ will bring life out of death, good out of evil, and hope out of despair. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. (Ibid, 15) What did he say? We do not know. It is not important. That he speaks at all is a sign that his soul inhabits a body quickened by Christ once again. All are filled with awe and wonder. The wonder that has wrought new life in the dead man now rejuvenates his mother and her fellow mourners. The miracle is contagious.
        
Today we are called to remember that whatever the state of our souls, we must acknowledge not only that we have them but that they depend wholly and completely on Jesus Christ’s love for lasting meaning that leads to salvation. With the Apostle Paul, we must come to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge. (Eph. iii. 16-19) This is the greater miracle of new life that Jesus Christ bestows upon our souls through His everlasting love. The young man in today’s Gospel is an illustration of the body that needs to be brought alive once again. His mother ought to stir us into mourning over it. Only when the soul of the one and the body of the other are brought back together by the love of Jesus Christ can we have any hope of salvation. Only when Socrates’ learned ignorance, I know that I know nothing, and Jeremiah’s fear of the Lord are present can we be made ripe for the visitation of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin

 O God who hast prepared for them that love Thee
such good things as pass man’s understanding…
(Collect: Trinity VI)
 
          We have said that the Trinity tide is all about fertility and growth; it is the green season, and in it we focus on God’s spiritual harvesting of virtue in our souls. The green vestments and Altar hangings of this season draw our minds from things earthly to things heavenly, from the green crops and plants of the fields that surround us physically to the idea and image of spiritual produce and yield in our souls. Thus, we are to be moved and inspired to grow the fruits of God’s seed, His Word, in our hearts. And, yet the end of our spiritual endeavors relates specifically to certain Divine promises - such good things as pass man’s understanding, as our Collect reminds us of this morning. The Collect tells us that we love God above all things, (Idem) that we may obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can desire. We shall be blessed with God’s good things permanently only if we love God above and beyond all creatures. Thus, God’s eternal reward is given to who love His Grace.
          
But loving God is a virtue that is not easily attained. Last week St. Peter and his fellow Apostles, having obeyed Jesus by letting down their nets for a draught of fishes and finding themselves the beneficiaries of supernatural power and might, surrendered themselves to the radical otherness of God in Jesus. With a deeper fear of the Lord, their faith and confidence in Jesus were made more sure as they forsook all and followed Him. (St. Luke v. 11) They were being caught up in Christ’s net, and so slowly but surely, they began to die to themselves and come alive to Jesus Christ. The Divine Virtue began to be felt in the presence of God’s Holy One. If we are going to discover how to love God above all things, we had better begin with the fear of the Lord and God’s power in Jesus Christ.
But there is more. Christ says to us today that except [our] righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, [we] shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (St. Matthew v. 20) He intends that our faith and confidence in His power should be converted into righteousness. Righteousness of the ancient Jews – of the Scribes and Pharisees – was the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The religious world that Jesus found when He came down from Heaven was one defined by the strict Law of Moses and the Fathers. Its rites were administered by the scribes and pharisees, who were called to make men right with God through the Law. Every evil deed had its onerous form of penance. And in it was much that was correct.

But Jesus found something lacking. Romano Guardini reminds us, so long as we cling to [human] justice, we will never be guiltless of injustice. As long as we are entangled in wrong and revenge, blow and counterblow, aggression and defense, we will be constantly drawn into fresh wrong. (The Lord, p. 81) Ancient Jewish Law was obsessed with sin and its punishment, with finding it and punishing it in a way that could only reveal the loss of its original spirit. The Temple’s ministers, the Scribes and Pharisees, had become possessed by evil and unrighteousness. Thus, the Jewish System, as it had developed, had lost its way as the righteous had become even more judgmentally consumed not with sin but with the unrighteous or sinners. Fallen man is always in danger of confusing the two. Needless to say, the system was so powerful that publicans and sinners in Jesus’ day had come to despair of any real hope for redemption from those whose judgment precluded any love or forgiveness.

But Jesus came into the world to remind us that the cycle of unrighteousness and sin can be broken only through the spirit of love and the forgiveness of sins. So, He proceeds to teach his listeners about the problem with the spiritual character of the scribes and pharisees and, for that matter, of any religious man whose notion of righteousness is bound up with imposing a Law that is robbed of any love.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: (Ibid, 21)
 
Jesus surmises that Religious folk are prone to anger against sinners when they have no just cause. True enough, we all must love righteousness, and we must hate unrighteousness and sin. But to be angry with sinners just because they are sinners isn’t just cause for our anger against them. We might just as well be angry with ourselves since we, with them, are caught in the horrible grip of sin! Of course, there might be rare times when there is just cause for righteous indignation or anger. But the rarer that is for us, the better, since we all are sinners. Jesus comes into the world to teach us to hate the sin and love the sinner. And this was clearly lost on the scribes and pharisees. Our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and pharisees. (Idem)

Jesus goes on to reinforce his point. Whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of the judgment…. (Ibid, 22) Judging sinners in our hearts with anger, without cause, reason, or moderation that desires their salvation and betterment by God’s mercy and forgiveness will judge us by the Father’s Love. Our hearts must desire God’s righteousness for all men. Next Jesus says that Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council….(Ibid, 22) Allowing our anger to explode into tongue-murder, as Matthew Henry puts it, demeaning other man as worthless will measure our every word according to the council of God’s Wisdom and Word. Raca means thou empty or worthless man! Jesus concludes by saying but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. (Idem) When our anger condemns a man as a fool, we have despaired of God’s Power and grieve the Holy Ghost. And it all proceeds, again, with angrily judging other men without cause. St. Augustine says this means that we are angry at the brother and not the cause (Retr. i. 19). Thus, Jesus reveals that it is not the sin but the sinner who has become the object of our unrighteous anger.
        
Jesus teaches us that the real threat to loving [God] above all things is internal and spiritual. Anger or wrath threatens to damn us all. Its loveless judgment, its malicious council, and its Hellish despair should terrify us all. Anger or wrath kills the soul inwardly and spiritually. When one is angry at sinners, one ceases to identify with all other men. When one is angry at sinners and not with sin, the path to righteousness has been completely abandoned. When one is angry at sinners, one forgets oneself. Jesus insists that we be reconciled with [our offending] brother… [and] agree with our adversary quickly… lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. (Ibid, 24,25) Enslavement to anger and judgment might hold us forever in the prison-house of Hell because we have forgotten that the sin that we find so quickly in others is sin that we know in ourselves but fail to confess.
        
The angry pursuit of earthly justice threatens every religious man. It corrupts his soul with an undue sense of superiority and hubris. The proud man forgets that he needs those good things as pass man’s understanding… and the promises that exceed all that we can desire. In sum, what is lost is the consciousness that we all need the forgiveness of sins that Jesus Christ brings. This forgiveness of sins passes man’s understanding because it is unnatural to our fallen condition, and its effects yield promises that exceed all that we can desire. Christ’s righteousness is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins alone overcomes God’s anger and wrath against our sins and makes us right with Him. Loving God above all things is in peril because we fail to allow the forgiveness of our sins in Jesus Christ to then become so alive in us that it crucifies our anger, judgment, and unforgiveness of all others.
        
Our anger, wrath, and unforgiveness of others must be conquered by what Jesus Christ has done to overcome God’s wrath against our sin. St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle asks us, Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. (Romans vi. 3-7) When we begin to remember what God in Jesus Christ has done to reveal God’s Anger against sin as His Love for our salvation, we cannot help but die in Him to be freed from our sin. The anger that we have reserved for all others will die. Our old man will be crucified with Christ and come alive to righteousness in His forgiveness of our sins. We shall discover that the only form of anger and judgment suitable for our spiritual journey is what we direct against ourselves as we persistently seek to conquer our propensity for anger, judgment, and unforgiveness. 
        
Christ tells us to agree with our adversary quickly. (Idem) St. Augustine teaches us that in doing so we are really seeking to be reconciled with the Image and Likeness of God in our neighbor. (Idem) What we ought to love in all men is Christ’s Righteousness waiting to be brought alive by our faith in His Grace. No one except for the Devil should ever be our enemy. For God, in Jesus Christ, wants us, through faithful prayer, loving forgiveness, and hopeful aspirations to imagine such good things as pass man’s understanding. Loving Him above all things we pray that we might obtain His promises which shall exceed all that can desire. And this desire must for our miraculous incorporation into the new life of Jesus Christ that makes enemies friends and all of us heirs together of His eternal promises because our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees (Idem).    
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 










O God who hast prepared for them that love Thee
such good things as pass man’s understanding…
(Collect: Trinity VI)
 
          
We have said that the Trinity tide is all about fertility and growth; it is the green season, and in it we focus on God’s spiritual harvesting of virtue in our souls. The green vestments and Altar hangings of this season draw our minds from things earthly to things heavenly, from the green crops and plants of the fields that surround us physically to the idea and image of spiritual produce and yield in our souls. Thus, we are to be moved and inspired to grow the fruits of God’s seed, His Word, in our hearts. And, yet the end of our spiritual endeavors relates specifically to certain Divine promises - such good things as pass man’s understanding, as our Collect reminds us of this morning. The Collect tells us that we love God above all things, (Idem) that we may obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can desire. We shall be blessed with God’s good things permanently only if we love God above and beyond all creatures. Thus, God’s eternal reward is given to who love His Grace.
          
But loving God is a virtue that is not easily attained. Last week St. Peter and his fellow Apostles, having obeyed Jesus by letting down their nets for a draught of fishes and finding themselves the beneficiaries of supernatural power and might, surrendered themselves to the radical otherness of God in Jesus. With a deeper fear of the Lord, their faith and confidence in Jesus were made more sure as they forsook all and followed Him. (St. Luke v. 11) They were being caught up in Christ’s net, and so slowly but surely, they began to die to themselves and come alive to Jesus Christ. The Divine Virtue began to be felt in the presence of God’s Holy One. If we are going to discover how to love God above all things, we had better begin with the fear of the Lord and God’s power in Jesus Christ.
But there is more. Christ says to us today that except [our] righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, [we] shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (St. Matthew v. 20) He intends that our faith and confidence in His power should be converted into righteousness. Righteousness of the ancient Jews – of the Scribes and Pharisees – was the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The religious world that Jesus found when He came down from Heaven was one defined by the strict Law of Moses and the Fathers. Its rites were administered by the scribes and pharisees, who were called to make men right with God through the Law. Every evil deed had its onerous form of penance. And in it was much that was correct.

But Jesus found something lacking. Romano Guardini reminds us, so long as we cling to [human] justice, we will never be guiltless of injustice. As long as we are entangled in wrong and revenge, blow and counterblow, aggression and defense, we will be constantly drawn into fresh wrong. (The Lord, p. 81) Ancient Jewish Law was obsessed with sin and its punishment, with finding it and punishing it in a way that could only reveal the loss of its original spirit. The Temple’s ministers, the Scribes and Pharisees, had become possessed by evil and unrighteousness. Thus, the Jewish System, as it had developed, had lost its way as the righteous had become even more judgmentally consumed not with sin but with the unrighteous or sinners. Fallen man is always in danger of confusing the two. Needless to say, the system was so powerful that publicans and sinners in Jesus’ day had come to despair of any real hope for redemption from those whose judgment precluded any love or forgiveness.

But Jesus came into the world to remind us that the cycle of unrighteousness and sin can be broken only through the spirit of love and the forgiveness of sins. So, He proceeds to teach his listeners about the problem with the spiritual character of the scribes and pharisees and, for that matter, of any religious man whose notion of righteousness is bound up with imposing a Law that is robbed of any love.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: (Ibid, 21)
 
Jesus surmises that Religious folk are prone to anger against sinners when they have no just cause. True enough, we all must love righteousness, and we must hate unrighteousness and sin. But to be angry with sinners just because they are sinners isn’t just cause for our anger against them. We might just as well be angry with ourselves since we, with them, are caught in the horrible grip of sin! Of course, there might be rare times when there is just cause for righteous indignation or anger. But the rarer that is for us, the better, since we all are sinners. Jesus comes into the world to teach us to hate the sin and love the sinner. And this was clearly lost on the scribes and pharisees. Our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and pharisees. (Idem)

Jesus goes on to reinforce his point. Whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of the judgment…. (Ibid, 22) Judging sinners in our hearts with anger, without cause, reason, or moderation that desires their salvation and betterment by God’s mercy and forgiveness will judge us by the Father’s Love. Our hearts must desire God’s righteousness for all men. Next Jesus says that Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council….(Ibid, 22) Allowing our anger to explode into tongue-murder, as Matthew Henry puts it, demeaning other man as worthless will measure our every word according to the council of God’s Wisdom and Word. Raca means thou empty or worthless man! Jesus concludes by saying but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. (Idem) When our anger condemns a man as a fool, we have despaired of God’s Power and grieve the Holy Ghost. And it all proceeds, again, with angrily judging other men without cause. St. Augustine says this means that we are angry at the brother and not the cause (Retr. i. 19). Thus, Jesus reveals that it is not the sin but the sinner who has become the object of our unrighteous anger.
        
Jesus teaches us that the real threat to loving [God] above all things is internal and spiritual. Anger or wrath threatens to damn us all. Its loveless judgment, its malicious council, and its Hellish despair should terrify us all. Anger or wrath kills the soul inwardly and spiritually. When one is angry at sinners, one ceases to identify with all other men. When one is angry at sinners and not with sin, the path to righteousness has been completely abandoned. When one is angry at sinners, one forgets oneself. Jesus insists that we be reconciled with [our offending] brother… [and] agree with our adversary quickly… lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. (Ibid, 24,25) Enslavement to anger and judgment might hold us forever in the prison-house of Hell because we have forgotten that the sin that we find so quickly in others is sin that we know in ourselves but fail to confess.
        
The angry pursuit of earthly justice threatens every religious man. It corrupts his soul with an undue sense of superiority and hubris. The proud man forgets that he needs those good things as pass man’s understanding… and the promises that exceed all that we can desire. In sum, what is lost is the consciousness that we all need the forgiveness of sins that Jesus Christ brings. This forgiveness of sins passes man’s understanding because it is unnatural to our fallen condition, and its effects yield promises that exceed all that we can desire. Christ’s righteousness is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins alone overcomes God’s anger and wrath against our sins and makes us right with Him. Loving God above all things is in peril because we fail to allow the forgiveness of our sins in Jesus Christ to then become so alive in us that it crucifies our anger, judgment, and unforgiveness of all others.
        
Our anger, wrath, and unforgiveness of others must be conquered by what Jesus Christ has done to overcome God’s wrath against our sin. St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle asks us, Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. (Romans vi. 3-7) When we begin to remember what God in Jesus Christ has done to reveal God’s Anger against sin as His Love for our salvation, we cannot help but die in Him to be freed from our sin. The anger that we have reserved for all others will die. Our old man will be crucified with Christ and come alive to righteousness in His forgiveness of our sins. We shall discover that the only form of anger and judgment suitable for our spiritual journey is what we direct against ourselves as we persistently seek to conquer our propensity for anger, judgment, and unforgiveness. 
        
Christ tells us to agree with our adversary quickly. (Idem) St. Augustine teaches us that in doing so we are really seeking to be reconciled with the Image and Likeness of God in our neighbor. (Idem) What we ought to love in all men is Christ’s Righteousness waiting to be brought alive by our faith in His Grace. No one except for the Devil should ever be our enemy. For God, in Jesus Christ, wants us, through faithful prayer, loving forgiveness, and hopeful aspirations to imagine such good things as pass man’s understanding. Loving Him above all things we pray that we might obtain His promises which shall exceed all that can desire. And this desire must for our miraculous incorporation into the new life of Jesus Christ that makes enemies friends and all of us heirs together of His eternal promises because our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees (Idem).    

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
 


Fisher of mortal men, them that the saved be,
Ever the holy fish caught up from the depths of the sea,
Out of the world’s tumultuous sea of sin
Enticed into thine embrace, forever to be held therein .
(Clement of Alexandria)
 
        
Post-modern man seems wholly afraid of being caught –caught in an embarrassing situation, caught off guard, caught red-handed, caught asleep at the wheel, or caught out as incompetent. The fear is caused by an absence of spiritual integrity that reacts angrily to a world whose expectations he has been denied but are still being asserted by his neighbors. The post-modern fearful man has told us all that we ought not to have any hope for betterment since we are all genetically pre-determined to be less than mediocre. We are meant to congratulate such a man on his genius as if he had discovered something profound. He is Big Brother and we are all the incurably ignorant plebian masses. When other people’s natural instinct for certain norms of law and order react to his imbecility, they are met with the juvenile gibes of derogatory derision. For the adolescent, judgment moves in one direction –away from the self and onto others.

Fortunately for us, today’s Gospel turns us around and encourages us to move in a better direction, to be self-consciously caught out in our sinful condition so that we might be caught up and into the net of Jesus Christ. For whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth; And scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. (Hebr. xii. 6) Prior to today’s reading, St. Luke tells us that Jesus had been healing those who were sick with divers diseases. (St. Luke iv. 40) Exhausted, He then went into a desert place (Ibid, 42) to pray, only to be interrupted by the multitude who would have kept Him from leaving them because they were caught up with His miracles. He said, ‘I must preach the Kingdom of God to other cities also’. But they nevertheless followed Him. Today we read that As the [same] multitude pressed upon Him to hear the Word of God, He stood by the lake of Genesaret, and saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets. (St. Luke v. 1) This crowd pursues Jesus pressing upon Him to hear the Word of God, that He is nearly driven to take refuge in the sea! The sinful world they inhabit can offer no peaceful refuge or shelter from their sin. And so with all zeal, alacrity, and dispatch, caught by the short hairs in the devil’s lair, they are determined to be caught up into the salvation that Jesus brings.

But the zeal and passion with which men press upon Jesus must be tempered and moderated. When we press upon Jesus overzealously or impetuously we run the risk of being caught up in passion and emotion. Zeal must be converted into spiritual love that yields sober detachment, needed to discover Christ apart from our passions. The crowd is quieted, Jesus is silent, the sea is still, and the only activity we discover comes from fishermen who were gone out of their boats and [were] washing their nets. (Ibid, 2) We ought to be caught up in the stillness of this event. These are men whose worldly success and failure depend upon the uncertain moving winds, stirring sea, and elusive fish.

These men are caught up anxiously over the seas of chance and fortune. Isaak Walton says, Blessings upon all who hate contention, and love quietness, and virtue, and angling. (The Compleat Angler) Angling is fishing, but with A. K. Best we must remember that often the fishing [is] good, but the catching [is] bad. And that, They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. (Ps. cvii. 23, 24) The rising and falling of the great deep aggravate the fisherman’s art of following and catching his prevaricating prey. Two motions blend to confuse and confound the fisherman’s science of the seas. Walton says that Angling may be said to be so like mathematics that it never can fully be learnt. (Idem) Driven by persistent curiosity and wonder, fishermen aim for a precision they never obtain.

So we read that Jesus entered into one of the ships, which was Simon’s, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land: and He sat down, and taught the people out of the ship. (Ibid, 3) Jesus doesn’t force Himself upon any man. Archbishop Trench reminds us that the work of the fisher is one of art and skill, not of force and violence. (Miracles, p. 106) So He prays or asks Peter to thrust out a little from the land so that spiritual men might be caught up into the net of His preaching. He has no pulpit, and thus, as Matthew Henry reminds us, must ask St. Peter for the loan of his fishing boat. (Comm: Luke V) The multitude –the hoi polloi, must learn of the distance and differentiation between their condition and that of the fishermen. The multitude on the shore had zeal aplenty, but
Peter and his fellow fishers –James and John, were humbled by another night of laborious failure.
Jesus commands Simon Peter: Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draft. (Ibid, 4) Simon responds, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing….(Ibid, 5) Peter confesses the impotence of the fishermen. Yet, they pressed on, washed their nets, and cleansed theirs boats hoping for a better return the next time round. Oddly enough, now Jesus takes them out in the clear light of day. He will take their craft and trade into the clear light of day. Peter is perplexed. We know that we are fishers, but is Christ a fisher also? Christ presses upon Peter. Peter presses upon Christ. Peter obeys humbly. Nevertheless, at thy Word, I will let down the net. (Idem) Peter the fisherman may doubt his profession’s precision, but he does not doubt his Lord. He and his fellow men have already been caught out and seized by the consciousness of their fallen condition. Now they are caught up and into the commands of their Christ. Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. (Ps. cxxvii.1) Peter’s hope for accomplishing anything on his own has been thrown overboard; but he knows that they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. (Is. xl. 30, 31)

And when they had this done, they enclosed a great multitude of fishes, and their net brake, and they beckoned to their partners in the other ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled both ships, so that they began to sink. (Ibid, 6,7) The word of Jesus is obeyed, and God can catch man up into a new life.

But what is the real miracle? Is it merely the miracle of the draught of fishes? The answer can be found in the response of St. Peter. As Isaac Williams explains, [St. Peter had] no thought of his own profit at such a supply, no sense of relief after having so long toiled in vain occurred to him, but all was lost in the feeling of God’s presence and of his own sinfulness. (I. W. ‘The Peaceable Ordering of the World.’) Peter falls down before Jesus and says, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ For he was astonished, and all that were with them, at the draught of fishes which they had taken. (Ibid, 8,9) Archbishop Trench writes, Peter, while drawing the multitude of fishes into his net, has himself fallen into the net of Christ, taking a prey, he has himself also been taken a prey, and now the same man as ever after, yielding as freely to the impulse of the moment…can no longer, in the deep feeling of his own unholiness, endure a Holy One so near. (Idem)  

St. Peter can do little by his own ingenuity and effort. Man’s craftsmanship and science can produce only unpredictable and impermanent gains in comparison of what God in Jesus Christ can do for us. There is a miracle of fishes. Jesus’ power is manifested. This is the first miracle. Next, the same power of God in Jesus Christ converts Saint Peter. He is drawn and caught up into Christ’s net. His heart sinks, as he discovers the Wisdom and Love that alone can draw the migrating soul back out of the tempestuous depths of human sin into the net of that love that can reconcile all men to God. Peter senses the loss of himself; he is drowned in the sea of spiritual death. This is the second miracle. Peter dies to himself. He is poor in spirit. Peter comes alive to Jesus Christ. Grace abounds. Father Mouroux reminds us that man must realize that [he] is dust and ashes before his God; however much he abounds, he is always a poverty-stricken thing hanging on the Divine Mercy, and however much he may be purified, he is still a sinner face to face with Holiness. (The Meaning of Man, p. 217) 

The fish which the men have caught are still alive –flailing, thrashing, and thwacking with all their might to return to their life in the sea. Peter falls down, surrenders himself, and begins to die in order to embrace Christ, the New Life. Jesus says, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men. (Ibid, 10) At the conclusion of our Gospel we then read that when the [Apostles] had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed Him. (Ibid, 11)

The Apostles were on their way to becoming fishers of men for Jesus. Their forsaking all is a spirit of self-abnegation. To be caught up in the net of Christ elicits spiritual death to oneself. If we would become Apostles of Christ, in ourselves the contradiction [must be] felt between the holy and the unholy, between God and us sinners. (Trench, 102) For then we shall become spiritual fish out of water, caught up into the net of Christ, so that other men might see that even our postmodern sea of tumultuous sin is not beyond the powerful craft of the Fisher of Men. So let us close by singing along with Mr. Walton, not only caught up by Christ into His net, but also pressing upon Jesus that we too might become fishers of men.

The first men that our Saviour Dear,
Did chuse to wait upon Him here,
Blest fishers were, and fish the last
Food was, that He on earth did taste.
I therefore strive to follow those,
Whom he to follow Him hath chose.
 
                           (The Compleat Angler, Modern Library, p. 112)
 
 
 
Amen.
 

 
If we obey God it is going to cost other people more than it costs us, and that
is where the sting comes in. If we are in love with our Lord, obedience does not cost
us anything, it is a delight, but it costs those who do not love Him a good deal.
Oswald Chambers ‘My Utmost for his Highest’, January 11.
 
Today’s quotation is taken from Oswald Chambers, an English Baptist minister who lived from 1874 until 1917. He died at the ripe young age of 43 when serving as a chaplain to the Royal Army in Egypt, died of appendicitis because he refused to take a bed that was intended, he was sure, for the wounded soldiers of the Battle of Gaza. Before he died, he left us with numerous works, including his famous My Utmost for His Highest. In it, amongst other gems, he reminds us that Christian Discipleship costs those who do not love [Christ] a great deal, and that this is where the pain begins. (Idem)
        
I have opened with these remarks because I believe that the dangers of false Discipleship are everywhere present in this morning’s Gospel lesson. In it, we read that Then drew near unto [Jesus] all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. (St. Luke xv. 1,2) On the one side, we find the publicans and sinners, and on the other the Pharisees and Scribes. So we have those who need what Jesus has to offer and against them the self-righteous religious Jews who judge Him for keeping company with them. Nestled in between the two groups are, as always, the Apostles who are called to glean the truth from what Jesus will have to say to the publicans and sinners. So Jesus, reading the censorious thoughts of the religious and pious Jewish Elders, offers two parables. What is interesting about the parables is that Jesus uses them to address all his listening audience. The teaching to be gleaned from them is to alert the Apostles and us to the dangers that threaten to ruin the religion of good people.

So, Jesus asks, What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. (Ibid, 4-6) An Australian scientific study done in 2012 concludes that sheep are selfish animals which congregate towards a safe center. (Flock and Awe…) When one errs and strays from the sheepfold, the shepherd must set out to find it. Sheep are not only selfish but stupid. They don’t realize when one of their own goes missing. And, presumably, they don’t care. Provided they are together and safe, they are happy enough. The lost sheep is missed only by the shepherd, who rejoices when he finds it.
Jesus teaches us the parable in order to point us to the character of spiritual shepherds and spiritual sheep. The Pharisees and Scribes, presumably well-positioned through moral education and application to be good shepherds, are more like selfishly safe and contented sheep. The limitations of their ministry are revealed throughout the life of Our Lord. Those who were called to be religious pastors and shepherds to bring the sinful into the righteousness of the Law have become a brood of vipers whose chief claim to fame is cherishing the limited moral purity they possess and protecting it against any threat of contamination through contact with publicans and sinners. As Archbishop Trench remarks, they had neither love to hope the recovery of such, nor yet antidotes to preserve themselves while making the attempt. (N.O.P’s. p.286) 

The publicans and sinners are clearly more like the lost sheep in need of a shepherd’s love and care. The shepherd returns home with the lost sheep while the ninety and nine remain in the sheepfold not noticing that anything has happened. Special care and more individual attention are afforded to the lost sheep. The lost sheep is a symbol of fallen man, knowing he is lost and needs to be found, or who knows that he needs a shepherd to rescue and save him. Jesus says, I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. (St. Luke, Ibid, 7) Clearly then, the parable that Jesus teaches rebukes the self-righteous Pharisees who think that they are good enough. A true Disciple of Christ will be more like the publicans and sinners, who need what Jesus Christ has to offer. And what He has to offer is something far greater than any limited moral human goodness that sets us apart not only from sin but also from sinners, whose company, we believe, only stands to corrupt us.
        
Jesus elaborates with another parable. Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it? And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost. (Ibid, 8,9) In Jesus’ day silver coins were stamped with the image of Caesar, much like our coins are stamped with the image of various past Presidents. The point is that the image of the king on the coin points to a greater value symbolized in the parable. Men are made in the image and likeness of God, and so the lost coin that the woman recovers in the second parable symbolizes God the Father’s most precious possession, His human children, whom He seeks to find and reconcile to Himself. He does so by the good shepherd, His own Son, Jesus Christ, whom He sends into the world to sweep the house [of the fallen creation], until [He] finds sin-sick souls. Again, as with the first parable, the woman rejoices when she finds what she has lost, and so there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. (Ibid, 10) The true Disciple of Christ realizes not only that he has erred and strayed from the right way of God but is sought out and found precisely because, despite his sin, He remains forever a precious treasure to God.
        
Of course, for the Pharisees and Scribes, the truth contained in Jesus’ parables fell on deaf ears. And this, not because they were wholly devoid and destitute of holiness and goodness. In so far as they followed the Law, they were obedient unto God. But the problem for them was that they did not realize that the Law of Moral Goodness can never save a man. Unfortunately, the Law inevitably divides publicans and sinners from good people. The Pharisees and Scribes were self-consciously better than others and remarkably unconscious of their need for a Saviour. What they could not see in the publicans and sinners was their own sin, that they were lost sheep or even a lost coin of great price. Thus, their pride prevented them from seeing that Jesus ate and drank with publicans and sinners precisely because the latter knew that they were lost sheep in need of a Good Shepherd who could find and save them forever.
        
When we discover ourselves to be publicans and sinners who have been lost and found by Jesus Christ, the Pharisees and Scribes of this world will lose us. No longer will they be able look down upon us with their treasure of contempt and ridicule. For, with St. Peter in this morning’s Epistle, we are becoming subject to our fellow men, clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble. (1 St. Peter v. 5) We are humbling [ourselves]…under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt [us] in due time. (Ibid, 6) The humility that allows us to be found by Jesus the Good Shepherd, reveals our utter dependence upon God’s healing Grace. We share the same dreadful disease of sin with publicans and sinners. St. Peter says, Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist steadfast in the faith, seeing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world. (Ibid, 8,9) The Christian Disciple must suffer the fact that like a stupid sheep, he will always be tempted to get lost. He suffers too as a potentially lost coin who forgets his value to God and the price that was paid to redeem that value, once for all, by Jesus on the Cross of Calvary. As true Disciples, we must confess that we are the chief, the chief, the greatest of sinners, who are spiritually lost and in need of a shepherd who calls not the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (St. Luke v. 30)
        
Our obedience to Jesus Christ is free and should become our delight. It will cost others a great deal. (Idem) They will lose the power they held over us and will persecute us. Our gain is greater. Let us fervently believe that we were once lost but now are in the process of being found by Jesus Christ. Let us remember that we are no better than our brethren that are in the world and that we are in danger of being much worse should we elevate ourselves above them by reason of our religion or piety. Our Heavenly Father will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim. ii. 4) Our righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees. (St. Matthew v. 20) The Good Shepherd or Saviour we need his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes [we] were healed. (1 Peter ii. 24) Salvation is free for us; it cost God the Father a great deal. Oswald Chambers asks the Christian this:
Who of us would dare to stand before God [on Judgment Day] and say, ‘My God, judge me as I have judged my fellow men’? We, [with the Pharisees and Scribes] judge our fellow men as sinners; if God should judge us like that, we should all end up in Hell. (Ibid, June 22) God resisteth the proud, and giveth Grace to the humble. (1 Peter v. 5)
 
With all men, let us find ourselves as Christ’s lost and found. Then, there will be joy in the presence of the angels of God (Luke xv. 10), to whom, as St. Bernard of Clairvaux suggests, the tears of all penitents is angelic wine.
Amen.

 
Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God.
St. Luke xiv. 15
 
The liturgical season of Trinity tide is all about virtuous and godly living. In this season, we are called to translate and convert our vision of Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life into habits of holiness and righteousness. We are called to apply what we know to our hearts. With our Collect, we must remember that God…never failest to help and govern those whom [He] dost bring up in [His] steadfast fear and love, through the protection of His good providence, if we ask Him to make us have a perpeptual steadfast fear and love of [His] Holy Name. The good that we are focusing on in this beginning of Trinity Tide is charity or the love of God. On both last Sunday and this we have been called to contemplate God’s charity towards us, the perfecting of it in our hearts, and then its natural outpouring for all others. Last Sunday’s parable warned us of what happens in the hereafter when we do not share God’s charity here. Dives desired charity too late in Hell. This Sunday’s parable warns us of what happens when we trifle with the charity of God. If we do not outright reject the love of God like Dives, perhaps we fritter away and squander our love on lesser things. The end result will be the same.
        
Every claim of God’s charity on our souls requires that with perpetual steadfast fear and love we petition His help and governance. God’s charity is far greater than any other kind of love we find in creation. His love is measureless, mammoth, monumental, and majestic. Jesus likens it to something unique, in and for Himself. God’s charity is unselfish and creative. Jesus compares it to the Bread of Life that we shall eat in His Kingdom. Such bread nourishes us inwardly and spiritually and is nothing other than the Love of God.

So, we read that A certain man made a great supper, and bade many…. (St. Luke, xiv. 16) The certain man is God. His supper is the chief meal of the day for the Ancient Greeks, and thus the essential supper of the Lord in spiritual terms. The supper is comprised of that spiritual satisfaction that will be the reward of those who sit down to eat with God in His Kingdom. God’s Love is forever expansive and so He invites many. Many is the word indicating that God’s Love includes all men. The parable is given to us in the past tense since God’s Love in Christ will be made for all future generations. God’s Love in Christ was established and intended from the Dawn of Creation. Come; for all things are now ready. (Ibid, 17) It begins in Christ’s Church, where the fact that Christ has died for the sins of the whole world, risen with healing in His wings, ascended to plead our cause and returned again in the Holy Ghost to establish His ongoing ministry to us, have all been established through His Love. Beginning here and now, we can begin to be nourished and grown up into those who have accepted the invitation and intend to be accepted forever as guests at God’s Great Supper. If we accept the invitation, we begin to enjoy the things that God hath prepared for them that love Him. (1 Cor. ii. 9)
        
So, men in all ages have been invited by God, through Jesus Christ, to embrace the Spirit that invites them to the great supper of Heaven. Yet, let us see how men in all ages refuse this gracious invitation. Many men throughout history have made excuses as to why they cannot come to God’s Love Feast. The first cannot come because of what he has. (Trench: The Great Supper) Archbishop Trench remarks: Perhaps the first, who pleaded, ‘I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it,’ represents those who are elate of heart through already acquired possessions. (Idem) There are those who are satisfied and jealous of the property they possess, and so love what they have much more than what they stand to gain from God’s Love in Jesus Christ. The second cannot come because ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them.’(Idem) These cannot come because of the care and anxiety of [what they stand to gain] from earthly love of what they seek. (Trench, Idem) The first have and cannot love anything more than what they possess with pride. The second lust and envy for more. Both pray, have me excused. (Ibid, 18, 19) The third is adamant and insistent. I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come. (Ibid, 20) According to the Levitical law, this would have been reason sufficient why he should not go to battle, (Deut. 24. 5;) but it is none why he should not come to the feast, (I Cor. 7:29) He, however, counts it more than sufficient. (Trench, Idem) Archbishop Trench remarks that this man’s cannot is sealed under the I will not, and believes that the marital bond is sufficient to overcome the offer of God’s Love. For all, There is room at the feast but no room in their hearts for the loving intention of the host and his provision. (The Harmony of the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, M. Scott, 154) And so they forfeit those greater and lasting riches that reveal God’s Divine charity and how it promises to keep us under the protection of God’s good providence. (Collect: Trinity II)
        
Notice, however, that God’s Love persists unabated. We read that the master or God is angry. When rejected, Abused mercy turns into the greatest wrath. (M. Henry, Comm.) Yet, God is pictured here as turning swiftly to share His Love with those who will humbly and gladly receive it. Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. (Ibid, 21) The great supper of the Lord is intended first for those who need God’s Love more than any other. Literally, the parable is first about the Jews, God’s chosen people, and the apple of His eye. Then, the parable is directed against Christians who neglect God’s Love in the Holy Communion. In either case, those first called prefer other loves to God’s Love in Jesus Christ. It is as simple as all that. They will go to Hell if they reject the invitation.
        
The master in the parable -God, turns His attention to others. The parable takes a turn and twist to picture those who will be brought to the supper. Now, the servant brings to the feast the poor, maimed, halt, and blind. (Idem) Those who should have believed and known the servant, Jesus Christ, the Father’s Ambassador and Emissary, and as their own Saviour and Redeemer, refused Him. They felt no need for Jesus Christ. Now those are brought who know their own frailty, fallenness, and need of God’s Love. With all humility, they allow others to bring them to the supper. They may be poor, maimed, halt, and blind literally or spiritually. It matters not. The parable is for all ages and the temptation comes to all to think themselves too rich, too busy, or too happy to be made better. We cannot taste the supper until we have a taste for it. The penalty of refusal is rejection and our heaviest punishment will be what we shall miss. They, too, who have accepted the invitation, and have taken their seats at God’s board, must have a care that they really partake. (Scott, p. 155)
        
To appreciate God’s loving us, in deed and in truth, we must realize that God is greater than our hearts and knoweth all things. (Idem) We must become spiritually conscious that we are all poor, halt, maimed, and blind in order to discover our real need for God’s healing Love. Yet, there is more. What do we read next?

And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. (Ibid, 22) There is room for a deeper felt need for what God promises to give us through His charity. And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. (Ibid, 23) Those bidden to come did not. Others who have been brought gladly accepted the invitation through persuasion. Now the servant compels even more still. God’s charity calls His own, persuades others, and now compels another lot! This word compel must reveal God’s passionate and urgent desire to ceaselessly pursue all men to come to the salvation supper. Of course, this compelling must mean that strong and earnest exhortation, which…Christ will address to [His] fellows. (Trench, Parables, Ch. xxi) This is that Love of God that longs, by nature, to save all men by forgiving even those who first rejected or neglected the invitation but see how God’s Love pursues all other men. The invitation must appear more and more compelling through its unstoppable quest to find others for the Great Supper of Heaven. Although we have rejected it, we must see how God in Jesus Christ never changes. Then, we shall understand that loving Him means keeping His Commandments. And this is His commandment, That we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment. (1 John iii. 23)
        
Jesus says to us today:
 
All things are now ready, now is the accepted time; it is now, and has not been long; it is now, and will not be long; it is a season of grace that will be soon over, and therefore come now; do not delay; accept the invitation; believe yourselves welcome; eat, O friends; drink, yea drink abundantly, O beloved. (M. Henry)
 
We have left Christ, but He never leaves us. In fact, Christ who invited us a first, second, or third time might find us still. The Feast has begun, and we should now be compelled to come. (Idem) We must not delay. Christ’s original invitation might be directed at others, but we too can follow as we find ourselves with the last and the least. God’s Love in Jesus Christ is discovered better late than never. Perhaps we have preferred other loves to God’s Love. Now we see the nature and power of God’s Unabated Love in Jesus Christ and we must not delay to accept the invitation to the Great Supper of God. We might have neglected it or not appreciated God’s Love. Now, with the poet, let us discover it anew.

How many unknown WORLDS there are
Of comforts, which Thou hast in keeping!
How many Thousand Mercies there
In Pity’s soft lap lay a sleeping!
Happy He who has the art
To awake them
And to take them
Home, and to lodge them in his heart. (R. Crashaw)
 
Amen.
 
 
 
    
 
 
  
 

 
We love Him because he first loved us. (1 John 4. 19) 19)

Trinity tide is all about the moral life rooted in the vision of God. Today, I will speak about the friendship of God and man. Throughout the seasons of the liturgical year, you and I have been illuminated progressively by the knowledge of God so that we might come to find friendship with Him. If Eastertide might be called the season of vision and knowledge, Trinity tide is one of moral activity. To know God through vision, as He reveals Himself in the historical life of Jesus Christ, is not enough. Vision is knowledge, but knowledge for the Christian is also the Truth that bears fruit in the good life.

The knowledge of God in Jesus Christ is what we have been working through from Lent to Ascension Tide. We have come to the knowledge of what God thinks, speaks, and does in the Sacred Humanity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. What we see in Jesus Christ is the Wisdom, Power, and Love of God the Father perfectly at work in the human life of Jesus. St. Paul tells us, For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich. (2 Cor. viii. 9) St. Paul hopes that we might find the knowledge or vision of God in His Son that [our] hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians ii. 2-4) St. Paul teaches us that Jesus Christ sets aside the plentiful treasure of His Divine nature to become poor for our sakes. The Wisdom, Power, and Love of God comprise the only treasure that ought to interest every earthly man. Jesus possesses this treasure forever as the only begotten Son of the Father. He is the Logos or Articulation of what the Father intends for us. Adam was made to be moved and defined by this treasure of inestimable worth but rejected it. Jesus takes upon Him the seed of Abraham and becomes the New Adam who will be poor on earth so that He might make many rich in Heaven. How does Jesus become poor? Jesus takes on our frail, weak, suffering human nature. He takes on our sin and subjects Himself to it. He reveals how the Omnipotent Word of God made Flesh responds to sinful man’s attempt to kill it in Man. He reveals how, as God’s Word in the Flesh, in His Death he will conquer all earthly concupiscence and love of earthly riches.

In this morning’s Epistle, St. John reminds us that no man hath seen God at any time (1 John 4. 12). But he tells us also that God is love. (Ibid, 8) God is one who desires and longs for, seeks out and finds a common ground of friendship with us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4. 10) So, we love Him because he first loved us. (1 John 4. 19) God is Love, and that Love is revealed and seen in His Word made flesh. His Word is His Son. His Son not only creates, orders, defines, governs, beautifies, and harmonizes all of creation, but He also humbles Himself to become Man to redeem and reconcile all men to God the Father. To know this is to begin to see how the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ became poor for our sakes. St. John tells us that every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. (Idem, 7,8) In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. (1 John 4. 9) And here is the operative difference between those who live naturally in and through the world and us. God sent His only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. The knowledge that we have in God’s own Son is nothing short of seeing God and coming to believe and know how we must become poor in this world to be made rich spiritually in the next. Our knowledge of Jesus Christ should begin to form a new moral character in us, as He comes to us through the Holy Spirit.

And yet we cannot have any of this until what we know is actualized by following Jesus from poverty into the riches and treasures of His Kingdom. In other words, we must make an act of will that becomes poor in this world and surrenders completely to Jesus Christ by forfeiting and foregoing all rights to ourselves. God is Love, and He loves us in and through His Son. This Love who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians ii. 7,8) We can be like most men of the world, good enough, but loving and living only for the here and now. They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. (1 John 4. 5) We can be like Dives - the rich man in today’s Gospel, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, (St. Luke xvi. 19) whose was rich in earthly things, lorded it over others, and cared little for that deeper Mercy and Love that stoop down and become poor, to be one with the poor, in order to lift them up and into the riches of God’s spiritual bounty. Or if we are rich like those who are full of tongue and weak of mind (R.Hooker, E.P., i. viii. 2), we might be like Dives in another way - perhaps we already count ourselves rich spiritually. We keep the Law, we tithe, we attend Church regularly, and we are sufficiently religious, outwardly visible for all to see. We feast sumptuously on Christ’s Body and Blood each week, we live fairly moral lives, and count ourselves blessed, hoping all the while that this might earn us our salvation!

Being like Dives or the rich man may mean that we are either material or spiritual hoarders. In this morning’s Gospel, Dives walked over Lazarus, who was laid at his gate, full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. (Ibid, 20, 21) Dives’ moral character was such that he was unloving and ungenerous with his earthly treasure. Because Dives did not meet his poor brother’s material needs, Lazarus was left hungry of earthly food and, thus, destitute of spiritual potential. Lazarus found love only from the dogs [who] came and licked his sores. (Ibid, 21) In either case Dives did not know God, love God, or love His neighbor. Friendship with God seemed too costly a price to pay for a man who was possessed with earthly treasure and religious self-satisfaction. So, in the end, his soul is parched and tormented forever because he rejected the knowledge of God and the love that it necessarily implies. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. (Ibid, 22,23) Dives might have known God, but his knowledge had not been converted into Love of God in his neighbor. 

Unlike Lazarus, who had nothing here but longed for the more that only God can give, Dives is left with the broken cisterns that can hold no water, crying out of sterile narcissism that rejects God’s offer of loving friendship with man. Had he received the Love of God in Jesus Christ, he would have emptied himself of his riches  to stoop down and give bread to poor Lazarus. St. John tells us this morning that If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? (1 John 4. 20) If we do not love those whom God gives us to see with our earthly eyes, how can we love God with supernatural eyes? With Dives, we shall find ourselves in Hell forever where there is a great gulf fixed…an eternal separation, a yawning chasm, too deep to be filled up and too wide to be bridged over. (Trench, Parables…)
         
Today we come to know about the friendship of God and Man in Jesus the Word of God, who lives out the Summary of the Law: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, strength, and mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. In the Love of Jesus, we find the Father’s rich spiritual treasure come down from Heaven to all of us. But perhaps Archbishop Trench’s warning about the deeper meaning of the Parable ought to strike us today. He reminds us that we all can become like Dives in a spiritual sense. The sin of Dives in its root is unbelief: hard-hearted contempt of the poor, luxurious squandering on self, are only the forms which his sin assumes. The seat of the disease is within….(Idem) Again, with the good Archbishop, the parable is a warning to the Church, that it do not shut itself up in selfish pride; glorying in the multitude of its own privileges but at the same time with no feeling sense of the spiritual wants and miseries of those who know not God, with no earnest effort to remove these distresses; that on such forgetfulness a terrible judgment must follow. (Idem) The Church’s treasure is to be found in the friendship that might have been between Dives and Lazarus. The poor we have with us always. The Church must be awakened to her own spiritual poverty for as long as she neglects the spiritual treasure that still lurks in the heart of that one lost soul that the Church has not found. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 St. John iv. 16) When the Church ministers the poor, the friendship between God and Man is imitated and perfected. Then she shall be rich indeed.
Amen.
©wjsmartin


 

 
After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
(Rev. iv. 1-3)
 
Tradition has it that St. John the Evangelist died a very old man in the city of Ephesus. The same Tradition, dating from the Second Century A.D., tells us that he was the only Apostle not to have suffered martyrdom. Having written his Gospel of love, his Epistles of sanctifying affection, the same man endured the vision that we read of in our properly appointed Epistle for this Trinity Sunday, on the island of Patmos, not long before his death. To the old man a door was opened in heaven. Indeed, a door was opened to one who was in the spirit. But the door had been opening to him from the day that he dropped his fisherman’s net, some eighty five years prior, when as a young man, one Jesus of Nazareth said come follow me (St. Matthew iv. 19) One gets the sense, if one follows John, that he was always in the spirit following and finding Jesus. His Gospel is not merely about Jesus’ love for him and all others, but about his own discovery and knowledge of that love as he grew from young manhood into maturity. His Epistles call others into that same love, into that unbreakable knot of friendship with God the Father that the then Ascended Jesus offered through His Spirit. His Revelation or Apocalypse crowns his life with a vision of the Trinity and the life yet to come. A door was opened in heaven, John says, and I was in the Spirit. Jesus says, come follow me, and John writes, that we too may follow and find our love and affection in friendship with God the Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord and by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
         
Following Jesus, being in the Spirit, finding that a door is opened comprise the reality that John offers to all who will accept it. St. John was a uniter or unifier; John was as one who desired not only God for himself, but God for others, that all might journey with him and find friendship with God. But, perhaps more than others, he knew only too well the spiritual cost of discipleship, the demands that accompany the journey into this new kind of friendship. You will remember, no doubt, that St. John calls himself the disciple whom the Lord loved or the beloved disciple. And indeed, St. John is nothing if he is not the Apostle of love. Of course, love is the basis of any friendship. But the kind of love that St. John came to know in Jesus was as something that stirred him on in the persistent, even insistent, pursuit of his Master through the Spirit. Come follow me takes on a nature for John that then grows and develops as Divine love draws him progressively towards that door that was opened in heaven.
         
John was stirred on to pursue friendship with God because of the love in Jesus that drew him to it. In Jesus, he discovered and came to know one who came to do not His own will but that of the Father who sent him. In other words, in Jesus, he found one who emptied himself that he might convey to others what he had heard from and seen of the Father. Jesus was human; John had no doubt of that. But John saw something else at work in him; he saw the Divine Life reaching out through the human life of Jesus to offer to men the hope of salvation. In other words, he saw and perceived the Divine Desire of the Father, flowing through the Son by the motions of the Spirit which he had hitherto not known. What he learned, progressively, perhaps slowly, was that its reception in his own heart would require a response costing nothing less than everything. He began to realize then that he would have to die to himself, that the Divine offer of salvation and redemption might be received, treasured, and grown in his heart.
         
What he realized he records in the Gospel lection which we have read today. At the time, he had not entirely grasped its meaning and urgency. But looking back he remembers the words of Jesus the knowledge of which would prove essential to salvation. John remembered a conversation that Jesus had had with Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. Nicodemus had been impressed by the miracles that Jesus had wrought, and under the protective covering of the night, came to Him privately to explore the meaning of His life. Jesus responded to him with these words: Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. (St. John iii. 3) Nicodemus became confused and asked,

How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? (St. John iii. 4) Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (St. John iii. 5-8)
 
Jesus makes clear that the whole of a man must be born again by being born from above. He insists that the body and soul must be baptized into new life; the body being purified by water with John the Baptist’s Baptism of Repentance, and the soul being cleansed by the inbreathing of the Divine Spirit. New birth and new life would be Jesus’ condition for all men who would follow him in pursuit of friendship with God the Father in Heaven. This St. John began to learn when he first heard these words. This St. John came to understand more deeply after the events of his Master’s crucifixion, resurrection and ascension.
               
You will remember that St. John was the only disciple present at the crucifixion. No doubt, unbeknownst to him at the time, the power of the Divine Spirit’s love and desire called him to follow Jesus even to His Cross. He remained throughout the agonizing death of His master’s earthly life- his mind and heart, for certain, being carried by the love of Jesus into a death that would become his own. His pursuit of Jesus had been confirmed, we surmise, long before those horrific hours. Come follow me. John did. I was in the Spirit. John was. Following the death and burial, on the first day of the week, when news had reached him and Peter of the empty tomb, John outran his good friend. Love that pursues and follows in the Spirit always outruns that which is not yet freed of the flesh. Peter was like Nicodemus: If I have told you earthly things and believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things? (St. John iii. 12) John had been drawn by the heavenly nature of Jesus to death, into death, and now up and out of death into the Master’s new life.
         
Later in his Epistles, and prior to the Revelation which he endured, St. John added this to Jesus’ conditions for discipleship and salvation. Already he grasped the nature of the Trinity. There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. (1 St. John v. 7) Through Jesus Christ- by water, blood and the Spirit, God the Father had overcome the world. The Father spake his Word into the flesh and blood of Jesus, and by the Spirit had opened Heaven once again to the hopes of all men. On earth, St. John insisted, men could begin to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity. There are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. ( 1 St. John v. 8) To the water and the Spirit which Jesus said were necessary for the Baptism into new life, John adds blood. Indeed, the blood of the everlasting covenant made flesh, was poured out, effectively inviting fallen fleshly man into the new birth through death to sin, death, and Satan. John adds blood because without it there would be no death- Jesus’ death for us, and ours in Him. Without that death, there can be no new life, light, and love in the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven. (St. John iii. 3) Man is born again through the waters of Baptism as the Spirit washes away our sins and in the blood of the Holy Eucharist as the Spirit nourishes and strengthens us with all heavenly virtue.
         
Trinity Sunday is all about the new life that is opened to all men through the essential process of being born again- through water, blood and the Spirit. But being born-again is a hard and painful process. We might ask ourselves, how can I do it? The best way is through Word and Sacrament. Through both, we shall discover man’s alienation from God and Jesus’ response to it. In Scripture we shall find the Word of Life, Jesus Christ, who intends to return us to the Father through the Spirit. The Spirit establishes the Word of the Father in our hearts efficaciously when we receive the Sacraments faithfully. What we believe and know from Scripture is brought alive by the Spirit as the love of Christ for the Father is established in our hearts by Grace. One thing is clear, it cannot be found unless we accept Jesus’ gracious invitation: Come follow me. When we do, we shall discover that true new life is found with the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. A door shall be opened. When we do, we shall discover that true new life comes from and returns to God the Holy Trinity, whose chief desire is to stir us up with St. John onto the journey of love and whose ultimate joy is the sweet embrace of unbreakable friendship with Himself in Heaven forever.
 
 
Amen.  
©wjsmartin
 
 

 
                     They marvelled to see such things; they were astonished,
                               and suddenly cast down. Fear came there upon them;
                             and sorrow, as upon a woman in her travail.
                                                        (Psalm xlviii. 4,5)
 
One day in the future men will look back at our age and describe it as the time when man had forgotten his past. In general, we shall be judged as those who had little or no respect for the wisdom of our fathers, and in particular, as those who spent their lives running away from the truth. Because of both, we shall be known as those who forfeited any meaningful future. William Wordsworth once said, Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future. But Wordsworth was a Christian, and authentic Christianity, we must admit, is the most feared and despised of all religions in this dark age of ours. Why? Well, because it demands that every man face his past, cull it into the present, name it, claim it, repent of it, and open himself up to that sanctification that promises better life in the future. Authentic Christianity is something that our world cannot bear; our world hates the past, and never more passionately than when it creeps into the present to judge and measure us, to reveal to the world why we are not as hale and hearty as we pretend to be.
         
Pentecost or Whitsunday is all about the past, present, and future. Pentecost helps us to see who we have been and what we have done; Pentecost teaches us who we are now; Pentecost calls us forward into a spiritually informed future. Today we read about the first Pentecost in the cenacle –or upper room, in the Acts of the Apostles. Monsignor Knox describes the setting in this way: 
A room haunted with memories –through that door did Judas Iscariot slink out into the night…on that table the consecrated chalice reposed; through that window they listened to the shouts of ‘Crucify Him’; that floor had been trodden by impassible feet. It was in this room that the Holy Ghost visited His people on the day of Pentecost. (Pentecost: R. Knox) 
 
It was in this room that both good and evil battled in response to Christ’s impending Passion. It was in this room that one man betrayed our Lord, another sought refuge having denied Him thrice, and the rest remained huddled together for fear of the Jews. It was in this room that the past events of the Last Supper and the Foot Washing were about to become the signs and badges of the Apostles’ common life and Christian future. It was in this room that past sin would be remembered so that future hopes could be realized in the new life that the Holy Spirit would bring. If man is to be redeemed and saved, the past must always mold and shape the future in the present. Each of the Apostles would bear about in his life the forgiveness of his past sins, the sanctification of his present predicament, and the redemption for his future glory.
         
So perhaps we should turn to our text in order to examine how this process all began at the first Pentecost.  

WHEN the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilæans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, where in we were born?  (Acts ii. 1-8)
 
What jumps out at most Christians immediately is the rushing mighty wind, cloven tongues like fire, then speaking in [other] tongues. What arrests them wonderfully is the vigorously aggressive, paranormal, transcendent, and otherworldly dynamism of the Holy Ghost. So, they tend to conclude that the Apostles were swept up into a chaotic, disordered, even anarchic Dionysian irruption of emotion and passion that defied all reason. So, their response is akin to the eyewitnesses [who] were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Or with the others mocking, saying, these men are full of new wine. (Acts ii. 12, 13)

But a more cautious reading of the text reveals a providential ordering and sanctification of the past, in the present, and for the future. This is Christian History in the making. This was the day of Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, on which devout Jews from all over the world descended upon Jerusalem to commemorate God’s giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Holy Spirit only ever comes to sanctify those who gather to thank God for past mercies and future Grace. And so we read that [the Apostles] were all with one accord in one place. (Idem) They were of one mind, united in purposive prayer, in one place, watching and waiting, honoring one past, loving one another in the present, and praying about the future. For that blessed Dove comes not where there is noise and clamour, but moves upon the face of still waters, not the rugged ones. (M. Henry) This particular Pentecost fell on the first day of the week. The pouring out of His Spirit that gives birth to the Church occurs on Sunday, the Day of Resurrection. Even when the sudden sound from Heaven, as of rushing mighty wind (Idem) fills the Cenacle, the Spirit grips the Apostles with fear as they remember John Baptist: He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire. (St. Matt. iii. 11) And so tongues of cloven fire gently rest upon their heads making time-past, present. Matthew Henry tells us that the Spirit, like fire, melts the heart, burns up the dross, and kindles pious and devout affections in the soul. (Idem) And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts ii. 4)  What could have broken down into confusion and chaos was, as it turned out, ordered, disciplined, and purposive. The Holy Spirit translated one message of the wonderful works of God (Acts ii. 14) in Jesus Christ to devout men out of every nation, and to every man in his own tongue. (Idem)
         
To the Apostles, the experience of Holy Week and Christ’s Eastertide teaching were just now beginning to be understood. God’s power, wisdom, and love were making sense of the past. For, as Monsignor Knox reminds us, In those six weeks before Pentecost the Apostles had already lived through, as it were, the whole cycle of Church history; there was nothing callow, nothing tentative, nothing inexperienced about their methods from the very first. And because she was born old, the Church remains ever young. (Ibid) What the Apostles experienced was nothing short of the old man being made new as the past was transformed and redeemed in the present for the good of the future. Thus, belief led to repentance, repentance opened to obedience, obedience elicited knowledge, and knowledge reached forth towards its future in God the Father, through Jesus, and in the Spirit.

But they could endure this only because they had patiently allowed the work of God the Holy Spirit to teach them the truth and to change their lives. They remembered the words that Jesus had spoken to them in the Upper Room: If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth (St. John xiv. 15, 16) Because they loved Jesus, they began to keep His Law. With His departure, He filled them with the deepest desire for the Redemption He had won through the promised illumination of His Holy Spirit. They began to realize that the greatest blessing spiritually is to know that we are destitute; and [that] until we get there, Our Lord is powerless…As long as we are rich, possessed of anything in the way of pride and independence, God cannot do anything for us. It is only when we get hungry spiritually that we receive the Holy Spirit. (The Bounty of the Destitute: O. Chambers) St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us that the Holy Spirit, whom the spiritually destitute desire, conveys to man four operations: Subtleness of substance, perfection of life, impulse of motion, and hidden origin. (Sermon: Emitte Spiritum) So the subtle, perfect, active, invisible, and intangible Spirit passes through physical nature to penetrate their souls. Then, He perfects their lives by infusing all virtue. Next, He moves them to embrace the holiness that He brings from the Father in the Name and Nature of Jesus. Finally, He reveals His hidden origin in the Father’s being and the Son’s wisdom. So the hidden and invisible Divine cause, through the motions of eternal love, perfects the Apostles by refining and rendering them subtle and contemptuous of all temporal and earthly things. (Idem)

Jesus says that the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. (St. John xiv.) The Holy Ghost will illuminate the past so that in the present we might repent, believe, and understand. The Holy Ghost will bring the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ to life in our hearts as He speaks death to our sins. As members of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, the Holy Ghost longs to mold and shape us into the instruments of His unselfconscious holiness. The Church is neither new nor old, but eternal….For her Pentecost is continually repeating herself, making all things new, (Pentecost: R. Knox) for those who know that they can be perfected and made new only by God’s Holy Spirit, and so long as they have not forgotten how to be sorry. (Repentance: O. Chambers)
        
On this day, let us remember, with the Apostles, that if a man speaks in a tongue that is unknown to him, it is sure indication that someone else is speaking through his mouth. (Claudel, ‘I Believe’) If the Holy Ghost begins to speak through us, Christ Jesus Himself will be heard, and Christianity’s past will no longer be dead but alive in a present that is redeeming the time for a future when the wonderful works of God shall be crowned with glory. Amen.   

 
Christ's Ascension is therefore also our own, upon the glory of the Head rests the hope of the body. On this holy day, we have received not only the assurance of entering into possession of eternal glory, but we have already entered into the heights of heaven with Christ Jesus.
                                     (Leo, Sermon 1 De Ascensione Domini c. iv)
                                               
This is the first Sunday after the Ascension. We find ourselves situated between our Lord's Ascension back to the Father and the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost or Whitsunday, which we celebrate next Sunday. Today we must meditate upon the Ascension and find in it the devotion that prepares us for the promise of a new coming made to the Apostles in today's Gospel. Ascension is that day on which the church celebrates the return of the Son of God to Our Heavenly Father. On Ascension Day our Lord's earthly sojourn comes to a close. His temporal life and mission began when He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. He lived, He taught, He healed, He was rejected, He suffered, He died, and He rose again from death. Nonetheless from the time of His Resurrection to His Ascension, His human nature is transfigured. He is in possession of a spiritual body, transparent, obedient to the Spirit, unconstrained and lightsome, an apt and natural instrument for the salvation He now intends to foment in all others. (The Meaning of Man: Mouroux, p. 89)

Romano Guardini tells us that in Christ’s death on the cross, Jesus’ temporal life comes to an end, but not His life itself. He had been incorporated into terrestrial existence, submitting to its conditions, bound by its limitations. When He is in one place, he is not simultaneously elsewhere; what he does at one moment is not done also at another. Event follows event. (The Lord: R.G. p. 427) Easter’s Resurrection changes all of that. The concrete human is now joined to an indestructible essence. (Idem) Jesus is with His friends again but is not subject to terrestrial power, the laws of government, or the laws of nature. He is here and there; He appears and disappears. He is unrecognizable and then recognized in an as earthly [and seemingly insignificant] gesture as the breaking bread. We feel in the lines how He pauses on the sill between eternity and time. (Idem) Christ is transfigured, and now temptation, evil, and corruption cannot touch Him. He is Risen Man. He moves at once in and out of events that are concurrent but isolated, united to all simultaneously in the event that He is.

Christ has been the victim of the best that sin can do, and now He has broken its chains, condemned its curse, and reversed the course of its rule in human life. Therefore, in His Ascension which we contemplate today, human mortality is redeemed. Christ has won the victory over sin, death, and Satan. Man’s end is found in His beginning, in the Father who is the source and origin of all truth, happiness, and joy. St. Peter says today that The end of all [other] things is at hand. (1 St. Peter iv. 7) In Jesus Christ, the power of human sin –the devil's deceit, is overcome, subdued, and brought to an end. The desire to tamper with God's eternal law for all creation is revealed to be futile, impotent, pointless, and ephemeral. In Jesus Christ, God has brought all sin to death. Satan flees and men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven [are] shaken. (St. Luke xxi. 26) Now the relationship between the Apostles and their Lord must change. Now there is no excuse for disobedience to God. Now there is no justification for sin. God Himself has confronted and crucified sin in the human flesh of His own dear Son. Through that resolute and passionate determination to come closer than any man ever had or could to the corruption of sin, He has felt its power acutely, and because He is God in Man, has overcome it perfectly. In Jesus Christ alone, the eternal life, light, and love of God have endured sin and revealed it to be utterly absurd and unsatisfying. In Jesus Christ alone sin is brought into death, death is brought into death, and Satan becomes progressively ineffectual and insignificant in the lives of men who believe.

In His Resurrection, Christ’s soul took back His body, penetrated it through and through, and made it spiritual. Instead of the body of lowliness, Christ now has the body of glory. The body sacrificed is now the body glorified. (The Meaning of Man: Mouroux, p. 89) Now as Christ the God-Man ascends to sit down on His throne in the Heaven of His Father, He will begin to become the Word made flesh in all times and all places, in one heart here and in another heart there, simultaneously. He sits in Heaven and yet will come alive in the souls of those who fear and love Him. He is in eternity yet in time, though differently from before, in an intimacy of becoming. (Guardini, Idem) Christ desires to become the effectual and operative principle –the way, the truth, and the life, that carries all men to their Divinely intended destiny.

And yet whether He is accepted as such or not, the Ascension establishes His role as Judge. His innocent human life alone has earned Him the right to weigh and measure all other men’s lives in relation to the Word made flesh that He is. Jesus says Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words, thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. (St. Matthew xii. 36, 37) Christ is God’s Word made flesh and for all flesh. From the seat of His ascended glory, His Holy Spirit will reprove the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. (St. John xvi. 8,9,10) 
Again, with St. Peter:

The end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer. And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. Use hospitality one to another without grudging. As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God…that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever and ever.
 
If we hope to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we must believe that our lives are now hidden with Christ in God. (Col. iii. 3) We must be vigilant and sober for [our]adversary the devil walketh about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. (1 St. Peter v. 8) The Ascended Christ sings to us: Lift up your hearts! Our chorus replies: We lift them up unto the Lord! He yearns to embrace us in the arms of His ascended love so that the allure of His benevolence might grow into forgiveness that is neither resentfully nor reluctantly offered to others. He longs that His ascended truth might be articulated through us as the oracles that tell of His future coming and judgment. For if His Holy Spirit is to descend into our hearts and souls, we must be lifted up above all things earthly and mundane, seeking those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. (Col. iii. 3)   
        
Ascension tide is all about worshipping and adoring the Saviour who invites us into intimate communion with Our Heavenly Father. Christ has completed His Father's mission. And now a new relationship emerges between His friends –the Apostles, their successors, you and me, and God our Heavenly Father. As Father George Body, sometime Canon Missioner of Durham, has said:
‘They worshipped Him,’ -His very withdrawal from among them, His very elevation to the throne of God, was the development of new relations between the disciples and their Lord. As long as He was on the earth the worship was not the principal feature of their life; but as soon as He was withdrawn from them and seated at God's Right Hand in the heavenly places, the adoration of the Lamb -the worship of Jesus Incarnate, Crucified, Risen, Ascended, Enthroned, -the distinctive worship of the Christian Church, -began to be…where the Ascended Jesus is ever adored.
 
Ascension tide is the time of Adoration. In this time we worship and adore God’s own Son who has reconciled in Himself man to God and God to man. Today, Christ tells us: When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me: and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning. (St. John xv. 26, 27) So we must prepare our hearts for bearing witness to the glorious truth of Christ’s Ascension. From His seat on High, He shall move us here below, that others may come to see and understand His triumphant victory over all that hinders us from communion with the Father and in His Person our own redeemed humanity. O God, my heart is ready, my heart is ready; I will sing, and give praise with the best member that I have…I will give thanks unto Thee, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises among the nations. For thy mercy is greater than the heavens; and thy truth reacheth unto the clouds. (Ps. xviii. 1-4) Man and God have united once again. Heaven itself is stirred by the irruption of the Ascended God-Man. Angelic worship and adoration are radically refined. The Ascended Christ takes His seat with the Father and a new light illuminates the intellects of angels and men, a new adoration fills their spirits, a new song bursts forth from their lips, a new worship is begun, the worship of Jesus Christ. (Body, Idem) God is gone up with a merry noise: and the Lord with the sound of the trump.O sing praises, sing praises unto our God: O sing praises, sing praises unto our King. (Ps. xlvii. 5,6)
         Today we find ourselves in that space between Ascension’s glory and Pentecost’s calling. Let us end with the poet’s desire for both:
But since he
That brightness soil'd,
His garments be
All dark and spoil'd,
And here are left as nothing worth,
Till the Refiners fire breaks forth.
 
Then comes He!
Whose mighty light
Made his clothes be
Like Heav'n, all bright;
The Fuller, whose pure blood did flow
To make stain'd man more white then snow.
 
He alone
And none else can
Bring bone to bone
And rebuild man,
And by His all subduing might
Make clay ascend more quick then light.
                                    (Ascension Hymn: Henry Vaughn)
Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.
(St. John 15. 27)
 
        
Ascension Day is sadly a spiritual feast that elicits little attention in the post-modern world. Like His Conception –celebrated on the Feast of the Annunciation, Christ’s Ascension is a celebration that too many people avoid to their great peril. It would seem that our Lord’s beginning and ending are not heeded with sufficient spiritual interest. The Conception marks the union of God with Man; God’s Word and Son came down from heaven, He humbled Himself, and was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary, as God became Man. The Ascension marks the return of Man to God, the exaltation of the Crucified and Resurrected One, or the reconciliation Redeemed Man with God the Father, as Man returns to God. God in Jesus Christ, in the Person of the Son, has come to us to recapitulate or reunite Man with God; and now He carries that new life back to the Father. The beginning and ending of God’s mission of mercy and love manifest the invisible source of God’s desire for us. They reveal completely the encircling motion of Christ’s descent and return to the Father. God comes down to be made Man in the Person of His Son, is enfleshed, reaches out, is rejected, suffers, dies, rises, and now ascends back to the Father. And so what we celebrate is one movement of Divine Love in and through the Word that is always descending or coming down to us in order to ascend and return us into union with God our Heavenly Father in Heaven.
        
Christ’s beginning coming to us in Conception is the beginning of God’s redemption of human nature. In it, He takes our Manhood into God, a Manhood that had hitherto rejected and removed itself from God the Father’s will. Man had willfully rejected God’s will and way for human life, and so, in Adam, had secured for himself a false freedom with a constant battle between good and evil. Man’s forfeiture of the good life earned him a life of suffering, sin, and death. Now in Christ, God had entered the man-made land of alienation from God. God had blasted through the wall of separation and division to open the door to His presence once again. God had come down from heaven and joined Himself to the sorry predicament of lost human nature. Silently and invisibly the reconciliation of Manhood to God began in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
        
Between Conception and Ascension much had happened. Our liturgical memory in the life of the Church is an ongoing meditation upon it. There is the Christ-event, the activity and motion of God in Man, going about and generating all manner of goodness. There is man’s rejection, abandonment, and betrayal of Him. Through it all, Christ, the God-Man lovingly offers Himself as a pure and perfect sacrifice to the Father. He recapitulates human nature. But there is more. For even in the unjust death of God’s own Son, gladly assumed and suffered by Christ, there is the never-ending love, yearning, and desire for all men’s salvation. The same love conquers sin, death, and Satan from the Cross. In Eastertide, the Crucified One rises and faith is made new, knowledge is established, hope is enlarged, and love is made strong. Inwardly and spiritually the followers of the Risen Lord come to believe, grasp, and penetrate the mystery of God’s salvation love in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the God-Man forever moving towards men and catching them up in the net of His Salvation. He is alive. He is lifting the hearts and souls of believers into the eternal and unchanging moving spiritual center of God’s desire for Man.
        
So with the Ascension, we are being moved back into the sound of silence and the movement of stillness. The visible Christ returns to the Father. The invisible Christ takes His friends into a place and space of new conception and new birth. The 6th-century Kontakia of St. Romanus puts it this way:
        
He Who descended to earth, as He alone knew how, Rising up from it, again as He alone knew how, took the ones whom He loved, and gathering them together, He led them to a high mountain in order that, when they had their minds and sensibilities on the height, might forget all lowly things. And so, when they were led up to the Mount of Olives, They formed a circle around the Benefactor, As Luke, one of the initiates, narrates in full. (Lk. 24:50-53) The Lord, raising His hands like wings-- Just as the eagle covers the nest of young birds which she warms-- Spoke to the nestlings: "I have sheltered you from all evil Since I loved you and you loved Me. I am not separated from you; I am with you, and no one is against you.
 
My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. (St. Luke i. 46) The Blessed Virgin Mary was lifted up at the Annunciation and Christ’s conception in her womb and we are being lifted up now. Jesus takes his friends to a high place. God became Man and humbled Himself in order to assume our nature and return it to God. Now He leads His friends to a higher place. Lift up your heads O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. (Psalm 24. 7) Lift up your souls, Jesus says to His Apostles, and my eagle’s wings will lift you up into this high place, far above the mundane and earthly space of your alienation from God. Christ vanishes from men’s sight that He might be embraced in all human hearts by faith. I will vanish from your physical sight. But follow me, remain close by my side in spirit and in truth, and in your hearts and minds you too shall ascend. Come, we are moving into the Father’s bosom. He shall come unto you, even into you, into your souls, and will be with you. Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them…Behold I make all things new. (Rev. 21) This is our reconciliation with the God who dwells on high. It begins now. Be not afraid, follow me, for I am with you. Come up with me and I shall fill you with a love that destroys despair and raises you far above your sin and death. My prophet Moses went up into a high mountain to receive the Law that I am. A greater than Moses is here. Elijah was lifted up on high and taken on a chariot of fire into heaven. A greater than Elijah is here. Austin Farrer says this:

WE are told in an Old Testament tale, how an angel of God having appeared to man disappeared again by going up in the flame from the altar. And in the same way, Elijah, when he could no more be found, was believed to have gone up on the crests of flaming horses. The flame which carried Christ to heaven was the flame of his own sacrifice. Flame tends always upwards. All his life long Christ’s love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God. The fire is kindled on our altars, here Christ ascends in fire; the fire is kindled in the Christian heart, and we ascend. He says to us, Lift up your hearts; and we reply, We lift them up unto the Lord.
 
Christ calls His Apostles and us to lift up our hearts and to journey to heaven with and in Him. The fire of His love has always burned upward toward His Father. It leaps up to our Beginning and our End. It rises to find consummation in the Father’s heavenly embrace. It extends from His new humanity, our humanity, to find its true home and spiritual rest in Heaven. It comes from the Father and returns to the Father. Christ teaches us that we are made to be caught up into the unbreakable knot of this Heavenly fire of Love, by Faith and with Hope. Creation and Redemption are the evening and morning of one day. Christ desires to spread His love abroad in our hearts. He intends for us to be as on fire as the Apostles were long ago. He has forgiven us, broken down the wall of partition separating us from God. Now He will lift us into the blaze of unending longing and passion for God and salvation.
        
If this fire is kindled in us, we shall begin to ascend. What is this fire, but the ascent of the soul’s passion and love for God in Christ that conquered all our sins? What is this fire, but the Love of Christ who intends not for us to have Him externally, visibly, and temporarily but inwardly, spiritually, and eternally. He is God’s Word of Love made flesh that desires to be made flesh in us. Not the Earth but Heaven has always held me. Let it take hold of you also. Christ leads captivity captive- captive to the inner dynamism of His own Holy Spirit. Our bondage to sense is transformed into service to God (Village Sermons), as Bishop Westcott reminds us. We are being transformed into service as servants. We are being lifted up; we rise through the fire of Christ’s love for the Father. With Him in heart and mind, we thither ascend that with Him we might continually dwell. (Collect)
Let us desire to do God’s will that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever and ever. (1 Peter iv. 11) Christ’s Ascension means that here and now we can rise with Christ to rejoice in His Redemption of our souls and our Reconciliation with God the Father. So, with Cardinal Newman, let us

Set aside every day times for seeking Him. Humble yourself that you have been hitherto so languid and uncertain. Live more strictly to Him; take His yoke upon your shoulder; live by rule. I am not calling on you to go out of the world, or to abandon your duties in the world, but to redeem the time; not to give hours to mere amusement or society, while you give minutes to Christ; not to pray to Him only when you are tired, and fit for nothing but sleep; not altogether to omit to praise Him, or to intercede for the world and the Church; but in good measure to realize honestly the words of the text, to "set your affection on things above;" and to prove that you are His, in that your heart is risen with Him, and your life hid in Him. (Newman: Sermon 15) 

Amen.
©wjsmartin

 
Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never takest rust,
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings . . .
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds and opens forth in light,
That doth both shine and give us light to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evil becometh him to slide,
Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath,
Then farewell, world; the uttermost I see;
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.  Sir Philip Sidney
 
Where is Jesus Christ? Is God anywhere to be found? Frustrated and exasperated post-modern Christians complain that He is absent, at least when things don’t seem to be going their way materialistically, physically, or tangibly. Other self-contented, complacent, unmoved non-believers, do not make matters any easier, for they challenge the weak and carnal Christians with where is now thy God?  Show Him to us! We cannot see Him. Prove to us that He exists. For if your God does exist, He seems comfortably ensconced and nestled away in heaven's unreachable perfection –far enough away, at any rate, from being of much use to any of us.

And the weak Christian realizes that his pagan friend might have it right and so grows resentful and bitter. On one side, frustration and despair sets in, while on the other the worship of mammon proceeds apace as the human community progressively indulges the wilder elements of the animal kingdom. Both groups, it would seem, have their senses fixed upon the things of this world, with the love which reacheth but to dust, as Sir Philip Sydney names it. And so the poet’s song, which once inspired and inflamed men of old to soar to higher things, growing rich in things which never takest rust, seems to fall upon deaf ears.

In this way, contemporary Christian ears are sealed shut to the sweet truth contained in the poet’s encomium to the love of God. And because they are possessed and moved by what fades and fading pleasure brings, they have no ground upon which to criticize the unbelieving world around them. In most cases what bothers and exorcises them begins and ends with happiness and comfort, health and prosperity, justice and injustice in this world. That it should ever occur to them that this world, as a prelude and preparation for the next, seems wholly lost and gone. And that the justice and happiness of this world are always going to be an imperfect shadow of a far greater land of greater glory seems equally hidden from their spiritual sight. This is because such Christians, by and large, are the worshipers of mammon. Milton puts it nicely, a little later in time:

Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heaven: for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. (Paradise Lost: i. 678)
 
And, we mustn’t imagine that Sir Philip Sidney lived in an age which was necessarily more idolatrous than our own. He lived in the 16th century, the age of Reformation, Renaissance, and Discovery. He died at the young age of 32. But he was conscious that the encroaching and advancing, penetrating and piercing, attractive and enticing light of the perverse and profane that always leads the Christian soul to dwell on trodden gold. Having been scorched by this impermanent luminance himself, he hearkens to the appeal of the Muses. It is always the case that those who have indulged the world, the flesh, and devil more than others, have a more acute sense of the disappointment and despair that these gods bring.
So, Sir Philip Sidney confesses that he has spent too much time pursuing false loves and fleeting fancies. And herein we may find the sole cause for our failure to experience and appreciate God’s presence and nearness in the course of our lives. The poet sings out, Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might /To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;/Which breaks the clouds and opens forth in light,/That doth both shine and give us light to see. Call back and reject your desire for earthly things, the poet insists. See that you have misplaced and misspent your time, energy, and attention on the things that fade and fail. Reclaim your love and let the light of Eternal Love reveal the path that leads to brighter things that never die.

I rose up at the dawn of day,--
"Get thee away! get thee away!
Pray'st thou for riches? Away, away!
This is the throne of Mammon grey.
                           (William Blake: Mammon)
 
The Muses insist that drawing in the beams of light and sight are essential, lest we forget what manner of man (St. James i. 24) we are. With the poet we remember how evil [it] becometh him to slide, Who seeketh heav’n, and comes of heav’nly breath. (Idem) We come from God, were made by His Word, and are quickened by the Heavenly Breath of His Spirit. And if we come to see and know that we were made by God’s Word, we are indeed called to be hearers of the Word. (St. James i. 22)
But St. James tells us this morning that we are to Be…doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving [our] own selves. (Idem) First we must draw in [our] beams, and humble all our might. Then we must see the Word that doth both shine and give us light to see. and…take fast hold, [and] let that light be our guide. The light may seem silent, but the poet hears, obeys, and submits to its summons. This is the light that illuminates his soul and speaks to his heart. This is the light that enables him to behold himself, [to go] his way, and straightway [to remember] what manner of man he [is]. (St. James i. 24) This is the man who looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, [who] being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work… shall be blessed in his deed. (Ibid, 25)  

Christians must bid farewell to the world to be blessed because we are not forgetful hearers but doers of God’s good work, walking in His Light. We must let the light of God’s all-seeing eye and not the eye of the world be the star to steer our course. We must be determined not to ‘seem’ religious and good but ‘to be’ religious and good in deed and in truth. (B. Jenks, p. 159) St. James says, If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain. (St. James i. 26) Again, hearing God’s Word and walking in His Light calls us into silence. We must hear and then do. Speech gets in the way of hearing God’s Word and discerning His will! St. James calls us to keep silent and remain focused on God’s Light Jesus Christ.

Today we prepare for Christ the Light’s Ascension to the Father. What He has seen and heard from the Father, He has revealed to us. To travel with Him to the Kingdom, in heart and mind we must forsake earthly gods whose cisterns can hold no water. We must hear His Word and follow His Goodness that will reveal the Light of His Love to us. Christ the Word is risen from the dead and is become the first fruits of them that slept. (1 Cor. xv. 20) Now He will Ascend. Will we hear the sweet song of the Word who invites us to follow Him? Cardinal Von Balthasar tells us that Christ’s Ascension is the return to the starting point of His mission. He is the Light and Love that comes from God and returns to God. But He is also the Light and Love who gave us heavenly breath, that we too might seek Heaven in following Him. He tells us this morning in the Gospel that whatsoever [we] shall ask the Father in [His] name, He will give it [to us]… ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. (St. John xvi. 24) Today is Rogation Sunday and rogation comes from the Latin rogare, to ask. In our Collect, we pray that by [God’s] holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by [His] mercifully guiding may perform the same. God, in Jesus Christ, by the comfort of the Holy Ghost, accepts our humble hearing of His Word, knows that we yearn to be doers who perform the same, and now gives us lease to speak, to ask for, and to receive those things that be good. Now Christ invites us to ask to receive His Goodness in the Light of His Love that has gained the victory over all our sins. Christ says, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. (Ibid, 33)

So today with Sir Philip Sidney, let us hear the sweet and loving song of God’s Word made flesh. Remember that The Word that was here [long ago], [still longs] to be heard, cherished, treasured up in the heart of man, as what makes him new and carries him to the kingdom of God. Let us dare to become not hearers only but doers of the Word. In the Light of Christ’s Love let us hear God’s Song of Salvation that has overcome the world and calls us up into His Heavenly Choir. Today, dear friends, may the truth, beauty, and goodness of this Song be heard in our hearts, as we respond with great joy and sing…farewell, world; the uttermost I see;/ Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 

 



















Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way,
that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 
because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,
which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
St. Matthew vii. 13, 14
 
        
Our opening quotation, taken from St. Matthew’s Gospel, gives us a useful segue into our study of the meaning of Resurrection in this Eastertide. In it, Jesus Christ, true to himself and candid as always, basically tells us that most people go to Hell and few go to Heaven. Pardon me for cutting to the quick, but these are Jesus’ words, and this is Jesus’ analysis of the human condition. I am quite sure that He always wants it to be otherwise, but His words remain. Far from being a condemnation or sentencing of His own people to Hell, these words ought to be taken seriously by men in all ages, and especially by Christians who think that they are “saved” before the gift is bestowed, bank on Cheap Grace, or think that their religion and all their good works are going to save them. None of this is good theology and it certainly isn’t Biblical. Most men go to Hell because they choose the broad way over and against the strait gate and the narrow way that alone lead to salvation.
        
Of course, none of this is pleasant news. Christians protest, didn’t the Angel Gabriel proclaim to the shepherds, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord? (St. Luke ii. 10, 11) And didn’t Jesus Himself speak often of His mission to bring the Gospel, which means Good News, to all nations? He began His ministry by sending John Baptist’s disciples back to him saying, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them. (St. Matthew xi. 4,5) And St. Paul, repeatedly insisted that he was a bearer of the Gospel or Good News to all people. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. (Romans i. 16) How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! (Romans x. 15) The Gospel of Jesus Christ is always the Good News of the salvation that Jesus Christ brings to all men in all ages.
        
So, Christians have every reason to rejoice in the knowledge and love of God found only in Jesus Christ and to believe that the Good News or Gospel alone leads us to salvation. But there is more. Jesus also says, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (St. John xiv. 6) Salvation means the return of man to God, through the Redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by participating in the Atonement He has made for us. Jesus died and rose for us and yet it is up to us to respond. Jesus has won our salvation and we cannot have it except by and through Him. This means that Christ expects us to have a relationship with Him. Unless we find the strait gate and enter by the narrow way by that He establishes for us, we cannot reach Heaven. And this means that the life that He lived, the unearned, unmerited, and undeserved suffering He endured, and the Resurrection He commenced must all become our own or something that we participate in willingly, sacrificially, and joyfully. This is the message of Eastertide.
        
To find the strait gate and to enter the narrow way is no easy business. The old adages no pain, no gain, no suffering, no salvation, and no Cross, no Crown are all consecrated by the earthly life our Lord lived and intends to share with us. Christ will sanctify us by the Father’s Grace in a patient progress that leads us out of sin and death and into righteousness and new life. The pattern He consecrates and blesses will involve suffering and death before we find new life. Christ never promised us immediate and paranormal perfection and salvation now. This is a gift to be bestowed upon us as we find the strait gate and enter the narrow way that leadeth unto life. (Idem)
        
Therefore, what we have before us is the promise of a gift and reward to them that embrace Jesus Christ. Embracing Jesus Christ will be the hard part. In Eastertide we learn that no sooner has Christ risen from the dead than He tells His Apostles, Now I go my way to Him that sent me; and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou? (St. John xvi. 5) Like men in all ages, we want God with us and for us, tangibly present in the flesh. We want the immediate gratification of Christ’s nearness. We believe, immaturely, that His absence from us in the flesh will breed catastrophic sadness and sorrow. Yet we, with the Apostles, must learn that Christ cannot save us unless we are willing to share in His sufferings to gain His victory. His tangible Incarnation is only the beginning. We must find the strait gate and narrow way that leadeth unto life inwardly and spiritually through His indwelling Holy Spirit. Christ intends to come alive in our souls by working His redemption into us. Christ desires to dwell in us. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (St. John xiv. 23)
        
With the Father, Christ intends to come to us and pitch their tent on the soil of our souls. The Resurrected and Ascended Lord wants to live on in us from Heaven to Earth as His all-saving life takes root in our hearts. It will be as full of Satan’s tempting and troublemaking as it was for Him. His Redemption accomplished once for all must be tried and tested from the ground of our souls through persistent faith.
 
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you….The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me. (St. John xv. 18-21)
 
The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is no miracle recipe for instant gratification and premature salvation. Salvation is a process whereby Christ will be born in us and grow up in us through the Holy Spirit. The whole point of Christ’s Victory over sin, death, and Satan in Crucifixion and Resurrection was to order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men. (Collect Easter IV) The comfort and strength of the same Holy Spirit will enable us to love the thing that the Father commandeth and love the thing He doth promise (Collect…) in His Son. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. (St. John xvi. 7)
        
Christ will come to us from the Father inwardly and spiritually. St. James exhorts us to Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.  Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. (St. James iv. 7,8) Jesus tells us that when He sends the Comforter unto us, He will reprove the world of sin. (St. John xvi. 8) We must be convicted of our sins, which were the cause of Christ’s passion. We must repent and embrace the Father’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas says that he will convince, rebuke, the world, as the one who will invisibly enter into their hearts and pour his charity into them so that their fear is conquered and they have the strength to rebuke. (Aquinas: John’s Gospel) We must not only repent but rebuke all sin in the Name of Jesus. Next, the Comforter will reprove…the world of righteousness. (Ibid, 10) Aquinas reminds us that St. Paul, the greatest of convicted Christians, proclaimed that we are sold under sin… There is none righteous, no, not one. (Romans iii. 10, Ibid) and that the world must be convicted always of the righteousness that [we] have ignored or neglected. (Idem) Through the Spirit, the Father will show us how we have rejected the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Finally, the Comforter will rebuke…the world of judgment because the prince of this world is judged. (Idem) Aquinas reminds us that we shouldn’t blame our sins on the devil. Thus, the world is reproved by this judgment because being unwilling to resist, it is overcome by the devil, who although expelled is brought back by their consent to sin: "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies" (Rom 6:12, Idem) In Christ’s death, the Devil was robbed of any power he had over us. In the end, through the Spirit, we shall rebuke Satan if only we believe.
        
Christians should never seek an easier, softer way. The journey into Christ’s Resurrection is difficult but filled with all faith, hope, and love. St. James exhorts us:
My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience… Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.
(St. James i. 2-4)
 
This is all Christ’s precious gift to us. St. James continues:
 
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the Word of
Truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (St. James i. 17, 18)
 
The gift of the Father is Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Word. Jesus longs for the power of His Crucifixion to lift our redeemed hearts into His glorious Resurrection. Jesus, the Word of Truth, will prune away the deadwood of our old hardened sinful selves to implant the new life that He has in store for us as the beauty of the Holy Spirit convicts us towards this end, leading us through the straight gate and narrow way that alone ensure our salvation.
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

But praised be the LORD, who hath not given us over
for a prey unto their teeth. Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the
snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and we are delivered.
(Ps. cxxiv. 5,6)
 
Easter Tide is all about avoiding those things that are contrary to our profession and follow such things as are agreeable to the same. (Collect Easter III) We do this, of course, because if we have been admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, this alone as a habit of life will ensure that our pilgrimage is sanctified and that we shall be saved. In Easter Tide, we undertake the hard labor of dying to our old selves and coming alive to the new life that we find in our Resurrected Christ. We die to ourselves as we petition God to show [us] that are in error the light of [His] truth. (Idem) Satan’s power must be banished. And all of this must come to us by the Grace of the Holy Spirit. Christ desires for us to partake of His Resurrection and participate in the New Life that He has won for us. But the power of hope and belief in His Resurrection involve a transition from one state to another –from sin to righteousness, from death to life, in rejecting Satan and embracing our Heavenly Father’s will.
         
Thus, the Resurrected Christ invites us into a relationship that will ensure our deliverance to His Kingdom. With St. Peter, in this morning’s Epistle we must come to discover ourselves as strangers and pilgrims (I St. Peter ii. 11) in a fallen creation. And this means that we must no longer be at home with this world and its impotent gods. St. Peter insists that the starting point is to
abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul; having [our] conversation honest among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak evil against [us] as evil doers, they may by [our] good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. (Idem)
 
We must say No! to any inordinate desire or longing that is not of God. Isaiah the Prophet reminds us that for the iniquity of [our] covetousness was God wroth, and smote [us in times past]: [God] hid [Himself], and was wroth….(Is. xviii. 17) Our old selves had forgotten the secret things that belong to the Lord our God (Deut. xxix. 29). Because we did not remember that our true relationship is always with God, who seemed hidden but was present to the spirit, we were strangers and pilgrims to His Omnipotent Wisdom, Power, and Love.

St. Peter reminds us that we must be cuttingly candid about the spiritual warfare that threatens to envelop us if we forget God. David the Psalmist reminds us If the Lord Himself had not been on our side…when men rose up against us. They had swallowed us up alive, when they were so wrathfully displeased at us. Yea the waters had drowned us, and the stream had gone over our souls. The deep waters of the proud had gone even over our souls. (Ps. 1-4) David claims that the troubled sea…[whose] waters cast up dirt and mire, [in which is]…no peace, always threatens to devour and drown the souls of those who forget God’s Invisible Power. The man who struggles to be faithful to God is even hindered, harassed, and hijacked by those who have no fear of God before their eyes. (Rom. iii. 18) He is assaulted by a blasphemous and brutish generation, that set their mouths against heaven, out of [whose mouths] belch forth impieties and impurities, to dishonour Him who made them, to grieve the souls of his servants, and to spread the contagion of their ungodliness. (B.Jenks: P.P., p.240) But because David knows that his enemy is too strong for him, he resorts to God’s strength in all humility. Praised be the LORD, who hath not given us over for a prey unto their teeth. Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and we are delivered. Our help standeth in the Name of the LORD, who hath made heaven and earth. (Ibid, 5-7) David believed in and embraced the presence of the Invisible but living God. He grasps too that God alone can chase away the birds of prey that would [ensnare and] devour God’s Sacrifice in his heart. He believes that God alone can drive out the unclean beasts that would trample down the plantation of God’s Grace in his soul. (Jenks, 224) He trusts that the Lord of hosts is with him; the God of Jacob is his refuge. (Ps. lxvi. 11) He sets aside the clear and visible threats of earthly enemies and in meekness of mind humbles himself before God, for that continual proneness which is in him to sin against His Maker and Redeemer, that makes him so unlike to God, and so contrary to what His holy laws require him to be. (Jenks)

David was a stranger and pilgrim in this world. He looked forward to God’s deliverance by hoping for the fulfillment of His promises in Jesus Christ. Christians know the benefits of Christ’s all-saving life and believe in the power of His deliverance. But for that power to liberate us effectually, we must declare spiritual war on this world and its ship of fools. The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. (Psalm xiv. 1) Fools trust in their wits and the stirrings of their hearts. He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool. (Prov. xxviii. 26) A fool despiseth wisdom and understanding. (Prov. i. 7) Fools rejoice when they should lament and mourn when they should rejoice. Because they are at home in this world, they exult only in the temporary pursuit of happiness and joy. Because it is convenient to their idolatries, they are glad to think that God cannot be bothered and thus remains unmoved by their sin. They have forgotten the wisdom in the wise man’s understanding:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
                           (Ps. cxxxix. 7-100
        

The wise man mourns when he forgets the Invisible God because he has forgotten that he is a stranger and pilgrim. He laments that he has not awakened sooner to God’s caring desire for his soul. For David’s heirs, who have witnessed Christ’s Resurrection, as a manifestation of God’s Invisible Wisdom, Power, and Love, Jesus says to us: Ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. (St. John xvi. 20)  Mourning and lamentation for man do not disappear with the Incarnation. Rather, they comprise an essential moment in that spiritual movement whereby Christ carries us from the death to sin into new and Redeemed Human Life. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that the wise Christian will be sad for three reasons. First, by sadness of evil, man is corrected. (Easter III: TA) When Christ promises to depart from us in the flesh, He will correct us inwardly and spiritually. Unless we mourn our sinful rejection of Him, the Resurrection virtue that Christ longs to infuse into our bodies and souls will remain dormant. Sorrow for our abandonment of His ever-present sacrificial love renew our passion for finding it anew. Second, by temporal sadness, man escapes eternal torment. (Idem) A healthy sorrow for our refusal to embrace the means of Grace compels our souls to long more fully for the stronger medicine that Christ has for our bodies and souls. Third, by a mean measure of justice, we acquire eternal joys. (Idem) Punishment through sadness impels us to accept the just punishment for our sins now. Then we begin to treasure the gain of Christ’s lasting victory over our earthly sorrow for our sins in this body of death. Temporary suffering will be converted into soaring desire for the exceeding and eternal weight of God’s glory.
         
Jesus is teaching us that for so long as we are in these earthen vessels, we must become strangers and pilgrims in this world. If we seek Him out amidst it all, His Invisible Presence will enable us to persist. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (St. John xv. 4, 5) If Christ lives in us now Invisibly, our sorrows shall be transformed into the permanence of His joy in our hearts. He likens it to a woman who is with child. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. (Ibid, 21, 22) The expectant mother endures all manner of suffering and sorrow in joyful expectation of her child’s birth. So too the wise man must endure the suffering and sorrow that accompany the conception of the Word of God in the womb of his soul before he is born again from above and by the Invisible God. Calvin tells us that Christ means that the sorrow which we shall endure for the sake of the Gospel will be profitable. (J. Calvin: Comm.)
       
St. Augustine reminds us that, At present, the Church is in travail with the longing for this fruit of all her labor…now she travails in birth with groaning, then shall she bring forth in joy; now she travails in birth through her prayers, then shall she bring forth in her praises. (John xvi) The end that we seek is the consolation of the Divine Presence. So, over and against ungodliness, St. Peter tells us that our incipient joy should be caught up with well doing, [that we] may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men, and not using [our] liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. (Ibid, 13) Christ tells us today, I will see you again, and you will rejoice. (St. John xvi. 22) If we believe in Him, He will take our bodies and souls into all joy, and others shall join us as strangers and pilgrims, visibly and truly embracing the love of the Invisible God, that no man shall take away from us. (Idem)
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 

 

 







































For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.
(1 St. Peter ii. 25)

In this Joyful Eastertide, we are called to become members of Jesus Christ’s Resurrected Body by embracing the forgiveness of sins in our lives. In so doing, we must acknowledge that the forgiveness of sins is really a two-edged sword meant to divide us both from sin and wickedness in ourselves and also from sin in the lives of others. Regarding the first, we are called to receive the forgiveness of our own sins. About the second, we are urged to translate the forgiveness of sins received into acts of compassion, pity, and mercy for all others. All this is given to us from the Risen Jesus Christ so that we might become habituated to the character and nature of Our Heavenly Father.
         
The Church’s selection of readings for this Joyful Eastertide does not pretend that this new Risen Life we seek is easy. Thus, for example, on this Good Shepherd Sunday, most people think that we ought to be reading about Jesus the soft, all-embracing, and gentle shepherd who forever seeks out His lost sheep. And while this might be true in one way, in another way it tends to ignore the tough love that characterizes the nature of every good shepherd. Christ the Good Shepherd is no exception.
         
Jesus Christ has demands and conditions for the sheep of His fold and the members of His Body, the Church. As we become His sheep, Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd’s expectations of us become clearer. What the sheep of Christ look like and what the Good Shepherd expects of them are illustrated in this morning’s First Epistle of St. Peter. St. Peter is addressing a group of slaves who are Christians. His letter is to one of his flocks in Asia Minor, many of whose members are servants or slaves. He uses them as a parable or illustration of the kind of life we should expect to live and how that life is fully taken on by Jesus Christ. He writes to slaves who suffer unjustly and undeservedly. We don’t know the specifics of individual cases, but we surmise that Christian slaves are having a hard time with the forgiveness of sins. That they are slaves is disturbing enough. Yet, St. Peter is not interested in the abolition of earthly slavery but with its spiritual counterpart. These slaves are being punishing unfairly and tyrannically and their spiritual freedom in Jesus Christ is in danger of being lost. Peter wants them to pray about becoming slaves in the spirit to Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd. He wants them to see that there is a good kind of slavery that no earthly creature can threaten or destroy.
         
St. Peter says, Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. (1 St. Peter ii. 18) St. Peter believes that every man, even slaves, can allow the Imitation of Christ to rule their hearts. He is not writing about earthly liberation but of that Divine and lasting spiritual liberty that Jesus alone, the Good Shepherd, brings to every man, no matter what his state in life. He reminds them that Christ too became a slave to earthly injustice, bondage, and malice. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps. (1 St. Peter ii. 21) St. Peter does not pretend in any way that such a spiritual response to earthly wickedness is easy. For, as Monsignor Knox reminds us, St. Peter remembers, too, how he followed in his Master’s footsteps, when Christ was led away to be crucified. (R.K.: The Epistles and Gospels, p. 125) He is only too conscious of the radical injustice done to his Master, Jesus Christ, and of his own slavery and bondage to cowardice, fear, and shame. When he had been sitting by the fire in the cellar of the High Priest’s palace, he was surrounded by slaves. Here were those who were shackled forcibly by other men. Yet Peter was chained and enslaved to his own voluntary faithlessness, dread, and pride. Peter abandoned Jesus Christ as a free man. The slaves knew no such liberty. Peter was afraid of losing his freedom. Yet all the while he was a real slave to his own shallow faith and faint heart. Peter had become a slave to a master far worse than the slaveholders who held his companions in bondage. He feared imminent death by reason of association with Jesus. Then, because he denied Jesus before the cock had crowed twice, he feared God’s judgment. He remembered that guile was… found in his mouth, that when reviled, he reviled…again, and that when he suffered the accusation that he was one of Jesus’ friends, he threatened his accusers. (Ibid) Jesus’ tough love alone would reveal his slavery to sin.       

But now in today’s Epistle, St. Peter speaks as one who has been liberated by Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins. St. Peter has repented, and Christ has forgiven his abandonment and betrayal. Christ now calls Peter into the new life of Resurrection. So, St. Peter exhorts all slaves who suffer unjustly to forgive their oppressors and masters as Christ has forgiven His executioners and even His cowardly friends. Christ suffered for our sakes…who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who when reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously: who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. (Ibid, 22- 25) 

The slaves St. Peter addresses may be the hapless victims of other men’s wickedness, but this is no excuse for not forgiving all men their trespasses against us. Both Peter and his hearers are potential slaves to sin. Now, they are invited into true spiritual liberation through Christ who is the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection, and the Life. The slaves are given a great opportunity not only to follow Christ themselves but also to shower their masters, Christian or pagan, with love and forgiveness because they can become emissaries and ambassadors in bonds for the forgiveness of sins and Christ’s Resurrection. They can reveal that they have been made free by the Blood of Jesus Christ and are now the true sons of the living God –whose Love in them can conquer all wickedness because the evil of other men need never provoke vengeance. True freedom is found in Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins. There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy…(St. James iv. 12)
           
This obedience to God calls them to forgive the sins of others, endure grief, suffering wrongfully…take it patiently…[because] this is acceptable with God. (Ibid, 19, 20) If Jesus Christ endured grief, suffered wrongfully on the Cross of His Redemption and made good out of it, so too can all men! Like Christ, we all should forgive those who are the cause of all of our suffering. For Christ is interested in all sinners –both slaves and free men! Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, desires to come alive in every human heart and to help us to forgive whenever we suffer wrongfully. If Jesus –the pattern of the unjustly tortured, punished, and crucified Slave, forgives us our betrayals and abandonments of Him, we should forgive also. In fact, Jesus said, If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you…if they have persecuted me, they will persecute you…. (St. John xv. 18, 20) For Christ bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness. (Ibid, 24) Again, with Monsignor Knox, Christ’s wounds are healing stripes, and His death produces, of its own efficacy, a new death and the beginning of new life in us. (Idem) So, all slaves, all of us, are invited into the new death…and new life through the forgiveness of sins. For ye were as sheep, going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls. (Ibid, 25) We all are slaves -the slaves of others, slaves of ourselves, slaves of our sins, and the slaves of Satan. Christ has forgiven us, and we should forgive all others.
          
St. Peter shows us that all men are the slaves of sin and should want to become the slaves of Jesus Christ, incorporated into the Resurrected Life of the One who has become a Slave for us all. This Slave is the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls. This Good Shepherd voluntarily became God’s Slave because He giveth His life for the sheep. (St. John x. 11) The Good Shepherd is the Slave who is works tirelessly and incessantly to bring His Sheep back to God our Heavenly Father. He even lays down His life for His sheep because it is the only way that He can bear the sheep’s burden fully, destroy their sin, and open to them the gate of everlasting life. But even beyond this, He longs to become our Slave even today. He is forever the Father’s willing and happy Slave. He, who is only and ever the obedient revealer of His Father’s Wisdom, Power, and Love, longs to infuse all men with the Spirit’s liberating power. He desires to feed us with God’s Goodness to free us from our slavery to sin. He alone is the Slave who knows our need and meets it. He is the Slave whose service alone can conquer and overcome our sinful condition. He alone is the Slave who selflessly, innocently, and freely becomes our Master from the Cross of His Love and beyond.   

Jesus goes where He is sent. He comes to us. Will we allow this Slave to do His work for us? He offers us His service for free! He charges no money. But if we would employ this Slave, we shall begin to see God’s love alive in His heart. If we would keep this Slave, we must allow His tough love to serve us, We need Him most in the hard work of conquering our sins. Funnily enough, we need this Slave to become our Master. Jesus is our Slave. The slaveholders of history should have seen Jesus in their earthly slaves. If they had, they would have freed them and thanked them for leading them to true liberation. Jesus alone is the true Slave and Master. Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd who can help us to endure grief, suffer wrongfully…and patiently be buffeted for the good. (Idem) Then we can begin to become His sheep, following the blessed steps of His most holy life, and ourselves becoming Slaves to others, following the Commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, with St. Peter and all the Saints.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
            
 

 
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,         
Where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affections on 
Things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life
Is hid with Christ in God. 
(Col. 3. 1-3)
         
There is something rather strange about our Easter Epistle, which was addressed by St. Paul to the infant Church at Colossae in small Phrygian city in Asia Minor, or modern day Turkey. Easter Sunday is the first of 40 days. Before He ascended back to the Father, during the period of 40 days, Christ appeared to Peter, to Mary Magdalene, to the women, to James and all the Apostles, to some five hundred, to Stephen prior to his masdsrtyrdom, and later to St. Paul as one born out of due time. (1 Cor. xv. 8)  So why does Mother Church have us reading an Epistle that seems to be all about the spiritual relationship that we have with Christ after Pentecost? In it, St. Paul speaks about our relationship with the hidden God. Your life is hid with Christ in God. (Col. iii. 3) We haven’t even begun our 40 days of getting used to the Resurrected Christ than the Church turns our minds upward and into the Heavenly realm!
        
So why are we reading about having our lives hid with Christ in God? For St. Paul, something has happened on the Day of Resurrection that forever changes our lives in relation to God the Father. Jesus Christ is not a mere soul or Spirit. Jesus Christ, the God/Man, has risen from the dead. Article IV of the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion states this: Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man's nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.  St. Paul believes that Christ indeed died in a natural body and rose a spiritual body. What he means is that Christ raised up the body through which He lived and died and has transfigured it. His soul took back his body, and penetrated it through and through making it spiritual…this spiritual body is transparent, obedient to the Spirit, unconstrained and lightsome…the instrument of the Divine Saviour’s soul. (Mouroux, p. 89) The Risen Christ is, then, a glorified unity of body, soul, and spirit. He is the same Lord who died once for all our sins. His Risen Body bears the wounds of His Crucifixion, reminding us that He has borne our sufferings, grief, and sin and brought them to death. But the same wounds remind us of His ongoing love for us, as this spiritual Body that He bears will expand deepen to include us in His new Resurrected life, as His Body, the Church. But even during the 40 days of His Resurrection, He begins to call believers into the new Body that He will share with all who will follow Him. This Body has been raised up with the Father’s Blessing and the Spirit’s power. This spiritual Body is in more than one place at one time. Peter sees Him and then James does also. Magdalene has seen Him and so too have the men walking on the Road to Emmaus. Jesus’ Body is already spiritually greater than what our earthly senses can ever comprehend. It is of such a nature that will ensure that our lives [can be] hid with Christ in God. 
Of course, it takes time for the Apostles to realize what is going on. The 40 days are necessary. For Man to come to understand timeless Truth, it all takes time. But in that time what they come to realize is that Christ is calling them to become one with Him in a new way. Christ is now ready to share Himself with them in the way that has enabled Him to conquer sin, death, and Satan and to open to them the Gates of Everlasting Life.  
        
So how can our lives be hid with Christ in God? St. Paul reminds us in another place that Christ our passover is sacrificed for us;  therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Cor v. 7,8) Christ Jesus our Saviour is Risen from the dead. He invites us into that life that has gained the victory over all sin in all ages. Just as Christ’s victory is complete, so too does He conquer all sins in all times. Jesus died at the hands of sinful men and their sin. But He died, being dead unto sin. Sin had no claim or power over Him. Christ conquered sin through His obedience to God the Father and because He has always been alive unto God. (Idem) In the Resurrection, Jesus Christ invites us to begin to participate in His obedience to the Father. Christ, even in death, was alive unto God. We are seldom alive unto God, since with the Jews and Romans and all sinners in all ages, we have killed God’s Word in the flesh -the flesh of Jesus Christ in our own flesh and the flesh of all others. We have been dead but now Christ invites us into the New Life that He reconstitutes for us following His crucifixion. So now, we must seek those things which are above. (Col. iii. 1) Not above and beyond our reach, but above and beyond our wildest expectations, above and beyond what we desire or deserve, above and beyond what Man can do for himself in any age. And yet not above and beyond what God’s love can and will do for us as Heaven reaches down to earth to lift us up back into His loving embrace. Not above and beyond God’s healing touch, His quickening spirit, His ever-present and all-powerful presence, even here and now. But yes, above and within the heart of Jesus, whose Glorified Body and Being are with the Father pleading our case in all ages. Yes, above and within Jesus Christ Himself, in whom every aspect of our lives can become a new occasion for our rising up and out of ourselves, mortifying [our] members which are upon earth; [up and out of] our uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry…(Col. iii. 5) In our bodies, because in His Risen and Glorified Body because Christ is always in God. In our souls, because in His Risen and Glorified Soul, He (is) in us, and we (are) in Him. Christ is risen from the dead. Sin is finished, death is finished, Satan is finished, if only we shall discover our need for Him even now. Our lives are hid with Christ in God. (Col. iii. 3)

And how does He allow us to continue to be hid with Christ in God? Jesus says I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (St. John vi. 51) As He reveals and manifests the truth of His Glorified Flesh on this Easter Sunday, we remember that Christ gives Himself to us as the Bread of Life. Christ’s life is to do the will of the Father. When we eat His Body and drink His Blood, we believe that we shall begin to partake of that Bread of Life that gives us the power to overcome sin, death, and Satan. Through this Sacrament we come into Communion with Jesus. The Real Presence that He shared with the Apostles on this Day of Resurrection, He shares with us also. When we eat His Body and drink His Blood, we begin to possess eternal life. (1 Cor. xi. 26) Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. (St. John vi. 54-57) 

When we eat His Body and drink His Blood, we can reckon [ourselves] to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans vi. 11) Being alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord means that our affections, our desires, and our passions our set on receiving that food and drink that can save us, who deserve none of it.  Being fed, we can ask the Father to give us His Heavenly Love that forever moves Jesus Christ the Son to free us from all sin and death through the Holy Spirit. Being fed, we can know that Jesus indwells our hearts and souls and is ready at hand to help us in every time of need. The love of God in the Heart of Jesus Christ leads captivity captive (Ephesians iv. 8). We are no longer to live in bondage to sin, death, and Satan. And mark my words, sin has always and ever been present in this world Our lives are hid with Christ in God because He has overcome them, has set us free, and holds us in His heart in Heaven, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for us! (Hebrews vii. 25) forever praying for our deliverance from our sins. He does so from the core of our hearts and souls, who knows our needs before we ask. (St. Matthew vi. 8)

On this Day of our New Life, as creatures Resurrected from the Dead, let us begin to live freely and thankfully. On this day may true joy fill our hearts. Let us, therefore, thank and praise our Saviour Jesus Christ this morning for dying for us and for rising for us, and for assuring us that our lives are Hid in Him with God. Let us close by ending with the song of the poet: 
 
MOST glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day, 
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin; 
And, having harrow’d hell, didst bring away 
Captivity thence captive us to win: 
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin; 
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin, 
May live forever in felicity! 
 
And that Thy love we weighing worthily, 
May likewise love Thee for the same againe; 
And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy, 
With love may one another entertayne! 
   So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought, 
   –Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
 
Edmund Spenser “Easter Sonnet”.
 
Amen.
 
©wjsmartin
 

Good Friday
Meditation Three
 
Christ is alone now. He has forgiven His enemies, He has welcomed a new friend into the journey of death, which His new family begins to experience as new life. Now He is alone, at the primordial point of experiencing the meaning of sin, offering himself to the Father. Jesus is the true life of man. When He dies, He feels the suffering and pain, as only the whole and complete, perfect and unblemished Word of God and forgiveness of sins can. The greater the Life, the greater the feeling of its loss. We cannot know what Christ felt, in the loss of His new human life. The Sinless One is punished as a sinner. Can we be begin to imagine the pain? Jesus is pure human life rejected by so many and now near death.
        
But He wills to be cut down in order that He may jump up high. His desire has been to do nothing less than the will of God made flesh. The will of God in human flesh involves death, death not only to sin but to any creature other than God.

The Son sees his Father approaching. The spiritual reality of God’s nearness is now known and experienced. Jesus says I thirst. (St. John xix. 28) He thirsts not for earthly drink. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth. (St. John xix. 28) They gave me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink. (Psalm lxix. 22) But Jesus insists that Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. (St. Matthew iv. 4) He thirsts for the righteousness of God. Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God? (Psalm 42. 1,2) Christ Jesus desires nothing less than that spiritual water mingled with the blood and the Spirit that will yield new life. The things of the earth have passed away. The forgiven sons and daughters of the earth, the reconciled criminal and the new family that He has taken with Him and into the depths of sin’s meaning will now find new birth, but only through the forgiveness of sins that He is. Man was created in God’s image and likeness. The discarded image must be made new.
Paul Claudel puts it nicely: A drop of water: the only thing in the world that costs nothing, a thing that one would not refuse to a wounded animal, a sick dog, humanity refuses to its maker and Savior. (I believe in God) But neither God nor Christ refuses it to us. We can have it through Christ, who today knows that we need it if we are to be saved. We will learn to receive it ourselves, and then give a cup of this cold water to others in His Name. He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me…And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.(St. Matthew x. 42)

Our journey on this Good Friday involves coming to the knowledge of Christ and to the knowledge of ourselves. Our eyes are beginning to be opened to the light that creates new life.  In Christ we find God’s deepest desire for us. I thirst. Christ says. We thirst and begin to drink in death. In Christ we find not only the thirst of One Man for His Maker, but the thirst of God’s Son for the salvation of us all. Our eyes are opened to Christ’s love for us even as He is suffering and dying. He never forgets us. We are an ongoing concern in the heart of Christ Jesus. Jesus is the light that loves and makes new life. Love has many dimensions. It is passion; He is the Passion of God made flesh, God’s Passion for our salvation. He will become our Passion for God rediscovered and our Passion for others’ salvation. He is the Forgiveness of Sins made flesh, God’s forgiveness of our sins, and will become that liberating power that moves us to forgive all others. He is Yearning made flesh, God’s yearning for our friendship and company. He will become our yearning for Him and then for others discovery of His friendship.  He is about to die and He remembers us. His thirst for God is His thirst for Man.

Jesus is the Love of God and the Love of Man in a simultaneous unity of unselfed in-othering. Think about it. He is Love as in-othering; He lives in and for the other, first God and then every other man. He is Love as unselfed. He has emptied Himself of Himself that He might escort new sons and daughters into the Father’s presence, in His name, as members of His new Body that He is forming. He is the Love of God and the Love of Man coming together. As for Himself, He doesn’t much care. The point, His point, the labor and work of His life, is to reconcile Man to God and Man to Man. His role is to arrange the meeting, to enable the encounter. Is He essential? Absolutely. But the minute He is self-consciously significant, the work and labor collapses. The selfless Saviour is the spiritual Person who alone conveys God to man and returns man to God.

It is finished. (St. John xix. 30) Today we come to know that the mission of Christ is finished and accomplished. We realize also that we ourselves are finished. The truth is naked before our very eyes. What is finished? Our pride is finished. Our sin is finished. The end of sin is death. Our sin has brought about the death of Christ. But even in this death, the death of Christ, man’s self-willed alienation from God is revealed as what has no power and no future. It is finished. Life in isolation and alienation from God is illusorily satisfying, temporarily pleasing, and wholly incomplete. Life in isolation from God is death. This life is finished. In the death of Christ what is finished is the illusion that we have any power, that we have any meaning apart from the wisdom and love of God. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not even death. Not even our Crucifixion of Christ, the Word of God in Man. Nothing can separate us from God at all. For God is near to us. We have been carried into Christ’s death and are about to enter into His New Life. Our sin is finished. Death is about to be conquered and finished.

It is finished. What this means is that Christ Jesus has gone where we could not go. Christ Jesus has endured what we could never endure. He has taken on and felt the curse of His own judgment, the punishment of His own law, the justice of His measuring. He is, in a word, consistent with Himself. He does not subject his own creatures to anything that He Himself cannot endure. Do not do unto others anything that you would not have them do unto you. (St. Luke vi. 31) He meant and He lived it. This does not make it any the less painful, horrifying, and sad. But at the end of the day, it shows us that He is the center of all reality- the life, light, and love that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.(1 Cor xiii.7), in order to make new life.

Life is an ongoing effort and labor to place our spirits into the hands of the living God. Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. Nothing need escape the Love of God. And God’s Love for man, which is Jesus Christ Himself, is reconciled to it. To love is to suffer, old Bishop Morse used to say. In Christ’s crucifixion we find the pathway to love. Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. So, we believe that Jesus’ final Ascent to the Father is an ascent of the whole Person, body and soul, suffering and pain, with joy and gladness. He intends what we should become members of His Body, here on earth, with Him as our Head. He promises us that we should experience as much struggle, pain, toil, and suffering as He did. Within the Body there will be an extension of His Crucifixion, with the crucifixion of many members on the way to Resurrection. Christ establishes the Pattern for Redemption. Let us close with some words taken from Hans Urs Von Balthasar:

At the very periphery of this thanksgiving to God, it is legitimate to ask that, if God permits it, we may help the Lord to bear a tiny particle of the suffering of the Cross, of his inner anxiety and darkness, if it will contribute to reconciling the world with God. Jesus himself says that it is possible to help him bear it when he challenges us to take up our cross daily. Paul says the same in affirming that he suffers that portion of the Cross that Christ has reserved for him and for other Christians. When life is hard and apparently hopeless, we can be confident that this darkness of ours can be taken up into the great darkness of redemption through which the light of Easter dawns. And when what is required of us seems too burdensome, when the pains become unbearable and the fate we are asked to accept seems simply meaningless—then we have come very close to the man nailed on the Cross at the Place of the Skull, for he has already undergone this on our behalf and, moreover, in unimaginable intensity. When surrounded by apparent meaninglessness, therefore, we cannot ask to be given a calming sense of meaning; all we can do is wait and endure, quite still, like the Crucified, not seeing anything, facing the dark abyss of death. Beyond this abyss there waits for us something that, at present, we cannot see (nor can we even manage to regard it as true), namely, a further abyss of light in which all the world’s pain is treasured and cherished in the ever-open heart of God. Then we shall be allowed, like the Apostle Thomas, to put our hand into this gaping wound; feeling it, we shall realize in a very bodily way that God’s love transcends all human senses, and with the disciple we shall pray: “My Lord and my God.”
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Good Friday
Meditation Two
 
Christ the Word of God, the forgiveness of sins made flesh is making new life from His Cross. The love of his Being is bringing life out of death. St. Luke tells us that Jesus is crucified with two malefactors. Saints Mark and Matthew tell us that they were thieves. One of the thieves, hanging to His right side, knowing that he deserves to be punished for his crimes, begs Jesus to remember Him when He comes into His Kingdom. Jesus and the good thief are approaching earthly death. The thief comes to believe that he is in the presence of God. Jesus consecrates his conversion. Today shalt thou be with me in paradise. (St. Luke xxiii. 43)

One thing more must be made for those who still live. Jesus utters His Third Word. Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! (St. John xix. 25,26) We remember the words spoken to the Blessed Virgin by the old prophet Simeon some thirty years prior: Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (St. Luke ii. 35) She did not understand the meaning of those words then but perhaps is beginning to feel their power now. Like any good mother, she feels the pain of her dying child as one who is pierced through with a sword. And how much more must the torture be for her now, as she sees the Son of her womb, God the Father’s Holy Innocent Word made flesh, the child [in whom would be] set the fall and rising again of many in Israel, (Ibid, 34) dying a wholly undeserved, unmerited, unearned, and unjust death. We can only imagine the pain and confusion that she experienced, the bewilderment and amazement at what was transpiring before her very eyes. To her, this was the true blasphemy, execration, and sacrilege of fallen man against her Son whom she conceived by the Holy Ghost of God the Father.
        
The time was not yet for Jesus to disclose the full truth and meaning that His death would bring to her and others. But in the time between now and what would come later, He takes the first steps to channel her faith and belief towards the new world that He was always making and now redeeming. The Blessed Virgin, we must remember, was nothing if not a creature of pure faith, obedience, and trust. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me, according to thy Word. (St. Luke i. 38) The commencement of man’s salvation began with her Yes to God. Her Son was first conceived in her soul by faith and only thereafter in her womb. And we do well to remember that St. Luke reminds us that on two occasions at least, because she did not grasp the nature and meaning of this Son she had brought into the world, she pondered these things in her heart –immediately following his birth, and when, twelve years later, she thought she had lost Him in Jerusalem, where, when she found him, He rebuked her and said, Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? (St. Luke ii. 49) Later, when He chastised her for pestering him about the depletion of wine at the Wedding of Cana in Galilee, rightly rebuked, she was obedient and trusting, faithful as ever, and said to the servants, whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. (St. John ii. 5) Jesus knows the faith of His Mother. She too knows that her life has been a constant vocation to let Him go. At one point she and His kin were standing outside of the temple waiting for him. One man said, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But Jesus answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? (St. Matthew xii. 47, 48) At another time, Jesus having healed a dumb man, a woman cries out, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But Jesus said, yea rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it. (St. Luke 27, 28.) To some, Jesus seemed always to be pushing His mother away from Himself, separating Himself from her, and so undervaluing her unique role.
        
And it here that we find revealed His real intention and desire. Jesus is a human son, the Son of Man, for sure. He is fully human. But Jesus is first and foremost the everlastingly-begotten Son of God. He has already begun to open His dying life to others; one man, the good thief, has become a part of this good and living death. His Sonship is enlarged; it will broaden and enlarge so as to include all who repent and follow Him. His Sonship is not limited by His blood-tie to his earthly mother. His Sonship will expand to include all who choose to become the Sons and Daughters of God through Him. Mary is His human mother, but she too is the mother of much more than one earthly son, as unique as He may be. Nay, she is called the Mother of God. And if she is the Mother of God, she must be prepared to bear and care for many more children than Jesus alone. She must die to earthly motherhood so that she might become a spiritual mother. Woman, behold thy Son, Jesus says to her as she stands trembling in the arms of John the beloved disciple. Jesus looks at John and says, Behold thy mother. (St. John xix. 27) In neither case does He address them by their proper names. Mary is to become the Mother of the New Creation that Jesus is making, beginning here and now from His Cross. She will become the Mother of redeemed and reborn humanity, beginning here and now, through the pangs of spiritual rebirth and new life. Her love for Jesus as a natural son dies with Him on His Cross; her method of birthing will move from the physical and particular, to the spiritual and universal.  John is to be adopted as her first new child, the child of the Grace that is making all things new through Jesus’ death. He will be the caregiver and son who will ensure that her spiritual mission continues through his earthly protection. She will be John’s mother. In the nearness of God’s Today, she will become the spiritual mother of a new humanity.
Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. (Isaiah liv. 1)
Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabacthani: My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? (St Matt. xxvii. 46)
 
Mary hears what must have seemed the most difficult words that Jesus- or perhaps anyone, could ever utter. They strike us as wrong, precisely because they seem so dangerously close to despair. And yet they are not. Jesus feels the potential despair of every man who feels abandoned by the Father. These are the words of psychic and spiritual pain, but they are the very opposite of despair. These are the words of hope actually, for Jesus has joined all who will be poor in spirit. Christ does not curse God and die. Rather He turns to the one and only source of new life, God the Father, in a cry of agonizing helplessness and loneliness. This is the summary of the long, dark night of the soul. The soul can turn to nothing for comfort other than God Himself. The Father is distant and silent, but present. Jesus cries My God, My God.

God’s distance and silence are indeed part of the process of salvation. Here is the sense of utter dependence upon God, even from that separation in silence. O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou [wilt].(St. Matthew 26. 39), He had prayed in His agony in the garden. But God’s will must be accomplished. And so Jesus endures what for all other men is seemingly unendurable. Here is the point where the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness overcame it not. (St. John 1. 5) The light flickers, and trembles, and might even be tempted to despair and yet Jesus does not yield. The light flickers and trembles because Christ has taken into His heart the experience of every man, woman and child who has ever felt the loneliness of abandonment. In the heart of Jesus, mankind’s last and final temptation to surrender to the void of nothingness, a lifeless place emptied of light and love, is overcome. Jesus experiences humanity’s predicament to the full. In the final point of encounter with man’s pain, he feels acutely and sees clearly the possibility of the sin against the Holy Ghost. And yet he does not surrender. He is tempest-tossed, is nearly overwhelmed, and yet He cries with the words of the Psalmist:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?…I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.…They pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.
 
Jesus turns to the Father. Romano Guardini sums up what is at work here beautifully. He writes:
God followed man…into the no man’s land which sin had ripped open. God not only glanced down at him and summoned him lovingly to return, he personally entered into that vacuous dark to fetch him, as St. John powerfully expresses it in his opening Gospel. Thus in the midst of human history stood one was both human and God. Pure as God, but bowed with responsibility as man. He drank the dregs of that responsibility- down to the bottom of the chalice. Mere man cannot do this. Man is so much smaller than his sin against God, that he can neither contain it nor cope with it. He can commit it, but he is incapable of fully realizing what he has done. He cannot measure his act; cannot receive it into his life and suffer it through to the end…It confuses him, leaves him desperate but helpless. God alone can ‘handle’ sin. Only he sees through it, weighs it, judges it with a judgment that condemns the sin but loves the sinner. A mere man attempting the same would break.
        
Amen.
©wjsmartin

Good Friday
Meditation One
 
In silence we come to the Cross of the Son of God on this Good Friday. We do so by way of remembering. We cannot be there in the flesh, since it is all history. So in memory we come to the Crucifixion of Christ. Some people say that they don’t know how anyone could desire and carry out such a horrific act of torture. Such people have no real comprehension of who and what they have been and still are. They have not thought about what sin does. Sin, they forget, kills the Word of God in our hearts and those of others. By extension, sin kills God’s Wisdom, Power, and Love in our hearts and others. Today, before us, we behold the external and visible manifestation of what sin does. Sin in its various forms is nothing other than what abandons, betrays, denies, tortures, and kills God’s Word in human life. Pride, envy, wrath, resentment, bitterness, sloth, lust, gluttony are all those sins which kill God’s Word in Man’s nature. We don’t see that what they do is endured and suffered by the dying Son of God on the Cross of Calvary. Our sins have killed God’s Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ. Our sins kill that Word made flesh for no reason other than that we cannot get over ourselves for long enough to remember that we are sinners in need of a Saviour. In His Passion, Jesus endures the effects of our sins. What is the worst that our sins can do? Kill God’s Son, God’s Word made Flesh.

It is said that sin is the absence of God, and that is true enough on one level. But it is more than that. It is really the will or desire to make God absent or to eliminate His presence. It is the obstinate refusal recognize that God, His Word, His Spirit are always necessary to mere existence, to man’s conquering of nature, to man’s discovery of liberty and freedom. It is the hard-hearted refusal to hear, obey, cultivate, and grow God’s Word in human life, and most especially in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes it is committed quietly in the ivory tower of arrogant stoical indifference. Sometimes it is committed in fear, as when a man can only envy the presence and success of goodness in the world. Sometimes it is committed rashly, impetuously, feverishly, out of impatience, outrage, and fear as violent anger, resentment, and revenge. Sometimes it is committed slothfully to ensure earthly comfort, peace, and normalcy, simply because zeal requires sacrifice, effort, and patience. Or it might be committed by making false gods out of greed’s ideal, gluttony’s comfort, and lust’s fleeting passion. In whatever way it is expressed, it all adds up to one thing: despair. And despair is the failure to hope. The failure of hope is the refusal to believe that a person, situation, predicament, or condition can be changed. Despair is the refusal to admit that the Good might conquer evil, Love might banish hate, Beauty might vanquish ugliness, and Truth might overcome error. Despair then leads men to eliminate God’s Word from human life. Thus we find Jesus hanging upon the Tree of Calvary on this Good Friday. Jesus is the only perfect expression of God’s Word of Wisdom, Power, and Love made flesh that the world has ever known. And He reveals to us what we think of Him and His most Holy Incarnation.
        
But is this all that we find? No sooner had they arrested, mocked, derided, stripped, whipped, crowned with thorns, and nailed Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross than He was back to doing what He had always done, what He had come to do. Archbishop Fulton Sheen reminds us that,  Seneca, [the great Roman Stoic Philosopher], wrote that those who were crucified cursed the day of their birth, the executioners, their mothers [for having brought them into this miserable world], and even spat on them that gazed upon them. Cicero recorded that at times it was necessary to cut out the tongues of those who were crucified to stop their terrible blasphemies. (Life of Christ, p. 372) Seneca ended up committing suicide, and Cicero was murdered, both because of alleged crimes against Caesar. Neither could have imagined that out of the death of a good man or from noble death something could emerge the likes of which we witness in Jesus. For here we find no resentment for ever having been born, no vengeful hatred of those who were crucifying Him, and no spitting upon those who wagged their heads at Him and those who said:
Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God. (St. Matthew xxvii. 40-43)
 
Rather, what we find is the One who looks beyond, behind, and even beneath the sin that has killed Him, to find the heart of man that is capable still of being forgiven and saved. In the hearts of those men and women who have willed His death, Jesus prays only for their forgiveness and eventual conversion. Jesus hopes. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (St. Luke xxiii, 34)
        
Jesus is the Word of God that always creates and always redeems. He is the Universal Response response to all despair. That response is kind, compassionate, and merciful. He judges their despair as the birth-child of ignorance. For, had they known what where doing, they might not have done it. The Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ, has perfect Hope for those who do not understand today, but may come to the knowledge and love of God tomorrow. For as long as a man lives, there is time for the discovery of true self-knowledge. With that, there can come a repentance for sin. Out of repentance can spring hope in the power of forgiveness. And the forgiveness of sins is not only what God’s Word is but more so what God’s Word made flesh came down to reveal and freely choose to embrace, even in the hour His own Crucifixion. Jesus Christ is God’s forgiveness embodied. Before He suffered this Passion, Jesus had told his friends, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father save through me. (St. John xiv. 6) The way to the Father is the forgiveness of sins. Jesus is the forgiveness of sins made flesh. It informs every fiber of His being, as the communication of God’s hope and love for His people. God never stops hungering and thirsting for the salvation of His people. Jesus, God’s Word made Man, is the embodiment of that love and that hope. Sin cannot silence the utterance of God’s desire in Jesus. Suffering and death can do nothing to stop God’s loving all men in and through Jesus. Satan cannot kill the Spirit of this Love. For within the heart of the dying Crucified One is the ability to pray for man’s turning to repentance, turning from his evil ways, and longing to be saved. The Word of God still speaks from the lips of the dying Son of Man. The offer still stands, the hope is alive, and God’s love is as determined as ever in the heart of Jesus.
         God’s offer is only and always an offer. It is never compelled, cannot be imposed, and so can never be revealed as an Omnipotent Power that overturns man’s created potential to turn to God’s Love for deliverance.
 
Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove:/O no! it is an ever-fixed mark/ That looks on tempests and is never shaken;/It is the star to every wandering bark,/Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken…Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom…(Shakespeare: Sonnet 116)
 
Love honors His potential lovers. That He forgives in the face of treachery and murder only stands to reinforce the transcendent nature of Love that longs to conquer all. The acceptance of Love as forgiveness of sins made flesh are in the power of the beloved.
So in Christ’s forgiveness we see the light that still loves. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. (St. John i. 4) He prays for others and thus emits the light that hopes for their salvation and deliverance. This is why He came into the world. He taught us all how to pray, and told us that if we do not forgive others their trespasses against us, neither will our Heavenly Father forgive us our trespasses against Him. (St. Matthew vi. 15) Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest…Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. (St. Luke vi. 35-38) And so even now, Jesus asks for the forgiveness of His enemies.
Today, Christ the Word as the forgiveness of sins made flesh in Man is petitioning forgiveness for the Pharisees, the Romans, and for Peter our friend who has denied Him three times. Christ the Word as Love, Hope, and Faith in God is made flesh for us that we might be forgiven.
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

 
But woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born.
 
We begin our Holy Week with an act of betrayal. Judas Iscariot has betrayed Jesus
Christ out of resentment and bitterness for Jesus’ refusal to be the earthly liberator that Israel has longed for. At least, this is the view of the Church’s Tradition. Judas had thought that the Christ was set to liberate Israel finally from all foreign occupation. Judas was an earthly minded man for whom the affairs of this world mattered much more than the affairs of God and His plan for Man’s salvation. Tonight we contemplate betrayal.
        
In fairness to the Jews, who had spent well-nigh 600 years awaiting the fulfillment of promises to them, one might be more than a little sympathetic. Foreign domination had characterized the history of the Jews. But Judas, along with no small number of his race then and now, had not understood the true nature of the promises made to Israel. The Jews had become intoxicated with their own thralldom and slavery. It is a temptation to those in every age. Human bondage and the absence of liberty are bound to make any people forever conscious of their own suffering. Yet, Judas and his friends ignored the finer points of what God had promised to His people. In tonight’s Old Testament lesson, Isaiah is full of rage.
And I looked, and there was none, to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury it upheld me. I trampled the nations in my anger; in my wrath I made them drunk and poured their blood on the ground. (Isaiah lxiii. 5,6)
 
The wrath of God fills the heart of the prophet. He hears God intending to make atonement for the bondage that Israel endured. Isaiah hears the Word of the Lord who prophesies that blood must be poured out to rectify Israel with God. But he imagines a spiritual state that far exceeds Israel’s need for any earthly Redeemer. His mind is on God and what God alone can do for His people. Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting. (Idem, 16) The prophet does not know what kind of Redemption the Lord will bring, but his focus in on God, His power and love and that Wisdom that alone can bring Israel to spiritual peace. Far be it for the prophet to focus on earthly things. He in consumed with the spiritual intention and plan of God for His people.
        
Judas and his kind are always overly consumed with earthly responses to earthly problems. To prefer the earthly to the spiritual is to engage in utter idolatry. God’s first mission to His people will always be spiritual. The nature of the promises themselves is hidden to the prophets. Sufficient it is for Isaiah to be focused on His Lord and the Lord’s nature. To be thus consumed will be the intention of God the Father for His people in His Son. Judas has missed the meaning of the Father’s message as articulated in the life of His Son, Jesus Christ.
        
We too are far too immersed in the affairs of this life on earth. Christ has better things in store for us. Judas, and so many of us, betray the Word of God with that anger and bitterness that reveal what kind of false gods truly move us mostly. Material happiness and worldly comfort seem all the rage and passion. Jesus responds to Judas and us this night with another kind of promise. Far removed from any kind of earthly hope, Jesus intends to fill His followers with what matters most. Tonight, Jesus redirects our attention to those things above and not the things of the earth.
Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.  Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God. (Idem, 22-25)
 
In response to Judas’ betrayal, Christ bids His Apostles and us to wonder about something as simple as a meal. The promises of God are revealed then and now as something strikingly simple and seemingly earthly. But He speaks of some fragments of bread and a sip of wine as somehow linked spiritually to His Body and His Blood. In some mysterious way He prophesies both His leaving us and His coming to us again. The earthly is not abandoned but will become something remarkably new. Through the elements of necessity -bread, and the cause of mirth and all joy -wine, Christ promises to come to His people and to be with them forever. His Body will be offered to them. His blood will be outpoured for them. And more than this, both will be present to them whensoever they repeat the words of this simple ceremony. And He seals this manual act with the promise that He will not eat and drink with them until He drinks it new in the Kingdom of God. (Idem) This earthly action will be an instrument and means of His ongoing presence with them until they reach His Kingdom. Spiritually, Man will commune with God over a meal that will become a Heavenly feast.
        
To the ancient Jews, what He said must have sounded like gibberish. But to those who believed then and have faith now, this is the seal of God’s promise to His people. There will be no need for any earthly deliverance from tyrannical rulers. In what follows, He will promise His people that they must trust that this is the way that matters most. What matter most is to repent and believe. What matters most is the Forgiveness of Sins that Jesus Is.
The day following, He will offer His Body on the Tree of Calvary and will pour out His blood for the sins to the whole world. The key to grasping the promises is in trusting God’s promise to be our God and we His people as earth is swallowed up in Heaven’s feast. In partaking of His Body, He will indwell His people with His suffering and death. His suffering and death will remain with them as they blend theirs with His in absolute obedience to the Father. In drinking His Blood, they all shall be quickened and resurrected into new life and virtue. What more can man need for the fulfillment of all his hopes in God’s promises? To eat His Body and to drink His blood fulfill God’s promises to His people. In eating His Body and drinking His Blood, men are invited to participate in the meaning of the Forgiveness of Sins and the Resurrection into the New Life. All is well with Jesus. Nothing more is needed. Jesus’ presence with us depends upon nothing less than His promise. This is. Our task this night is to trust and obey. Our calling this night is to follow Jesus to His Cross so that the bread and wine might be ever so simply linked to His broken Body and poured out Blood on Good Friday.
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 

When Pilate was set down upon the judgment-seat, his wife sent
Unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man:
For I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of
Him.
(St. Matthew 27. 19)
 
Holy Week has been set aside from the time of the early Church to ponder our Lord’s suffering in silence. If we approach this time with a determined silence and stillness, we will, no doubt, find that it will interrupt and confound the usual course of human reason and its expectations, as it tears and wrenches the human heart from the fulfillment of its usual expectations. Then, if we sustain the stillness, and with a quiet mind ponder the unfolding drama of Holy Week, the blanket of Divine Otherness might begin to make sense of what seems to be wholly wrong, unjust, and even unthinkable.

Following Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem He had told his Apostles: All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. (St. Matthew 26.31) This Word that was made flesh would be rejected on a number of different levels. Men always find excuses for refusing to allow the Word to be made flesh in human life. In the interests of political expedience, Pilate will convince himself, perhaps, that he has rid the world of a temporary religious nuisance. The Jews’ self-righteous indignation will be justified…or so they think. Jesus’ Disciples will abandon Him out of confused fear and cowardice. Peter will deny Him and repent, and Judas Iscariot will betray Him and hang himself.
In the lections for today, we already begin to see and hear the truth that will emerge through the trial, arrest, and condemnation of Jesus Christ. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judaea, is confronted with that earthly chaos and confusion that the Pax Romana must never abide, especially on what should be just another peaceful Friday afternoon in an insignificant outpost of the Roman Empire. He seems a reasonable and just enough man, who is neither drawn to nor impressed by the strange religion of the Jewish Aristocracy, which has interrupted his afternoon rest. He is commissioned with enforcing the Pax Romana –the peace of Octavian Augustus, that has brought unimaginable law and order in the now civilized the world. So he will do his best to treat the problem of this Jesus of Nazareth expeditiously with a kind of Stoical calm that the Romans had mastered with fine precision. In the interest of Roman Law, he will rebuke the Jews for their envy, commanding them to judge Christ themselves, or send him to Herod….but to no avail. (St. Matthew xxvii. 14) Then another kind of stillness, silence, and peace will emerge from this strange man, Jesus Christ, whom he must interrogate. Pilate marvel[s] greatly. (Ibid, 14) His wife has the spiritual sense to warn him to have nothing do with that just man (St. Matthew xxvii. 19), not realizing that she will be the prophetess of a new world order. And, in a sense he will try to do just that. But the crowd will demand that Barabbas be released and Jesus be crucified. Pilate’s conscience is nevertheless stirred, for he finds no evil or crime in the defendant. Why, what evil hath he done? (Ibid, 23) Let Him be crucified, the crowd demands. In response to the passionate envy that threatens further chaos and anarchy, we shall read that, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see you to it. (Ibid, 24) The Jews will confess: His blood be on us, and on our children. (Ibid, 25) And they too will prophesy a judgment of themselves that has never since been eradicated.
Many people, including Christians down through the ages, have never had enough time for Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God’s love in the flesh. As T. S. Eliot reminds us, Christ speaks to them and us:
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
 
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the daytime and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
                                             (Ash Wednesday: Eliot, v.)
 
But for those who can become contemplatively still and quiet by God’s Grace, the sound and sight of God’s Word of Love will emerge through the suffering and death of Christ, His own Son. From the still and silent center –the heart of the Son of God, who will be suffering and dying not only to the world, the flesh, and the devil enfleshed in others, but also to Himself, the Word will be seen and heard. It will be perceived and received, slowly, even hesitatingly, by those who have chosen to believe and to follow. Even now, as the world and its words assault and kill the Word of God in human flesh, the Word of God endures, to be spoken from the center and through the stillness of His unchanged and unmoved heart. This is the heart whose mind made all things and now intends to redeem them. For this Word made flesh –this Jesus Christ– always sees and hears the Father, and then reveals, communicates, and articulates the Father’s will to the world. He will not cease to do so, and especially through His suffering and death when He will be most challenged not to love the Father’s will and bring it to life in the world. He came from God and He will return to God. But not before He willingly offers Himself to God and man by laying down all claims and rights to Himself.

This morning, with St. Paul, we remember that though He was in the form of God, He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil. 2. 6-8) Jesus Christ empties Himself of His humanity, in order that pure powerlessness might be placed back in the hands of God, the maker and molder of all new human life. He will not desperately grab for, grasp, or clutch on to His Divinity in the hour of His human impotence. Rather He prefers to obey, fear, and follow God with all the humanity that remains in Him. He will become the Man who once again is the servant of God because God’s will and Word alone suffice to secure Man’s unbreakable union with Him. He will be one with the Word of the Father that He sees and hears. This is the Word that has spoken and continues to speak to Him, and through Him to us. And the Word that speaks is the eternal Desire of God for His people. This is the Word of Love that conquers hate, the Word of Good that conquers evil, and the Word of Truth that conquers ignorance.

This week, I pray, that each of us shall make time to travel with Jesus up to His Cross. We can travel with the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John looking and listening, to the Word made flesh, though we might be very confused and bewildered. This Word of God in Christ will be mostly silent. Pilate marveled, and so will we. In this Word who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously (1 Peter 2. 22, 23), we will begin to see the Word of God’s Love in the flesh. This is a Love that first touches and moves the still and silent hearts of those who remain faithful to it. This is the Love that was first seen and heard in miracles and parables, and now from the Cross persists in revealing itself to others in succinct statements of forgiveness and hope as He brings our old man, Adam, to death in Himself on the Cross. Ultimately and perfectly, this will be the Love that dies in order that all men might live. Christ takes on the burden of our sin and death, which we cannot bear. He bears it gladly and courageously, and even in the midst of unimaginable pain -not just the pain of the body, but the pain of the soul and the spirit also which nevertheless are true to God as the forgiveness of our sins and the seedbed of new and Resurrected Life.  

On this Palm Sunday we sing Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. And yet it seems that as soon as the jubilant song of praise and celebration fades, new malevolent cries for Christ’s execution grow and swell. Crucify Him. Crucify Him. Let him be crucified. Where will we be this week? Will we follow the Word of God’s Love in the heart of Jesus into suffering and death? Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53. 4,5)

This week, let us listen to the silent Word of God’s Love alive in the heart of the dying Saviour. Let us listen as the Word of Love makes innocent suffering and death the occasion for His persistent pursuit of our salvation. Let us listen to the Word of Love that calls us into death. Let us be determined to die in the embrace of Love which offers Himself to God and to us in that simultaneous knot of fire that purges away all cruelty, malice, malevolence, ill will, envy, and pride. Let us be determined to leave our old selves and the familiar haunts behind that the new Man in all of us may be made alive. And let us remember, in stillness and silence, as contemplating the suffering and dying Beloved the words of Archbishop Trench:

Twelve legions girded with angelic sword
Were at his beck, the scorned and buffeted:
He healed another's scratch; his own side bled,
Side, feet, and hands, with cruel piercings gored.
Oh wonderful the wonders left undone!
And scarce less wonderful than those he wrought; 
Oh self-restraint, passing human thought,
To have all power, and be as having none; 
Oh self-denying love, which felt alone
For needs of others, never for its own. 
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

 
 
But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.
                                                               (Gal. iv. 26)
At the very beginning of Lent Jesus said to his disciples, Behold we go up to Jerusalem. (St. Luke xviii. 31) We began our journey at Christ's command. Long journeys are hard work, and this Lenten journey is no exception. For nearly seven weeks Christians are invited to walk with Jesus towards Jerusalem. Walking to Jerusalem is what our lives are all about. We walk with Jesus to see how He conquers the temptations of Satan and triumphs over sin for us. We walk with Jesus to discover that, like the woman of Canaan, we are more like dogs than men, aliens and exiles to God’s promises, and yet still wholly craving the crumbs that fall from His table. So, we learn to long humbly for that mercy that persists in obtaining Jesus' mercy and healing. As dogs, we learn also that we are, more often than not, dumb and mute, incapable of comprehending and articulating God’s Word and will in our lives until His inward Grace opens our spiritual senses to His desire.
         
Our Lenten pilgrimage with Jesus up to Jerusalem, (St. Matthew xx. 18) will not be easy. We learn much about ourselves on this journey, and so we become spiritually exhausted. We grow haggard, hungry, and perhaps even dejected and discouraged. Lenten fasting and abstinence do that to a person. At times, we become distracted and even lose our way. The pull and tug of certain temptations may well have been overcome, but seven other demons worse than ourselves threaten to consume us. (St. Matthew xii. 45) Satan realizes that he is losing our spirits, and so he attacks our bodies with renewed vigor through the elements of this world. (Galatians iv. 3) We have the best of intentions and yet feel ourselves the children of the proverbial Hagar, the bond woman –giving birth to the earthly bastard offspring of vice. We do want to become free men, children of promise, and followers of Jesus, who go up to Jerusalem which is above… and is free. (Galatians iv. 26) And yet it seems the more we try the further back we fall.
         
Today Jesus Christ and His Bride, the Church, provide us with what we need. Today is Dominica Refectionis –Refreshment Sunday or Mothering Sunday: the day on which Mother Church asks us to sit down and rest awhile, to find some spiritual refreshment so that our pursuit of Jesus Christ will not be in vain. Today, we are asked to stop, to breathe, and to contemplate the transcendent and spiritual Jerusalem of Heaven which awaits our arrival. So, we read that Jesus went up into a mountain, and there He sat with His disciples. (St. John vi. 3) Jesus bids us come with Him to the mountain of His holiness so that He might give us a foretaste of our heavenly future. He knows that we are in danger of spiritual languor and listlessness. He intends to provide us with that spiritual food which will give us dogged and dauntless determination to press on.…Jesus said, Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand. (St. John vi. 10) St. John Chrysostom tells us:

That Jesus calls us up to rest at intervals from the tumults and confusion of common life. For solitude is good for the study of wisdom. And often doth He go up alone into a mountain, and spend the night there, and pray, to teach us that the man who will come most near to God must be free from all disturbance and must seek times and places clear of confusion. (St.J.C.: Sermon…) 


So, we must sit down, listen, and trust. And yet in Lent, worn out as we are, we wonder, Whence shall we buy bread that [we all] may eat? (St. John vi. 5). Our minds are bent on earthly things. Jesus asks this question this morning to prove Philip, for he Himself knew what he would do. (St. John vi. 6) He intends to enlarge and deepen Philip's faith so that he might find hope in heavenly and not earthly nourishment. Philip has seen the finger of God at work in the miracles that Jesus has performed. Will he believe that Jesus can provide food that no man can afford and that can satisfy far more than the physical hunger of a paltry five thousand? What measure of faith does Philip have? Is he a child of Hagar born after the flesh or a child of promise? (Gal. iv. 23) Philip answers as one in bondage to the elements of this world. He responds that even two-hundred penny worth is not enough for this crowd. (St. John vi. 7) Philip is thinking in earthly terms and thus calculates the monetary cost of feeding the hungry thousands. Too many people, too little money, he conjectures. Thus, Jesus intends to reveal the smallness and poverty of Philip’s faith. His faith should be in Christ’s power to fulfill all of his needs. He should have remembered that the same Jesus who made water into wine at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee would surely be able to feed the hungry multitude. His faith should have seen too that if Christ has asked whence shall we buy bread that He intended to remind Philip that God alone provides our every need and want.
Philip’s faith is small and weak because of what he does not have. Andrew’s faith is small and weak because of what they do have. There is a young lad who hath five barley loaves and two fishes, but what are they among so many? (St. John vi. 9) As Philip’s faith was overcome by too much, Andrew’s was constrained by too little. To offer so little to so many could only stand to mock and offend them, Andrew thought. Philip said we have too many to feed. Andrew said we have too little with which to feed.
         
True faith can often be destroyed because we conclude that we never have enough or we complain about having too little.  Jesus tells us to sit down, listen, and trust. He asks us to remember that we are going up to Jerusalem, that we are dogs eating from the crumbs that fall from His table (St. Matt. xv. 27), and that we must not only hear the Word of God but keep it. (St. Luke xi. 28) Jesus said, Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand. (St. John vi. 10) The disciples obey the Master, though as yet they have nothing to set before the guests. Nature serves her Master and so affords Him and His guests a plush, green carpet of comfortable grass. And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would. (Ibid, 11) Before we make use of God’s gifts to us, we must give thanks. What He gives to us is more than sufficient to satisfy our hunger. Jesus asks us to join in His thanksgiving to the Father as we are fed on our journey up to Jerusalem. Five loaves and two fishes will feed five thousand. For us, tiny morsels and crumbs of bread along with a small sip of wine will become supernaturally potent with Christ’s loving presence. Andrew’s poverty becomes Philip’s plenty. Something small becomes something great. 

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field. (St. Matthew xiii. 31) Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. (St. Matthew xiii. 31,32) Jesus says, gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost. (St. John vi. 12) Faith is spread through small fragments remaining from Christ’s feast –twelve baskets full to continue to refresh twelve Apostles and the multitudes whom they will convert. Those who think that Jesus Christ comes to satisfy only earthly hunger are in bondage to the elements of this world. (Gal. iv. 3) They are the children of Hagar. They are like Christians who are worried about what might happen to their bodies while ignoring the state of their souls. Their faith rests in earthly things and does not enlarge to embrace Christ’s true desire for man. To them nothing remains of Christ’s desire to feed the faith of their souls. 

But faith’s sustenance is food for men wayfaring. As St. Hilary suggests, The substance [of the five barley loaves and two fishes] progressively increases. (The Passing of the Law: St. Hilary of Poitiers) And as Archbishop Trench says, So we have here a visible symbol of that love which exhausts not itself by loving, but after all its outgoings upon others, multiplies in an ongoing multiplying which is always found in true giving.... (Par’s. p. 213) Christ’s real intention is not feeding hungry bodies. He will feed hungry bodies to be sure. But He will do more. The seed of faith and hope open to the indwelling of Christ’s all-powerful spiritual love. His love intends always to fortify and strengthen that faith that must follow Him up to Jerusalem which is above, and is free. (Gal. iv. 26)
          
Therefore, the Apostles gathered the fragments together, and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves, which remained over and above unto them that had eaten. (St. John vi. 13) St. Augustine tells us that the fragments that remained were the parts that the people could not yet eat. (Tr. xxiv. 6) What remains over and above is the spiritual substance of a faith that is growing. Jesus says, if you follow me, you will desire to eat of these fragments that remain. In the fragments that remain are hidden gifts of mystic meaning. In the fragments are the Divine potential for those who will hunger and thirst after righteousness. (St. Matthew v. 6) Jesus always provides more and better food to those who follow Him in faith. Faith sees that the more than the multitude can eat is Spirit and is Truth. Within fragments and crumbs of earthly food, lie hidden the spiritual nourishment of God’s Grace that will be food for men wayfaring. There is more to be seen, grasped, and ingested of this Giver and His gifts, but not until the eyes of faith are opened and the believer’s heart is softened. Let us then gather up the fragments that nothing be lost. (St. John vi. 12) We will need them. Behold we go up to Jerusalem; mere earthly fare will never sustain a faith that seeks to behold and plumb the depths of that love that never stops giving…even in Death. 
Amen. 
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
Before Abraham was, I AM.
(St. John viii. 58)
         
The threat of God’s nearness and proximity are quite enough to unnerve, unhinge, and unsettle men in all ages. There is something in human nature that fears God’s presence and His Word. Most men treat the existence of God carelessly, incautiously, indifferently, or casually. The majority of men in our own time are very earthly minded. Even post-modern “Christians” don’t seem the least bit interested in the intellectual and spiritual pursuit of God and appear rather smugly and self-righteously self-contented. Evidently, they’ve got enough or had enough and don’t need more. Or, they arrogantly assert half a shilling’s bit of knowledge to shield them against their own inner fear of what and who God really might be. If such men go on to describe the philosophy or theology that moves them, what emerges usually amounts to little more than a spiritualization of religious feeling that convinces them that neither they or this life is really all that bad after all. Of course, such a philosophy of life collapses into the self and refuses to pursue what might be God’s excellence and the sacrifice that it will, no doubt, entail. The comforts of this life are too much to abandon in the journey after God. 
        
Of course, as we learn in Passion Tide, Jesus Christ confronts all manner of resistance to His mission to us precisely because of this human hardness of heart that cannot abide God’s Word and Will. Which of you convicts me of sin? He says to us today. And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God, hears God’s words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God. (St. John viii. 46)  To be fair to contemporary man, who has stopped caring about Jesus Christ because he is drowned and drenched in the pagan culture which envelops him, it is no small wonder that Jesus Christ and His message are not only alien but antagonistic. Contemporary man seems so free and yet fears freedom. Test out your local I’m spiritual but not religious neighbors, and you shall find that what they fear most is the existence of God! They are enslaved to what is familiar and controllable.  They fear all challenges and confrontations to their pretended freedoms. They fear Christ because of what He might demand or what it might cost to follow Him. They don’t like the idea that there might be a right opposed to their wrong, a good opposed to their evil, and an Absolute Good that to their relative comfort. Who and what they fear above all is Jesus Christ, the One who alone comes to earth to reconcile us with what God has intended for us from the beginning of time. 
          
They are like the Pharisees in this morning’s Gospel who find that Jesus Christ questions their religion and the Law that they worship. Because they are so unacquainted with the Divine Goodness, they can only react to what they consider to be evil. Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil? (St. John viii. 48) What is alien, strange, and contradicts our ways fills us with fear. We become convinced that there must be something wrong with One who challenges and calls all of our lives into question. And when He does, wouldn’t we rather think that the problem is more with Him than us? This is why we convince ourselves that we need not heed with too much seriousness who Jesus says He is and what He asks of us. If He merely irritates or annoys us, we excuse ourselves from following Him on the grounds that who He says He is and what He asks are just too much. If He succeeds in enraging us, we proceed to silence and kill Him. Our negligence, fear, and ignorance kill the Word of God as Man. 

Of course, technically speaking, we are right. Who He says He is and what He asks seem just too much! If who He says He is was within the scope of human creativity, we would have invented it long ago and saved ourselves. So, the real question is this. Do we believe that He is who He says He is, and will we give Him what He asks of us? Jesus claims that God is His Father…[He] has come from God…that [he came] not of [Himself], [but was] sent. (St. John viii. 42)The Pharisees are enraged because they can’t imagine that Jesus could ever be who He says He is, and so condemn Him as demon-possessed. Their rage jumps at Him out of envy and resentment. Jesus is trespassing upon their sacred ground. Jesus answers, I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me. And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth. (St. John 8. 49-50) Jesus comes to honor all men with God the Father’s desire for their salvation. The Pharisees honor themselves and seek glory from men. Those who are sinking and going to decay boast most of how other men hold them in the highest esteem. Christ knows that their arrogance stands only to make them and all others only worse. The clergy in every age are mostly corrupt. What He offers, He has received from the Father, and honors it as what alone can touch human hearts and transform them with eternal glory. He is sent by the Father on a Divine Mission: My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work. (St. John iv. 34) The glory that Christ will offer is something that will come near and touch the world in a radically new way.

Jesus claims that if a man keeps [His] saying, he shall never see death. (Ibid) What He promises to faith exceeds our wildest imagination. We are righteously indignant because we know that we must die. Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, if a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death. Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself? (St. John viii. 52-53) The Pharisees mean: You are a man, Jesus of Nazareth, and when you die, your words will die with you. Abraham and the prophets are all dead. And their words have died with them. Indeed their words are as dead as they. So, we cannot believe that your words are any different. 
          
This is the response of all men who conclude that earthly death is the end of it all. Christ speaks once again. If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that He is your God: yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you; but I know him, and keep his saying. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad. (St. John 8. 54-58) Christ the Word teaches us that human life is made by God to become an opportunity to hope for joy beyond misery and life beyond death. What He tells us is that God spoke His Word to Abraham to give him the hope of salvation. Jesus is the fulfillment of Abraham’s hope. He speaks to the Pharisees to reveal to them that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life that will overcome our death with new and joyful life. The Father’s saying is the promise of salvation to His people. Jesus keeps this saying. This means that He cleaves to the power of love that will save all men. Jesus is the same unchanging Word of God, the saying that moved Abraham to hope in salvation. This is the same unchanging Word of God that inspires Jesus to save all of us. Jesus says, Before Abraham was, I AM. I am the Word, that was heard of old, is with you now, and will be with you forever if you believe and follow me. I am my Father’s ‘saying’ of love for you. Will you follow me? If our faith is dead like that of the ancient Pharisees, our irritation will become the rage that kills Jesus and longs to drag Him into our spiritual death. Then took they up stones to cast at him…. (St. John viii. 59)          
         
Jesus, God’s Word as flesh is sent to do His Father’s will. God’s Word is His will, His will is His Love, and His Love is the utterance and expression of God’s deepest desire and delight for all men’s salvation. His Love is that passion that longs to come near to us on this Passion Sunday. This passion is that Love that does not count the cost. His Love is as broad as the universe and as deep as the human heart. His Love incessantly, persistently, and relentlessly desires to make us His own. His Love is His Passion that longs to touch and transform us. This is the Passion that came near to Abraham, touched him, and transformed all his fears into one unchanging hope. This is the Passion that resonated, reverberated, and resounded in the spirits of those ancient souls who heard God’s Word and were athirst for God, yea, even for the living God…. (Ps. xlii. 2) This is the Passion of God in Jesus, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, to purge our conscience from dead works so that we might begin to serve the living God. (Hebrews ix. 11)
         
On this Passion Sunday, Jesus Christ persists and perseveres in Passion to keep the Father’s saying. Our English word passion comes from the Latin word patior and it means to suffer, endure, or even to be hurt or wounded. Today, we learn that Christ’s Passion will suffer and endure to win our salvation. He calls us forward to suffer and endure the love that is alive in His heart. If we are humble enough, He will come near to us. If we open our hearts, His approach will overturn all our fears. If we remain with Him, His Passion will wound us. If we follow Him up to His Cross, we shall be bruised by His loving death. In that death, we shall believe that we shall not die but live with Him forever. So, with Henry Vaughn, let us gaze with awe upon the Love that dies to smite and wound us into a Death that cannot help but lead to new and glorious life.

Ah, my dear Lord! What couldst thou spy
In this impure, rebellious clay,
That made thee thus resolve to die
For those that kill thee every day?
 
O what strange wonders could thee move
To slight thy precious blood and breath!
Sure it was Love, my Lord: for Love
Is only stronger far than death. 
(Henry Vaughn, ‘Incarnation and Passion’


Amen. 
 
©wjsmartin
 

 
Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God, and keep it.
St. Luke xi.
 
It is rather reassuring to know that the cynicism that characterizes the post-modern and post-Christian world is not new. If we have been attentive this morning, we will have found no small dose of it in the Pharisees who are murmuring against Jesus. Jesus had cast a demon out of a dumb (or mute) man, and the man spake. (St. Luke xi. 14) He had no sooner done this, than they who witnessed the immediate and extraordinary transformation claimed that Jesus had cast out the devil through Beelzebub the chief of the devils. (Idem, 16) In the ancient world, men believed that when any man had a physical handicap he was demonically possessed, and so when he was cured, men concluded that a devil had been cast out. In our own age, demonic possession and demons seem to be out of favor-mostly because postmodern psychiatry that has transcended good and evil believes that truth is relative. Postmodern man believes that truth is not objective, but subjective. So, in the end, if there is no difference between right and wrong, good and evil, then there really can be no talk of God and the chief of the Devils, Lucifer.
        
The theory that truth is relative is the bastard child of cynicism, and cynicism is the misbegotten child of Stoicism. The Stoic believes that reality is what it is, and that man must be responsible for himself in the pursuit of the Universal Good. None of the tension, struggle, and warfare involved in the conflict of other men must interrupt the Stoic’s philosophical journey. Cynicism emerges out of it because the Cynic sees the Stoic and most other men as selfish. Thus, the Cynic remedies the error by seeking to come to be one with Nature through the self. The Cynic is intent upon a subjective possession of truth for himself. The next step into relativism is not so difficult since man seems to become the measure of all things, of what is good, when, why, and how. The Cynic takes his stand defiantly only against traditional religion and philosophy but also against the state, with its laws and customs. Truth, to a great extent, can be found only subjectively. And so long before they ever get around to meeting God in Himself, they have fashioned another god in their own image -one who might even aid and abet the willful rejection of civilization and the sacrifices it entails for any common good. I am sore displeased with the heathen that are at ease (Zech. i. 15), the Lord tells Zechariah in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. And the problem is that most people use God or gods to promote and ensure their own spiritual comfort. They justify their ways of life, think themselves good enough. They think that their faith or knowledge is good for them, and if they are confronted with the truth that their lives are just as relativistic as their neighbors, they will probably say that you are possessed by an unclean spirit. This temptation is as old as ancient Cynicism.
          
But we, as Christians, can choose to make one of three responses to that temptation to think that truth is relative or that we are the best judges of what is good or evil and right or wrong. Like the ancient conservative Pharisees, who are much like the Cynics, we can refuse to allow the truth to challenge our carefully formulated and jealously guarded religious prerogatives. The Pharisees think that they have God in full, and that their role is to minister the God they have to others. Thus, when they encounter Jesus, they perceive that an interloper and intruder is poaching upon their territory and supplanting their authority. They say that Jesus casts out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils. (St. Luke xi. 15) In other words, they are moved first through pride and arrogance of their position and station as religious leaders. Truth is relative for them, since it depends upon their philosophy. If we identify with them, we begin and end with ourselves, and thus defiantly refuse to identify with the dumb and deaf man in today’s Gospel, or with the need that we all have for the healing and transformation of our lives by God.
        
Second, we can identify with those for whom the miracle which Jesus performed today was not enough, and so cry out for another. And others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven. (St. Luke xi. 16) With this group, we can choose to become selfishly intent upon the constant consolation that ongoing miracles bring. So, like the Cynics, we require more spectacular miracles -perhaps like those whose faith fails when the external and visible signs of religion do not perfectly meet our childish appetites. Our religion is then natural or rooted in Nature’s soothing touch upon our emotions and feelings. If spiritual life with Jesus does not always involve Transfiguration Moments, or natural and bodily catharsis, as what is always beautiful, true, and good, then we tend to lose faith, hope, and love. This posture is as selfish as the Pharisees, but here the selfishness is less a matter of power and control, and more an instance of the refusal to admit and accept that suffering and pain are part and parcel of the process of sanctification. Truth is relative to this group also, for its validity and authenticity depend upon an ongoing repetition of ongoing highs, appetitive and emotional surges of temporary happiness and thrills. Signs and wonders are demanded constantly in order to prove and authenticate God’s real presence.
        
Or, third, we can become like the dumb and deaf man in today’s Gospel. Jesus clearly believes that the model for our humanity is found in this man, but only as a starting point on the road that opens to healing and salvation. Like the Syro-Phoenician woman in last week’s Gospel, the man whom Jesus heals in today’s is one who is truly in need not only of a one-off transfiguration moment of healing, but of that process of redemption that lasts as long as a lifetime. Far from thinking that truth is a personal prerogative or feeling-based, here we find a spiritual disposition of helplessness that reaches out to a healing that tries and tests all spirits and ideas that confront and challenge the human predicament.   

So, with this third kind of person, we learn from Jesus that the Devil believes that truth is relative. Every kingdom divided against itself, he says, is brought to desolation. And a house divided against a house falleth. If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? (St. Luke xi. 17, 18) Satan does not unite but divides a man from truth, from truth’s healing of the self, and of truth’s healing of all others. Satan has one end to divide men from God, within himself, and from others. The Devil believes that relativism is the truth. Satan loves relativism’s delusion of self-sufficiency.
Jesus has been accused of healing a man whose life is separated from the civilized world. He cannot speak, and so is prevented from being connected with any kind of order -spiritual or secular. The man cannot speak and is thus alienated from the world of language and words. The devil delights in this, and if he had healed this man, he would have brought about what he hates -he would have connected this man to a deeper form of healing and goodness through language. Jesus insists that the Devil did not heal this man, for then he would have been at odds with himself.
        
Jesus says this morning that if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you. (St. Luke xi. 20) True healing then comes to a man who knows and admits his own powerlessness and then opens to what alone will carry and unite him to his fellow men and God through the language of salvation. When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils. (St. Luke xi. 21, 22) Pharisees, Relativists, and Miracle-Seekers all stubbornly and dogmatically clutch on to a knowledge that they think will save them. But when some unforeseen pain of body or soul, misfortune, loss or tragedy assaults them, they fall apart and into chaos, divided, as the Devil would have it. The armour wherein they trusted- self-assured knowledge, good works, and even the miracles are taken away. Jesus suggests that this is a good thing. Perhaps the mute man is a model of our condition. Jesus desires to cast out the devils from the human soul. He allows pain and misfortune to visit a man in order that our illusions, fantasies, and lies in which we have trusted may be revealed as impotent. Our relative happiness must be deprived of all force and meaning. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. (St. Luke xi. 24-26) Delusional despair can lead right back to the pursuit of relative and impermanent gods if we do not consider the condition of the mute man.
        
This morning the Word of God, Jesus Christ, puts His finger on our problem, and desires to cast away our demons. Our demons are any person, place, or thing that resists the Lord’s absolute power to heal us. They can be cast off, but they might return until one stronger than the strong man not only delivers us from them, but overcomes them with His virtue and goodness. Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which thou hast sucked (St. Luke xi. 27) cries a woman who witnesses today’s miracle. Jesus responds, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it. (St. Luke xi. 28) The true miracle we must seek today is that, with St. Paul, we realize that we were sometimes darkness, but now…are light in the Lord. (Eph. V. 8) True healing comes to us from God, who begins to heal us and participate in it. Truth is not relative but Absolute. So, with the dumb mute of today’s Gospel, let us be determined to hear the Word of God and keep it because we can speak the truth that has set us free and walk as children of the light (Idem) so that all other men may realize that the Kingdom of God has come upon us. (Ibid, 20)
Amen.
©wjsmartin    

He is no unkind physician who opens the swelling, who cuts,
who cauterizes the corrupted part. He gives pain, it is true, but
he only gives pain, that he might bring the patient on to health. He
gives pain, but if he did not, he would do no good.
(St. Augustine: Sermon xxvii)
 
Last week we examined the temptations that Jesus withstood for us to draw us deeper into His love for God our Heavenly Father. And I pray that we came away with a real sense of His desire to serve God alone and to fulfill His will for us. This week we shall come to see and grasp the nature of sin and our powerlessness over it; and, because of this, I pray that we shall come to learn that all sin whether subtle or direct threatens to control us. Lastly, I pray that we shall find deliverance from sin through persistent and humble submission to the Lord’s judgment of our condition and His provision of cure. I pray also that we might be willing to submit ourselves to Jesus’ potent and stinging medicine so that we might be healed fully.

This morning, we read in the Gospel that Our Lord Jesus Christ comes to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.(St. Matthew 15. 21) He comes to the borders of the pagan Gentile world. Jesus never went into non-Jewish territory. Rather, He visits the periphery and hopes to draw Gentiles into the land of Promise and Salvation. Jesus’ motives should fascinate us. Jesus intends that all men should be saved. He must offer salvation to God’s chosen people first. Yet, isn’t it interesting that more often than not He finds Himself drawn to the borders of heathen nations. Today, He had just finished a discourse to His own people about how sin originates in man’s heart and soul. He said, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. (St. Matthew xv. 8) What Jesus experienced from his own people was the outward shell of meticulous religious observance of the Law but hearts that were not devoted to the Spirit of the Law.         

So, the Spirit draws Jesus to the borders of Canaan. He will find the need for what He brings into the world from foreigners, aliens, and outcasts. A Syro-Phoenician woman, a Greek inhabitant of Canaan will approach Jesus. From a distance, she had learned that the Jews had brought those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatics to Jesus for healing. (St. Matthew 4. 24) She had heard that Jesus’ cures were instantaneous. His cure was efficacious, and she was determined to have it also. Jesus was coming, and she wasted no time. We read that she cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. (St. Matthew 15. 22) She comes from afar not for herself but for her daughter who is further away. She bears the burden of her daughter’s illness in her heart. Her daughter’s misery is her misery. She will learn that Jesus’ misery is our misery. She cries out for His mercy, but we read that He answered her not a word. (Ibid, 23) Jesus is silent. St. John Chrysostom writes: The Word has no word; the fountain is sealed; the physician withholds His remedies. (Homily LII: Vol X, NPNF:I)
Jesus, however, will elicit more from her to teach us about true faith –the faith that storms the gates of Heaven until Jesus responds. 

We learn that the Apostles cannot see what Jesus is doing. While they have been with Him for some time and have witnessed what He can do, they prefer to hoard Him selfishly, so that seeing, they see, and do not perceive. (St. Mark 4. 12) Like many Christians, they settle for the observing more of what Jesus can do than what all men need. Send her away, for she crieth after us. (St. Matthew 15, 23) The woman is ruining their spiritual friendship with Jesus. They want only to be rid of this pestiferous annoyance. Theirs is that heartless granting of a request, whereof most of us are conscious; when it is granted out of no love to the suppliant, but to leave undisturbed his selfish ease from whom at length it is exhorted. (Trench: Gospel) They are selfishly annoyed. Jesus is not. He will engage the woman, for He knows that in her heart there is a faith that persists in finding the cure that God alone can give.

Jesus is teasing the woman. His first response to the woman is I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. (St. Matthew 15. 24) In St. Mark’s Gospel, He says, Let the children first be filled. (St. Mark 7. 27) In both, He means that His mission is first to the Jews because they should be the Children of Promise. Jesus, the Great Physician begins to open this heathen woman’s spiritual swelling. The Apostles are silent. She is neither daunted, disheartened, nor disturbed. She needs more from Jesus than the Apostles, for now. As audacious and brazen as it would have seemed to these Jews, she moves closer to Jesus. The more acute the disease, more urgent is the need for the physician’s immediate attention. Then came she and worshipped Him, saying, Lord, help me. (St. Matthew 15.25) She will insist that Jesus is her Lord and she will submit to His rule. From His heart, Jesus is already healing her. As Calvin writes, We see then that the design of Christ’s silence was not to extinguish the woman’s faith, but rather to whet her zeal and inflame her ardor. (Calvin’s Comm’s. xvii) Jesus is amazed. She is courageous, determined, and true to herself.

Jesus is first silent and then discouraging. Now, He rubs salt into her wound. Jesus says: It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. (St. Matthew 15. 26) He calls her a dog! He takes the ancient Jews’ prejudice of the Gentiles and hurls it at her. Yet, if we look more closely, Jesus is trying to tease out of this woman not only faith but humility. Is he mocking this woman or the Jews? He knows that this woman, no matter what her race or cultural origin, might actually possess a faith that will put His faithful Jewish followers to shame. 
         
This Gentile outcast is on a journey after and for Jesus. She is going up to Jerusalem with Him in heart and mind. She needs Him completely. She hangs upon every His every word and refuses to let Him out of her grip. She will follow Him come what may. She believes Jesus is God’s own Son. She responds with, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. (St. Matthew 15. 27) She needs Jesus’ severe mercy and hard love. She may be a dog and not a lost sheep. But she knows herself to be dog who needs the Master’s attention. Jesus can become hers. I am a stray dog who, when found, will sit at my master’s feet. A dog belongs to its master. I sit at his feet but will not be cast out -under but not forsaken. I belong to thee, O Lord. So she says, Let me be a dog. If you are the master, I shall eat of the crumbs that fall from the table that you have prepared for your chosen people. The crumbs shall be more than sufficient for my daughter’s healing. As St. Augustine says, It is but a moderate and a small blessing I desire; I do not press to the table, I only seek for the crumbs. (Serm. xxvii, vol. vi. NPNF) My daughter is sick, and if I am a dog, let me at least eat the crumbs and morsels of mercy that fall from your table. I believe that ‘thou hast the words of eternal life.’ (St. John 6. 68) Lord, evermore give [me] this bread. (St. John 6. 34) 
         
With her words, this woman storms the gates of Heaven and conquers its Lord. Jesus says, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour. (St. Matthew 15. 28) Jesus cauterizes her wound, and her faith ensures that her daughter is healed. In the end, it is her faith that secures the healing she seeks. Faith in Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God and the Power of God, is what always obtains Jesus’ healing for our sin-sick souls. This woman’s faith did not demand that Jesus come down in person to heal her daughter. This woman’s faith knew that the Word could easily retrace the distance she traveled to find her daughter. In faith, she believed that Jesus need speak the word only and [her daughter] would be healed. (St. Matthew viii. 8) St. Mark writes that when the woman was come to her house, she found the devil gone out, and her daughter laid upon the bed. (St. Mark 7. 30) 
         
With our opening St. Augustine reminds us that [Christ] the Good Physician gives pain, it is true, but He only gives pain, that He might bring the patient on to health. He
gives pain, but if He did not, H would do no good. (Idem) So, we must be willing to endure the pain of hearing the hard truth we learn about ourselves from Jesus. He comes to diagnose our condition and provide the cure. He intends to empty us of any pride that our faith might persist in finding His loving cure. Matthew Henry warns us that there is nothing got by contradicting any word of Christ, though it bear ever so hard upon us. But this poor woman, since she cannot object against it, resolves to make the best of it. ‘Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs…. (Comm. Matt. xv.) 

With the example of the Syrophoenician’s faith and humility let us confess that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. (Collect, Lent II) Let us beg deliverance from all evil thoughts that may assault and hurt the soul. (Idem) With her, let us abandon the lust of concupiscence in Gentiles who know not God. (1 Thes. i. 3) Jesus longs to find a faith that will not cease until it finds His cure. Let us all admit that we are dogs. He calls us out as dogs because God call us not to uncleanness, but unto holiness. (Idem) Jesus is always overcome by the faith of dogs who fulfilled with His crumbs can conquer demons and heal human hearts. Jesus may resist us at times, but only to tease out that faith that will have Him, and Him alone as Master.
Amen.
©wjsmartin