![]() 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 words from St. Matthew’s Gospel give us a segue into our study of the meaning of Resurrection in this Eastertide. Here our Lord Jesus Christ, curt and candid as usual, 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 contrary to the wishful thinking of puerile Popes, Christ means what He says. Christ intends that His words be taken as a stark warning to all who 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 leads to salvation. This certainly qualifies the good news and the peace that most men artificially conflate with the musings of jolly old Buddha, earnest Confucius, the fraudulent Gandhi, and other religious armchair amateurs whose philosophies never graduated to high table at a covered-dish supper. Comparative Religion isn’t intellectually compelling. The ease with which postmodern Christians neglect the harder sayings of our Lord is troubling, to say the least. And while we might engage in a slothful wishful thinking about how all men go to Heaven, such jejune feeling neither squares with the Gospel nor leads to the Kingdom. No, I fear that the Christian religion is much more about the hard truth and our ongoing struggle to apply it to our lives. 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 His Atonement of our sins. 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 we will it 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 that He establishes for us, we cannot reach Heaven. Entering the strait gate requires our moral effort and decision. This means that the life that He lived, the unearned, unmerited, and undeserved suffering and death that He endured, and the Resurrection He commenced must all become our own 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 difficult. 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 for us to live. 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 sacrifice, suffering, and death before we find new life. Christ never promised us immediate and paranormal perfection. 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 an eternal reward to them that embrace Jesus Christ. Again, embracing Jesus Christ in our hearts and souls is 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 with us in the way closest to us, through our senses. We believe, immaturely, that His absence from us in the fleshwill breed catastrophic sadness and sorrow. Yet we, with the Apostles, must learn that Christ cannot save us until His suffering, death, and victory over our sin is something that we embrace inwardly, spiritually, and rationally. His fleshly Incarnation is only the beginning. We must find the strait gate and narrow way that leadeth unto life inwardly and spiritually through the indwelling of Christ the Word through the Holy Spirit. Christ intends to come alive in our souls by working His redemption into us. Christ desires to dwell in us spiritually and intellectually. 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. But for this to happen, we must expect the same temptation and troublemaking that the Devil brought to Jesus. Christ’s 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) Salvation is a process of becoming little Christs. (C.S. Lewis) The world might very well hate us and persecute us because it knows not the Father who sent the Son. (idem) Christ was made flesh 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 desire the thing that [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, through the Spirit. 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) The Comforter is the Holy Spirit, who must come to convict us of our sins, which were the cause of Christ’s passion. 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 with courage 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 reveal to 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 warns us that the Devil and an unbelieving world will be judged. 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 must not only rebuke sin, acknowledge our own unrighteousness but also hold the Devil in contempt by ongoing surrender to the Father and His Word, Jesus Christ, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Christians should never seek an easier, softer way. The journey into Christ’s Resurrection is a pilgrimage whose suffering, sacrifice, and death must be measured and tempered 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) Patience enables us to suffer the Devil’s divers temptations with joy and blessedness. We must cleave to the Good, come what may. 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, the Word of God’s Truth, will prune away the dead wood of our old hardened sinful selves to implant the new life, the beauty of holiness, the first fruits, from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to bring alive every good gift that God intends for us to use in His service, leading us through the straight gate and narrow way. Every good and perfect gift should overcome our spiritual exhaustion and fear. So, with John Henry Newman, let us beg of Christ Grace wherewith to enter into the depths of our privileges, to believe, to use, to improve, to glory in our present gifts as members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. (Sermon xvii, J.H.N.) 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 EasterIII) We do this, of course, because if we have been admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, this 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 the 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 and 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 deliver us to His Kingdom. But this is difficult. We are so at home in this world, in the realm of immediate gratification or its denial. The discomforts that threaten us would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, whose comforts were scarce. St. Peter’s exhortation this morning to become strangers and pilgrims (I St. Peter ii. 11) is now considered a tall order indeed. His insistence that we must abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul; having [our] conversation honest among the Gentiles (ibid, 11,12) strikes us more like the ludicrous last gasp of late Victorian piety. What is St. Peter talking about? Evidently, with lust now a virtue and with what was always considered unnatural and profane now in vogue, he must have been out of his mind. Poor, primitive St. Peter is no match for postmodern hedonism. Now, our old selves have not merely forgotten the secret things that belong to the Lord our God (Deut. xxix. 29), but we hold them in contempt. Of course, St. Peter lived in the then civilized world. Both Jew and Greek slave and free, lived in a world ruled and governed not only by Roman Law but a great deal of moral agreement about marriage, the family, and Natural Law. The best upright Roman would have found little wrong with the Jewish morality. More advanced Roman thinkers were intrigued to find that what they discovered about God through the study of nature, the Jews had by revelation as recording in their Sacred Scriptures. The success with which the Apostles converted the Greeks and Romans to Christ must be a testimony to a common need for a common cure for the ills of man in this world. Demonizing the ancient Greeks and Romans seems a fool’s errand. Both the Greeks and Romans were situated intellectually and spiritually to embrace Christ, the way, the truth, and life. (St. John xiv. 6) Needless to say, we do not find ourselves living in a world with the luxury of either Greco-Roman philosophy or Jewish revelation. Our world has surrendered to the worship of untamed and disordered appetites. The sanest of men can find rest in neither culture nor religion. The culture of the modern state is wholly corrupted by the protection of the irrational and unseemly. The churches have surrendered to the perverse and profane with an eye to profit. The words of the Psalmist ring truer than ever. THE foolish body hath said in his heart: There is no God. Corrupt are they and become abominable in their wickedness: there is none that doeth good. God looked down from heaven upon the children of men: to see if there were any that would understand and seek after God. But they are all gone out of the way, they are altogether become abominable: there is also none that doeth good, no not one. (Ps. liii. 1-4) For the power of God to liberate us effectually, we must declare spiritual war on this world and its ship of fools, who say there is no God. 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) The fool rejects both the knowledge of God that comes from the study of nature and the faith that comes from revelation. Because he is at home in this world, he exults only in a temporary possession of happiness. Because it is convenient to his fleeting, idolatrous passions, he is glad to think that God, who moves all things and informs all things, remains unmoved by his sin. He has 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 warns us that we ignore the Invisible God because we have forgotten that we are strangers and pilgrims, not to be at home in this world but passing through to return to the God who is the source of all life and truth. The wise man knows that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. (Romans iii. 23) The wise man has believed and understood that God’s Invisible Wisdom, Power, and Love have come into the world to save sinful man in Jesus Christ. He has come, and He has gone. We come, and we too shall go. The wise man knows too that human life is made to be judged and measured by God’s life, light, and love in Jesus Christ for eternal happiness or eternal misery. In this Easter Tide, today 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 xv.20) Mourning and lamentation for the wise 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 renews our passion for finding it anew. Second, by temporal sadness, man escapes eternal torment. (Idem) Temporal sadness is worth suffering when the reward is deliverance from Hell. Third, by a mean measure of justice, we acquire eternal joys. (Idem) Punishment through the just punishment for our sins now acclimates us to the virtue that leads to eternal joys. Then we begin to treasure the meaning of Christ’s lasting victory over 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, with St. Peter, 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 pregnant or 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. John 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 ![]() This is thankworthy, that if a man for conscience endure grief, Suffering wrongfully. (1 St. Peter ii. 19 ) Our Epistle reading for The Second Sunday after Easter taken from St. Peter’s First Epistle speaks of suffering. This might seem strange. After all, we are in Easter Tide. Suffering was studied at length on Good Friday. Easter Tide should be about joy – the surging relief and rising happiness that come to us when we meditate upon Christ’s victory over sin, death, and Satan. But dear old Saint Pope Gregory the Great, who is mostly responsible for our Church Lectionary, wants us to remember that our Resurrected life in Christ is a treasured gift to be received and perfected in willing hearts through constant suffering and warfare. As joyously focused on Christ’s Resurrection as we should be, the Church Fathers knew only too well that the prudent and cautious pilgrim who seeks to enter God’s Kingdom must fight a daily battle of suffering and dying in order to rise and be joyful. Easter Tide teaches us that suffering is a necessary component in the process of our sanctification and redemption. Last week, we learned that Christ’s Peace comes to us to infuse the forgiveness of sins and the New Life into our hearts. Today, we learn that the assurance of its rule in our lives demands a kind of spiritual struggle that tends to be threatened by the devices and desires of our own hearts. (General Confession, BCP p. 6) And what better teacher have we than St. Peter himself, to teach us about the taming of premature zeal as we embrace the reality of the Risen Christ? He writes: For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. (1 St. Peter ii. 19,20) Peter believes and knows what Christ has done for us already. Peter, too, knows how his own character had to suffer the consequences of a faith that had not been tried by fire. Peter had to die to his own sinful betrayal of Christ before the Holy Spirit could rise in him. Peter knew too that for as long as he lived, he would suffer the temptation to betray Christ or to become soft on his own past weakness. The union of Christ’s Suffering, Death, and Resurrection had to become for him the pattern of New Life. The Peace and Forgiveness of Sins which Christ had established would become his own prized possession only by way of dying and rising. For I have given you an example, that ye should do [to one another] as I have done to you. (St. John xiii. 15) For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. (Ibid, 15) The message is clear. By embracing the forgiveness of sins, Christians are called to suffer and die as they are habituated to the forgiveness of sins. Christ is the forgiveness of sins that rises in man’s heart only by way of suffering for the Truth. A man suffers to die to malice and ill will and come alive to the well doing. God’s well doing has overcome sin in Jesus Christ. Christ’s mercy tempers judgment, His generosity destroys selfishness, and His forgiveness breathes love and hope into new lives. St. Peter is quick to admit that this process is difficult. He writes his Epistle to a community that is struggling to allow Christ’s Resurrected goodness to overcome the instinctive urge to repay others with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. St. Peter acknowledges that most men, including Christians, must struggle to die to the old man and come alive to the new. Most men’s souls are tempted not to forgive. Evil’s assault upon men from the outside in other people is of secondary importance to him. It is only when men begin to suffer inwardly and spiritually that the forgiveness of sins is received as what we neither desire nor deserve but desperately need if we would be Risen with Christ. This will put to silence the ignorance of foolish men since God’s love is rationally consistent with His being and offered always through Jesus Christ and by the Holy Ghost. St. Peter reminds his flock today that Christ Jesus was the only Person in history who endured and overcame evil through goodness because the loving forgiveness of sins was perfectly alive in His heart. St. Peter reminds us that Christ embraced the forgiveness of sins as what was natural to Him, as God’s Son. He did not 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 St. Peter ii. 22,23) Yet Christ, in a sense, had more reason not to forgive, since He did not wrong and committed no sin. So, He responded to man’s sin against Him with God’s love or the forgiveness of sins. God forever intends that man should repent and believe so that he can live and not die in his sins. God’s goodness saturated Christ’s heart. In turn, Christ intends to love His enemies into friendship with God. In His suffering death, Christ was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Cor. v. 21) St. Peter agrees. Who in 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 you were healed; For ye were as sheep, going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls. (Ibid, 24,25) What the Apostles realized long ago was that the Crucified Jesus, who rose up from death on Easter Day, was God’s Good Shepherd. But what became clearer and clearer was that the Good Shepherd, in laying down His life for them, was still seeking out His lost sheep from the hard wood, the rod, of the Cross. Christ’s own struggle to conquer sin through suffering is the model for Man’s victory over sin. Christ pursues His end, our salvation, come what may. As God’s forgiveness of sins made flesh, Christ loves the sinner much more than his sin. Today, Jesus likens himself to both the Good Shepherd and the door through which He will carry us back to the Father. We can become His sheep if we begin to confess that we were lost sheep needing to be found by Christ the Good Shepherd. Dr. Farrer explains Jesus’ words in this way: What does Jesus say? A man cares naturally for his own things. He does not have to make himself care. The shepherd who has bought the ground and fenced the fold and tended the lambs, whose own the sheep are to keep or to sell, cares for them. He would run some risk, rather than see them mauled; if he had only a heavy stick in his hand, he would beat off the wolf…He says that he cares for us as no one else can, because we are his. We do not belong to any other man; we belong to him. His dying for us in this world is the natural effect of his unique care. It is the act of our Creator. (Weekly Paragraphs for the Holy Sacrament: Easter II) Christ would run some risk rather than lose His lost sheep. Belonging to Christ comes when we confess that we are lost sheep now being found by the Lord who is our Shepherd, the rod and staff of whose Cross comfort us. (Psalm xxiii. 4) But we protest: All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every man to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah liii. 6) Our false pride, masquerading as humility, exclaims that the Good Shepherd is too good to heal us. But though we are lost in sin and death, we must remember that He is greater than our sins, or His forgiveness is greater than our sins. I am the Good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known by them. (St. John x. 11, 14) Jesus implies that He knows us better than we know ourselves. His knowledge penetrates the secrets of our hearts. He knows how sin has enslaved us. He understands that He must struggle and suffer, as He alone can, to conquer our sin. The Rod that comforts us is His Cross, from which He becomes the forgiveness of sins for us. The Staff that comforts us is His Resurrected love that can extend the forgiveness of sins to others. The Rod of the Cross awakens us to how much He loves us. The Staff of the Resurrection herds us into the comfort of hope in His New Life. From His Cross, Jesus the Good Shepherd invites us to participate in His Good Death. Jesus the Good Shepherd now desires to lift us onto His shoulders in the New Risen Life where sin, death, and Satan can harm us no more. Because we belong to Jesus, we can reciprocate His desire for us. We can begin to know Him as the Good Shepherd, who prepares a table before us in the presence of [our] enemies; [who will] anoint [our] head with oil; [so that our] cup runneth over. (Ps. xxiii. 5) His forgiveness of our sins can lead us into sin’s death. His Resurrection can mean that we can forgive all men their sins against us. Suffering the assaults of malicious men can become the occasion for overcoming evil with good. Today, my friends, as we continue to wend our way through Easter tide, let us remember always, with St. Peter, that we have erred and strayed from [Christ’s ways] like lost sheep. Jesus insists we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. (Ps. c. 3) We belong to Him and He longs to have us forever. And, always, with Cardinal Von Balthasar, we shall remember that Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrow [and suffering], an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() As my Father has sent me, so send I you. (St. John xx. 21) Through Holy Week to Easter Day, when we tried to walk with Jesus Christ through his Passion and into His Resurrection. In it, if we were conscientious, we were moving from death into new life. First, we meditated upon the external and visible events that comprised the last days of our Lord Jesus Christ. Second, we allowed the facts to affect our souls, as His death became our death, and His Resurrection the seedbed of that new life through Him that leads us to Heaven. Our souls began to open to Christ as the forgiveness of sins and the promise of new life. I pray that we have begun to receive God’s Wisdom, Power, and Love made flesh, which alone can make us very members incorporate of His Body. I hope that who and what He was becomes who and what He is for us. Christ is not dead, but lives for us. The danger that confronts us is that we tend to treat Jesus as not alive but dead, not risen from the dead, but long gone. G.K. Chesterton noted the tendency, even within the churches, when he said, Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you anymore. (The Everlasting Man) Though their works live on and can perfect us to a degree, the authors are dead. Chesterton continues: Imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. (Ibid) Think about what it would be like to have some great thinker or artist back from the dead to help you to interpret and respond to the mad, mad world we inhabit. Perhaps this is not unlike what the Apostles were thinking, when they began to mourn Jesus’ death after the Crucifixion. Why, if only He were here? they must have thought. And yet when He was here, men were determined to ruin Him. Would it be any different? So, they mused on the might-have-beens. But they remembered, too, that they had abandoned, forsaken, denied, and betrayed Him. So now they were assembled behind the doors for fear of the Jews. (St. John xx. 19) They recalled their cowardice, treachery, and unfaithfulness. But against this, they feared more what guilt by association might mean for them. The followers of Jesus of Nazareth feared for their own lives. Their faith was feeble, their hopes confused, and their love for Him uncertain. They were selfish. Next, we read that Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. (St. John xx. 19) Their master and teacher had returned. The first day of the week is now the first day of the new creation. Christ mysteriously but silently comes through the door. Christ had already appeared to individuals – to Mary Magdalen, Peter, the two men on the road to Emmaus. But, appearing to individuals is far less convincing than the combined effect of a community. He comes to His flock, uniquely defined by their collective faith, as fragile as it might be. He shows them His hands and His side to confirm their faith in Him, that they might not have it by hearsay only, but might themselves be eyewitnesses of His being alive. (M. Henry) He does not reveal Himself to His enemies yet and does not reveal Himself to those who had no interest in God or the salvation He has promised to bring. As St. Peter will recall a bit later, Him God raised up the third day, and showed Him openly; not to all of the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to us who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead. (Acts x. 40,41) An event of supernatural making presents itself to them. The Apostles are baffled, bewildered, perplexed, puzzled, and flummoxed. Those who fled the Cross wondered: Did He truly die? Perhaps, in the end, He was spared; we did not see with our own eyes. Others might have thought: This is an optical illusion. Perhaps He was never a true man and that even now He is nothing but a Spirit. And if it will take time to cultivate the faith of His Apostles, there is no small wonder that He did not appear to the chief priests and people. For forty days Jesus comes to His flock with the eternal love of God that He has always revealed. He will teach His friends about the great mystery of the new life. He will teach them about how His coming was prefigured in the Old Testament and that He is its fulfillment in the New. He will teach them about the forgiveness of sins that He is. He will show them that without His suffering and death there could be no new life. For the new life that He brings into the world is perfect forgiveness that alone can overcome the grip of evil through love. His love will draw the new life out of them as His Holy Spirit emboldens them to be forgiven and to forgive. He will teach them that His suffering and death are a pattern for their own in the soul’s journey back to God. 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….If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you…. (St. John xv. 18-20) Peace be unto you: as my Father has sent me, even so send I you; and He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive the Holy Ghost.(St. John xx. 21-23) The Word made flesh is with them, and He calls them into His service again. He breathes His Word into them, and they begin to become living members of His Resurrected Body. He has laid down His life for them, and now He gives it back to them renewed, rekindled, and roused. These He restores, comforts, warns, and inspires. (Newman, Witenesses of Resurrection, 184) The onslaught of fear and the cloud of confusion recede into the past as He forms them into Himself slowly and methodically, as their faith grows that that they might show forth His praise. (Idem) So the Apostles begin to live the new life. Christ is the vine and they the branches; Christ is the root and they are the shoots. As Chesterton says, What the Apostles were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but at dawn. (The Everlasting Man) The Apostles’ mental unrest and uncertainty flee. The Master has returned as He had promised and is now teaching them how to live the new life in the garden of a new creation. Their faith in Him is being grown into new life with new meaning, where God the Gardener and man the new life reveal to the world the great possibilities in creation’s redemption. In this joyful Eastertide Jesus Christ calls us into the new life. St. John tells us this morning, Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is He that overcometh the world, but He that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?(1 John v. 4,5) What the Apostles begin to see is that faith in Jesus Christ is the victory that overcomes the world. They see that this [Jesus is He] that came by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the water and the blood. (1 John v. 6) The Spirit has raised up the One who has poured out water and blood to make man just with God. The Spirit has raised up the One who has died one death for the sins of the whole world. The Spirit has raised up the One who calls all from death into His new life. The Spirit enlivens the One who will be the Gardner that tills and tends the Garden of the new life in the hearts of all who believe and follow. Through the waters of Baptism, His Spirit will cleanse and purge the spiritual seedlings of all pestilence. The Spirit will cultivate and grow God’s Word in the soul so that obedience to the Father might flower and blossom. The Blood of the Eucharist will drown sin in death and flood the heart with a longing for all goodness. Spirit, water, and blood will raise man up from the ground of his death into the breath of that Love that leads into the new life. His Spirit will animate a new Body- the Church, that fertile Garden that will bloom with beauty and blush with delight. And yet none of this will come to pass unless we lost souls, who are promised redemption, face the Resurrected Jesus Christ. Solomon tells us that this process will be strange and painful. In the sight of the unwise [we shall] seem to die: and [our] departure [will be] taken for misery; and [our] going from [them] utter destruction….(Wisdom ii 2) But once they see what is happening to us, they will conclude that we are in peace. For though [we] be punished in the sight of men, [our] hope is full of immortality. And having been a little chastised, [we] shall be greatly rewarded: for God [will prove us], [to find us] worthy for himself…And…[we] shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble. [We] shall judge the nations, and have dominion over the people, and [our] Lord shall reign for ever. (Wisdom ii. 5-8) Then we shall find Blessed Gueric of Igny’s words surprisingly true: The man who enters Christ’s garden becomes a garden himself, his soul is like a watered garden, so that the Bridegroom says in praise of him: ‘My sister, My spouse is a garden enclosed’ (Cant 4, 12). Yield the fragrance of incense. Blossom like the lily, and smell sweet, and put forth leaves for your adornment. (The Garden of Delight) Indeed, yield fragrance, blossom, shoot forth, and reveal the beauty and love of the Risen Christ to the world! Amen. ©wjsmartin Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Col. iii. 2)
Our journey through the Lenten Season to Good Friday will have been of no use if it has not been characterized by affection. Set your affections on things above and not on things of the earth, proclaims St. Paul this morning, and not on things of the earth. (idem) Affection is an appetite that draws us, attracts us, and captures our attention. Throughout the Holy Season of Lent, we have prayed that the Holy Spirit might purify the thoughts of our hearts so that we can follow Jesus up to the Jerusalem of His Cross and beyond. Our affections have been set…on the things above [and] not things of the earth, things that have come down to us in the passionate heart of Jesus Christ to lift us up higher. Out of the unquenchable love of His heart, Christ desired that our affections should rise up to embrace Him in the Death He died for you and me on Good Friday. From there to here, on this Easter Morn, Christ now longs that our affections might rise higher still into His Resurrection Love. But setting [our] affections on things that are above and not on the things of the earth is no easy business. And it is not that affection is evil. God made it for a reason. But affection is fickle, unreliable, and uncertain. Affection, like all good things, must be tried and tested, lest it meander into the realm of evil. God’s affection and desire for us is pure and perfect. From the Divine Depths, articulated and expressed in the incessant, loving Passion of Jesus on the Cross, the uninterrupted longing of God for our salvation has persisted. The Word has gone out. God’s desire and affection have never swerved from His Great Unseen Eternal Design. The Word of God came down from heaven to live in man’s heart. His Good Friday is but one moment in the unfolding drama of our Redemption and Salvation. Our affection, as a response to Jesus Christ, was tried and tested on Good Friday. The mighty engine of Caesar’s Rome tried to capture our attention and affection with an offer of expeditious peace, the Pax Romana, a peace that would conveniently rid us of Jesus Christ’s messy and menacing death. Even God’s chosen people, the Jews, tried to claim our affection with a tradition that offered cheap Grace and inexpensive discipleship. The fear and even cowardice of Jesus’ Apostles then lured us into a broken and killed affection that we, surely, would somehow get over. Human affection carries with it a kind-of loss of self-composure and meekness. Solomon, in Proverbs, tells us A fool giveth full vent to his affection, but the wise man quietly holdeth it back. (Prov. Xxix. 11) Affection threatens us with losing something or all of ourselves in order to know the good and love it with our whole heart. And yet, God’s affection for all men persisted on Good Friday with a Passion that longs always to call forth and redeem the affection of men in all ages. The affection of God for us in Jesus Christ said to us from His Cross, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. (St. Luke xxiii. 34) From the Cross, Christ’s affection reached the Good Thief. Come follow me. Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise. (St. Luke xxiii. 43) From His Cross His affection reached out to His Mother and the blessed disciple. Come follow me. Women, behold thy son…son, behold thy mother. (St. John xix. 26, 27) From His Cross, His affection began to move us all out of fear and despair into new life. His affection even took on our desperation and dereliction. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. (St. Matthew xxvii. 46) With ongoing affection He mustered up enough desire for our salvation to cry, I thirst. (St. John xix. 28) From the Cross, He concluded, with unbounded affection, It is finished. (St. John xix. 30) Father into thy hands, I commend my spirit. (St. Luke xxviii. 46) Come follow me even into my death, as my death that shall become yours also. On Good Friday, God’s uninterrupted affection for us men took suffering and death up into the abyss of Holy Saturday. And through it all, our affection was, no doubt, hesitant and halting. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. (Genesis i. 2) Sin and death seemed to have swallowed up our affection for the life, light, and love of God in Jesus Christ. As in Adam all die (1 Cor. xv. 22) seemed to have consumed our life, light, and love. As we move from Good Friday to this Easter Sunday, to this first day of the week, something strange begins to happen. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis i. 3,4) In the beginning, God affectionately made the Light to inform, define, and enliven all of creation. In the same Light now, incandescent beams of Divine Affection will open the eyes of believers’ hearts to a new creation being illuminated by that true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into world. (St. John i. 9) Darkness begins to flee, sin begins to be felt as dead, death begins to be conquered, and ignorance yields to Wisdom, as the Divine Affection jumps up from Death in the heart of Jesus. The pure Affection and eternal desire of the Father of lights have transformed the Son as flesh from Death into New Life. The old Man is Dead, and the new Man has come to life with glory. At first, only angels and nature sensed the strangeness of this Light. The elements stirred, the air was parted, the fire blazed, and the earth shook and fell before the rising Light that follows the passion and affection of its Mover and Maker. The Father’s immortal, immutable, and immovable course of affection for man’s redemption is on course and thus is still at work in the heart of Jesus. Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. (Romans vi. 9, 10) The words spoken to Isaiah the prophet are remembered But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Isaiah xliii. 1) Christ is the fulfillment of the Father’s unceasing affection for us. And yet, in this morning’s Gospel, we learn that man’s affection for God in Jesus Christ, now risen from the dead, will take time to perfect. Christ’s death seemed like an end. We read that The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre. (St. John, xx 1,2) Jesus had said, And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me. (St. John xii. 32) At first, the affection of both the Apostles and the women for who Christ is and what He can do, was confused, uncertain, and halting. Mary Magdalene was moved still by her affection and love for Jesus, to anoint his dead body. She finds the stone rolled away. Her affection for the Light is not yet redeemed. She ran to Saints Peter and John and exclaimed, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher, and we know not where they have laid him. (St. John xx. 2) Her affection remains in darkness, believing that Christ’s enemies have stolen the body. But she remembers the words of the prophet: And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have…brought you up out of your graves, And I shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live. (Ezekiel. xxxvii. 12-14) Her stirring affection for things above begins to run to find John and Peter. Their affection and love run to the empty tomb. As Eriugena says, John outruns Peter because contemplation completely cleansed penetrates the inner secrets of the divine workings more rapidly than action still to be purified. John’s affection already begins to rest in contemplation and hope. Peter’s affection outruns it with action and faith. The affection of Peter must enter the tomb of darkness first to then understand with John’s affection. (Hom. Gospel of St. John, 283, 285) God’s uninterrupted affection and desire for all men’s salvation is still at work in Jesus Christ. Stirring within the hearts of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John are the affection for, faith and understanding in the Light that said, I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. (St. John xiv. 18, 19) Soon the Apostles will see God’s unfading Light in Christ, begin to receive His Life in Him, and return His Love through Him. Christ is risen from the dead. The Son of God made flesh, made man is Risen from the dead. In the Resurrected Light that shines through the transfigured flesh of His new life, we must remember that we are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God. (Colossians iii. 2,3) In the Resurrected Light, let us reckon [ourselves] to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans vi. 11) In the Resurrected Life, Light, and Love – let us embrace unabated affection of Jesus Christ with our own affection –that affection and desire for becoming very members incorporate in His Risen spiritual and mystical Body, transparent, obedient to His Holy Spirit…apt and natural instruments of His will and way, (The Meaning of Man, Mouroux, p.89) reflecting His Life, Light, and Love into the hearts of all others. And with the poet let us so begin to set the whole of our affection, the thoughts of our hearts, on Christ, who has redeemed and restored our human nature for greater things than these, rising up even to things above, not things of the earth. (idem) Then shalt thou feele thy spirit so possest, And ravisht with devouring great desire Of his dear selfe, that shall thy feeble brest Inflame with love, and set thee all on fire With burning zeale, through every part entire, That in no earthly thing thou shalt delight, But in his sweet and amiable sight. (E. Spenser: Hymn to Heavenly Love) Amen. ©wjsmartin 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. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. (St. John xix. 29,30) Jesus the crucified, Jesus the suffering Servant and dying Lord of Good Friday, is betrayed by one, and then denied and abandoned by the others, including all of us. Sinful man betrays and forsakes God, denies His rule and governance in human life, and abandons Him for the temporary and fleeting pleasures of this world, as important as they might seem. So, as we look back on this Good Friday, as Christians, it is our duty to identify with any sin that reveals no acquaintance or familiarity with Jesus Christ. We do this because we desire to repent. We desire to repent because we believe that Jesus Christ is God’s forgiveness of sins made flesh. And we believe that this forgiveness of sins is truly and perfectly offered to us through the death of God’s own Son on the Tree of Calvary. We believe also that this forgiveness of sins calls us into death, first, the death of Jesus Christ, and then our own deaths. If we will not die to sin by embracing the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, beginning here and now, we will never come alive to God the Father through the Risen Christ on Easter Day. Before we repent, we must look into the nature of what Jesus Christ is doing for us when He dies on the Cross of Calvary. St. Paul tells us that by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. (Romans v. 12) By one man’s disobedience to God, sin and death entered the world of human nature. Thus, from the time of Adam to Christ all men were oppressed with, enslaved to, and overcome by that sin which prevents them from obeying God purely and perfectly. St. Paul continues: For if through the offense of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification. (Ibid, 15,16) Jesus Christ becomes the forgiveness of all sins. He allows Himself to be brought to death by all sin. He allows Himself to feel the effects and nature of all sin. He becomes both the cause and the effect. He feels the malice of the sinful perpetrator of His death. He feels the effect of it all as the victim. Jesus [humbles] himself and is obedient [to God the Father] unto death, even death upon the Cross. (Phil. ii. 8) Thus, through His sacred humanity He brings man’s addiction to sin to death. Through His most holy Passion, He will overcome Original Sin. Through His enduring obedience to God the Father, He will suffer the worst and the best that man’s sin can do to God, and out of it make something much better and new. Sin and death will taunt, tempt, mock, deride, torture, and kill God’s Word made flesh. They will bring Jesus Christ to death. But what sin and death cannot kill is the Word of God’s Love in the heart of Jesus that persists through suffering into death and then up into new life. For even while dying unjustly, the Son of God’s forgiveness will begin to make new life, a new manhood, a new Adam whose nature will be shared as Humanity’s new life for all who believe and follow Him. Today, we come to the vision of Christ crucified. We come to see what our sin has done to God in the flesh. To our sore amazement, we find in Jesus Christ not some obscure theological concept but the living the forgiveness of our sins made flesh. For this forgiveness of sins is God’s uninterrupted desire for our salvation. This desire is still at work in the heart of the suffering and dying Christ. What do we hear emerging from the lips of the dying Jesus? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (St. Luke xxiii. 34) Father, today they kill me through ignorance, confusion, weakness, and pain, but I desire them still. Father forgive them, for tomorrow they may repent and believe and become our friends. Next, we hear. Today, shalt thou be with me in Paradise. (St. Luke xxiii. 43) Look Father, this convicted thief dying alongside me has confessed his sin and desires to come and follow me. Father, I desire him. This is our first death-bed conversion! And then what? Father, my Mother and dear John are here watching and waiting, dying to become a part my death and new life. Father, I desire them. Woman, behold thy son!...Disciple, Behold thy mother! (St. John xix. 26, 27) Father, already we have our first two missionaries, members of the new humanity that I am making. My Mother is ready to become the mother of your new spiritual children. My friend, my spiritual brother, is ready to become a new spiritual son to the Mother of my redemption and salvation. Jesus still desires to make all things new, to bring good out of evil and life out of death, though He is in extreme pain and agony. Jesus continues. Father, I am suffering and dying. The pain is acute. Strengthen them spiritually now, as I grow weaker and weaker, and my pains grow stronger and stronger. For, Father, the devil is once again on my back. My wounded and lacerated head, hands, and feet are overwhelming me and crushing my sense of the outside world that looks and gazes upon me. I am becoming blind, deaf, dumb, withered, and palsied like those I came to heal. I feel the pain of Job, and I hear the words of his wife: Curse God and die. (Job ii. 9) I feel the darkness. The silence is deafening. The nothingness envelops me. Lord I am spent; is there any more for me to do? Father, thou seemest to be absent from me. The deep and mysterious power of sin is attacking me. I sense and feel the nothingness not as that pure potential “about to be” that you and I once made real. I endure man’s rejection of thee my God. I sense the distance between thee and me. ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (St. Matthew xxvii. 46) Why…art thou so far from my health, and from the voice of my complaint? I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not: and in [this] night season also I take no rest.’ (Ps. xxii. 1,2) But, I know that ‘thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness: that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.’ (Ps. li. 8) I gasp for that spiritual drink that will satisfy my soul. ‘I thirst.’ (St. John xix. 28) There is one more thing for me to do before ‘It is finished’ (Ibid, 30), before ‘I commend my spirit into thy hands.’ (St. Luke xxiii. 46) There is Roman soldier over there, I cannot see him clearly, but he has not moved throughout this my suffering death. He has not taken his eyes off me. He is not vengeful or malicious. He has been looking into my eyes from the beginning. By his own judgment, he knows that something is terribly wrong. And yet he also sees that something is coming to pass that will be wonderfully right. The seed of faith is growing in his heart. ‘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. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.’(Idem, 29, 30) This Roman soldier, perhaps with another, gave Jesus his last sip of wine. Father, I thank you for giving me this drink through him. I thank you for moving him to provide me with the drink that is becoming his own offering of himself through you. Keep him near, my Mother and disciple will need his help in taking me down from this tree and burying me. And through them, let us welcome him into the Body of my Death, which is already becoming the Body of our new Life. Today, we come to the Cross to repent. While we are crucifying Jesus Christ, He desires us. Neither suffering nor death, neither pain nor torture will stop Jesus from desiring our salvation. Hans Urs Von Balthasar sums up what has happened for us. Jesus, the Crucified, endures our inner darkness and estrangement from God, and he does so in our place. It is all the more painful for Him, the less He has merited it. There is nothing familiar about it to Him: it is utterly alien and full of horror. Indeed, He suffers more deeply than an ordinary man is capable of suffering, even were he condemned and rejected by God, because only the incarnate Son knows who the Father really is and what it means to be deprived of Him, to have lost Him (to all appearances) forever. It is meaningless to call this suffering “hell”, for there is no hatred of God in Jesus, only a pain that is deeper and more timeless than the ordinary man could endure either in his lifetime or after His death. (Sermon for Good Friday) The desire for our salvation is alive in the heart of Jesus Christ as He takes on our darkness and estrangement from God. Love that is the Light and Life feels the pain more acutely than any man can because He has not earned or merited this condition. The pain is perfectly present because the Son of God must endure what is contrary to His own nature in the fiber of all His being. Because He is the Love that is the Light and Life that knows God perfectly and loves Him absolutely, His brokenness for us will be all the more pure and complete. He will lovingly endure the pain of a broken heart until He can overcome sin and open to man the gates of everlasting life once again. St. Paul tells us that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death (Romans vi. 4) because the light hath shined in darkness, and the darkness overcame it not. (St. John i. 5) Amen. ©wjsmartin He riseth up from supper, and laid aside his garments, and took a towel and girded himself.
Tonight, you and I are invited to the Last Supper of Christ. With the Apostles, we move into a realm that is fraught with fear and trembling, not grasping the meaning of it all or what will come tomorrow on Good Friday. The Apostles have been following Jesus for some three years, and they have experienced the hand of God extended to them and others through the life of their Master. In a sense there was so much to be thankful for, so many wonders and miracles, so many beautiful teachings and sayings, so much that man could endure and even enjoy. But tonight, we sense the impending doom of suffering, and death. Tonight, we feel fear and sense the approaching darkness of suffering and death. But despite what is coming, tonight, we witness more of the Goodness of God in Jesus Christ. Come what may, no matter what might threaten His earthly mission to us, Jesus Christ came into the world to offer God’s goodness to us. Jesus has been tempted to reject His Father’s will and way. He has refused it resolutely by embracing God’s goodness. The Father desires the Son, and the Son desires the Father. Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee. (St. John xvii. 1) The two move together as One for us men and for our salvation. Jesus Christ always embraces the will of the Father. Jesus has never denied God’s light and love. Tonight, before He bids us follow Him into darkness, He offers more goodness from the Father. Tonight, the goodness that Jesus offers to us comes in the Last Supper that He shares with His friends. It is the Feast of Passover. The Passover celebrates God’s passing over the homes of the Jews in Egypt to spare them from the last plague that he visited upon the Egyptians. The Passover celebrates the Jews passing over from Egypt to the Promised Land. Tonight, Christ prepares us for God the Father’s passing over of our sins. Tonight, Christ prepares us to accept that He alone will not be passed over, but must bear the burden of our sins, defeat them, and put them to death on the Cross of His Love, tomorrow. In tonight’s Epistle, St. Paul reminds us that The Lord’s Supper, The Eucharist, or the Holy Communion was instituted on the night in which He was betrayed. (1 Cor. xi. 23) Tonight, Christ imparts goodness in the face of impending betrayal. His promise to be with His friends will not be passed over because of Fallen Man’s sin. His promise will be stronger than all Man’s efforts to impede the salvation that He brings into the world. So, as St. Paul reminds us, Christ took bread; and when He had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat; this is my Body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood; this do in remembrance of me. (ibid, 24,25) The goodness that Christ will bring to us is threatened tonight by betrayal and tomorrow by malice, suffering, and death. But tonight, Christ gives us strength to fight our many betrayals of Him, to be with Him in suffering and death tomorrow. The New Passover is being established by Christ. A New Testament or covenant is inaugurated through Christ’s body and blood. St. Eusebius of Caesaria tells us that: Since the body he had assumed was about to be taken away from their bodily sight, and was about to be carried to the stars, it was necessary that, on the day of His last supper, He should consecrate for us the sacrament of His body and blood, so that what, as a price, was offered once should, through a mystery, be worshipped unceasingly. Christ prepares His Apostles then and us now for the mystery of our participation in the goodness of His redemption. We are invited to believe that bread and wine can become His body and blood for us. We are invited to believe that this special meal of earthly elements will become our share of spiritual nutriment at His Divine Table. We have been given us an example that Christians will forever follow in Imitation of Christ. What Jesus did and said, He offered as a friend. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. (St. John xv. 14, 15) Bread is broken and wine is outpoured. Tomorrow a Body will be broken, and Blood will flow. The two acts will not be divided in the end. Just as Christ’s human nature was joined to His Divine Being, so bread and wine will be joined to His Body and Blood, the essence of Himself as the Word of the Father. Tonight, the Body and Blood –soon to be broken and pierced, offers Himself to the memory and will of His followers. Tonight, also, the Body and Blood stoops down to wash and to cleanse the dirty feet of His disciples. Jesus always serves His friends. He promises that He will feed them by stooping down to wash them. The Body and Blood, present to the Church until the end of all time, will nourish and serve. Today, He is the servant who feeds with bread and wine, and cleanses with water. Tomorrow, He will wash us in the Blood of His dying Body. Both will be one. We are washed through water and blood. Tonight is tender and tame. Tomorrow will be callous and cruel. But there is more that we should see and grasp before we move from the Last Supper to Good Friday. What Jesus does is who He is, the will of the Father in human flesh. Who Jesus is, is what He intends we should become. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet…These things I command you, that ye love one another. (St. John xiii. 14, xv. 17) He will give us bread and wine so that His Body and Blood, His nature, might be assimilated to us. He will wash the dirty feet of our souls so that we too might become humble servants giving ourselves to all others. To be nourished for servanthood will be perfected in the sacrifice He makes for us on Good Friday. Tonight, we find ourselves the unwitting recipients of God’s goodness in Jesus Christ. Jesus does what he does, and we have no part of him if He does it not. Jesus comes to wash our feet, and, with Peter, we ignorantly resist. Lord, thou shalt never wash my feet. (St. John xiii. 8) Our instinct is to refuse to see how God in Jesus Christ must humble himself to save us. Proud as we are, we prefer a distant and unapproachable God: a God easier to endure. We prefer a God who does not muddy His garments with the filth and corruption of earthly existence. Our sense is that the Holy Word of God should never stoop down from Heaven to suffer the effects of our sin. God is high, we are low; the Master should never condescend to become a slave. Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man. (St. Luke v. 8) Jesus answers, If I do not wash thee, thou hast no part with me. (Ibid) Tonight, with Jean Mouroux, we must begin to realize that, out of a means of destruction Christ made the very means of life; of a punishment the means of healing; of an annihilation the means to a resurrection. (The Meaning of Man, p. 88) Christ chose His destiny as suffering and dying servant for you and for me. At the source of this choice, there lay a measureless love, a love that never hesitated, never drew back, never murmured; a love on the contrary that accepted, desired, and bore with everything. (Ibid, 89) If the Sacrament instituted tonight is to have any effect, we must follow Christ, the suffering servant, to the Cross. Bread and wine will remain bread and wine until we embrace His Body offered for us, and His Blood outpoured for us. Servanthood will only and ever be an earthly virtue unless we allow Christ the servant to nourish and heal us from the Cross of His love. St. Paul tells us that for as oft as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come again. (ibid, 26) Man was made for Communion with God. Man is remade for Communion with the Father, through the death of His own Son. We are called to partake of nothing short of God’s Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, to be made flesh in us. As easily as faith submits to Christ’s death for us, so shall bread and wine become Body and Blood, fitting us to serve God and one another. 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. Holy Week takes us to the one moment in history that judges all others. Holy Week takes us to the Cross of Jesus Christ. Following Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, he said: 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) Jesus prophesies His silent and lonely death on the Cross. His own Jewish people will demand His death on the Cross. The Romans will facilitate it. His Apostles will abandon Him in fear and cowardice. Peter will deny Him and repent. Judas Iscariot will betray Him and hang himself. Today, we remember that Jesus Christ predicted what the Jews, the Romans, and even His friends would do to Him. Today, we remember that Jesus Christ would willingly accept their unjust sentencing in order to save us. The envious malice of the Jewish Establishment will not stop Jesus from doing what He must do for us. The political expedience of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, will not deter Him. The fearful, cowardly, and weak affection of His closest friends and His Mother will not shake Him. The mysterious energy, wisdom, and will of God the Father in the human flesh of Jesus Christ must persist to the end. Christ has come down from Heaven to do the Father’s will for us men and for our salvation. (Nicene Creed) His Mission for us would be seen through to the end. Christ was intent on fulfilling what would be fraught with supreme significance for mankind until the end of time. His Cross would be the place of His sacrifice for us. In the face of what leads to Jesus Christ’s Cross and sacrifice for us, we find the Master’s silence. To it, Pilate marveled greatly. (St. Matthew xxvii. 14) Pilate’s wife sent word to her husband, have nothing do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.(ibid, 19) Pilate knows that there is no just cause for Jesus’ trial or punishment. His conscience is 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. Pilate, who was want to release a prisoner unto the people at the feast, acquiesced. In response to the passionate envy that threatens further anarchy, we 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) Jesus Christ accepts Man’s judgment on Him. He is rejected by virtuous pagans, righteous Jews, and His own Disciples. Jesus Christ will surrender to the unjust, unearned, and undeserved justice of fallen man. Let them do their worst. Jesus Christ is not only Master of Himself, He is also their Master as well. (The Christian Year in the Times) The Divine Providence, which is to say the Divine way, truth, and life made flesh, must continue to be Himself. Christ has a work to do, come what may. He embraces Divine Permission to do what He must to save us all. His sacrifice will be conditioned and caused by Man’s arrogance, enmity, envy, and bitterness. So be it. He will do what He must to save us. In all humility, with courage, and through faith, hope, and love, Christ will suffer and die. His sacrifice and suffering, as painful as they will be, will be well worth His good work for us. Today, in silence, as we contemplate the trial of Jesus Christ, we cannot help but be sore amazed at what His suffering and sacrifice will mean for us. The aid of all creatures has been denied Him. He is alone with the Father. He and the Father, through the Spirit, will effect our salvation. His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane commences His final work for us. There, He comes to know the nature of evil as the source of ongoing suffering and sorrow. There, He comes to know how evil, freely willed by friend and foe alike, forever divides Man from God and Man from Man. There, evil has one last go at Him, and He feels the sense of its looming nothingness and darkness. He does not fear death. Rather, He must bear and endure the nothingness and darkness of sin, and the desolation of all men who have been and will be destroyed by it. Jesus Christ, God’s Word and Will made flesh, must be emptied, made poor in spirit, to save us by God’s Grace alone. O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. (St. Matthew xxvi. 39) 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 all Divinity, in order that pure human powerlessness might be placed back in the hands of God the Father, the Creator and Redeemer of Mankind. He will not desperately grasp onto, clutch, or seize His Divine Power in the hour of His human impotence. Rather, He will obey, fear, and follow the Father as Man, found in the form of a servant, in human form, humbled, for us men and for our salvation. (idem) He will become the New Man, the Second Adam, who will be the servant of the Father because God’s will and Word alone suffice to save us. This week, I pray, that each of us shall discover that Jesus Christ brings us into His suffering and sacrifice in order to give us new life. In Jesus Christ, 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), let us begin to see the Word of God’s Wisdom and Love in the power of His suffering and sacrificed flesh. Christ is a servant of God alone. Curiously enough, I believe that we shall begin to see how suffering, sacrifice, and death are being made into something new and good. For, as we approach Christ and His Cross, we do well to remember that He dies for us on a Friday that is forever called Good. On Good Friday, what threatens to be judged by Fallen Man as tragic, is made Good by the only one who can make it so. And while we can never say that He did not suffer pain and utter humiliation at the hands of sinful men, we must also say that He endured it all in perfect compliance and purposeful acceptance with the Father’s will for our salvation. Jesus Christ has accepted the truth of the age-old maxim, no pain, no gain, no Cross, no Crown. On this Palm Sunday, we sing Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. And without a beat, we find our joy turned to malice, as we, with the Ancient Jews, cry Crucify Him. Crucify Him. Let him be crucified. Fallen Man is a mess. We are a schizophrenic mess. Once again, in this Holy Week, we can be silent and still to learn how to see and know what God in Jesus Christ does for us. 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 Holy Week, let us listen to the silent Word of God’s Wisdom and Love that reveals power and life in the heart of our dying Lord. Let us listen as God’s Word of Wisdom and Love makes innocent sacrifice and suffering the occasion for His persistent pursuit of our salvation. Let us listen to the God’s Word of Wisdom and Love that calls us into sacrifice and suffering. Let us be determined to be embraced by that Wisdom and Love which offers Himself to God and to us in that simultaneous knot of fire that purges away all sin, pride, envy, and cruelty. Let us be determined to find the forgiveness of sins in the One who gave Himself for us absolutely and completely as Man to God and God to Man. The Cross is the center of the world’s redemption. The Cross is the new Tree of Life, which blossomed first on Calvary, whose fruit has strength to induce all men to partake of God’s Glory. (The Christian Year in the Times, 1930) On the Cross, the pure and perfect Son of God made flesh, Jesus Christ, makes us right with God the Father once again. There alone, through the good work of Jesus Christ for us, on Good Friday, in His sacrifice, suffering, and death, we should begin to find the forgiveness of our sins. The forgiveness of sins is Christ’s chief end and purpose. Sacrifice, suffering, and death are Christ’s means to obtain it for us. For no other reason than love for us and our salvation, Jesus Christ becomes the forgiveness of sins. In becoming the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ crowns a life of giving Himself back to the Father, to do His will, come what may, against all opposition to it. In becoming the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ becomes the fruit of the new Tree of Life, food for our glorious immortality. Amen. ©wjsmartin That by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore,
both in body and soul… (Collect, Passion Sunday) The readings for the Sunday Next before Holy Week, invite us to study the doctrine of Christ’s sacrifice and priesthood. (Melville Scott, Harmony of Collects, Epistles, and Gospels) Today is called Passion Sunday, or the Sunday of the Atonement. Today we are called to learn about the doctrine of the Cross. The death of Jesus Christ must call us into far more than syrupy sentimentality and the short-lived pangs of a guilty conscience on Good Friday. Christ’s sacrifice and death must command such attention and respect of intellect that sound doctrine will move our wills to submit to the great mystery of godliness. (1 Tim iii. 16) Atonement Sunday calls us to remember the practice of atonement for sins in Jewish history and how Christ’s atonement perfects them all. In the Old Testament the Jewish high priest would enter into the tabernacle at Jerusalem to make atonement for the people’s sins on the eve of Passover. He would have sacrificed a one-year-old, male lamb, without spot or blemish. He then would have painted the doorposts leading into the inner sanctum of the temple, the holiest of holies, the presence chamber of God, with the blood of a sacrificed lamb. Next, he sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat, the place signifying God’s encounter with man, Moses. Then, he dredged the altar of incense, a symbol of prayer, with the blood. Finally, the priest would have undergone ritual washing for impurity and irregularity contracted by the bloody sacrifice. Thus, the Jewish high priest entered into the holiest of holies, the inner sanctum, only once a year, and every year to make sacrifice for his sins and the sins of the people. For the Jews, sinful man came closest to God by the external and visible sacrifices of the high priest. The sacrifices could make neither the priest nor the people perfect, as pertaining to the conscience; which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation. (Hebrews ix, 9,10) Neither food nor drink, bodily or fleshly cleansing, could make the conscience clean. Jeremiah had asked rhetorically; Shall the holy flesh take away from your crimes?’ (Jer. 11:15) Canon Scott reminds us that Jewish promises are Christian realities, their hopes our certainties, their future our present. (idem) What the Jews did to make atonement for sin was a forerunner and precursor to what Christ would do for us. The author of the Epistle continues. But when Christ became an high priest of good things yet to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. When Christ became our High Priest, in and through His death, He passed through the tabernacle of His body, His external and visible nature, beyond the veil of His flesh (idem) to God. When he finished His earthly mission to us, He ascended, to enter into the holy place of Heaven, to plead our cause and the merits of his eternal redemption for us. Through His Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Christ was opening the door of the Kingdom of Heaven to us, having torn down the wall of separation between the external world and the internal and invisible world of the spirit. Christ’s atonement for our sins was made in time and space but was eternally perfect. His redemption of our sinful human nature was made once for all, for the sins of the whole world, needing no repetition. The Jewish high priest offered his sacrifice to atone for sins in the tabernacle made with hands. Christ offered his sacrifice in tabernacle of His own body, not made with hands. The Jewish high priest offered the blood of goats and calves, a life less and inferior to his own. Christ shed His own blood and offered Himself. The Jewish high priest entered the temple of Jerusalem, a model of heaven. Christ entered heaven itself. The Jewish high priest offered the death of a brute beast. Christ became His own brute beast and made His own death the test of His own obedience to the Father. Death would be no barrier to life but the means of embracing a better and more perfect life with the Father. For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Hebrews, ix, 13,14) Christ offers His body to cleanse our consciences from dead works through the eternal Spirit. The Jews cleansed their bodies, but not their souls. Christ offers the first completely to purify and perfect the second. He sacrifices His body completely in order to achieve union with Father, for us. He does what we could never do. He dies purely and perfectly to the world, the flesh, and the devil, so that He might unite us with God. St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that the blood of Christ cleanses the conscience inwardly, which is accomplished by faith: ‘Purifying their hearts by faith’ (Ac. 15:9), inasmuch as it makes one believe that all who adhere to Christ are cleansed by His blood. (Comm. Hebrews, ix…) And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. (ibid, 15) Christ carries us from the Old Testament to the New. He makes death not something final as an end but a means, an instrument, a facilitator for new life with God the Father. Christ makes the Old Testament New because He gives us the promise of eternal inheritance. From Christ’s death to sin and Satan, our faith and hope through love of Jesus Christ can find freedom in His Resurrection and Ascension, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter i. 4,5) And, we are baptized into His death (Romans, vi. 4). His Atonement is all effectual for those who believe. Today, Christ Himself calls us to believe in what He did because of who He was. He alone is well-suited to save us. With the Pharisees, on the best of days, we tend to judge Christ. Our instinct is to be cynical about Him. We are not of God because we do not hear God’s words. (St. John viii. 47) We launch back at Him and say, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil? (ibid, 48) Christ comes from God and knows God. He seeks not [His] own glory for His Father seeks and judges. (ibid, 50) The Pharisees, you, and I judge ourselves and seek our own glory. If we keep the Word of God, in Jesus Christ, we shall never see death. (ibid, 51) All we see in Jesus Christ is another man, perhaps, at best, another Abraham. How can Christ claim to offer life after death if he is but a mere man? Christ seems to make Himself out to be more than a man. Of course, in the Gospel, He prepares us for the more than a man that He is. We forget that God made us for Himself, for eternity. Christ intends to reestablish the possibility of our eternal inheritance. Thus, He does not honor himself. The Man apart from God who honors himself, dies. Christ knows God and keeps His saying, His Word. The Word that Christ is and keeps will see Him through death, for all of us, into new life. We claim that God is our God. We glorify ourselves, but Christ glorifies God. The One Christ knows surely and certainly, He glorifies. He knows, while we can only come to know. For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. (St. John vi. 38) Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad. (ibid, 56) Inwardly and spiritually, long before Christ’s coming, with faith and hope, Abraham saw Christ’s coming. The Pharisees, you, and I cannot see spiritually and inwardly. Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. (ibid, 58) Christ binds the past and the future to the present. As St. Thomas reminds us, For eternal existence knows neither past nor future time, but embraces all time in one indivisible [instant]. (Comm. John…) Christ’s source and origin come to us from the Eternally Now of God, I am. Christ is the future hope of all the ancient Jews of the past, like Abraham, in the present. He is our hope now, soon to become history, in the future. Christ derives His meaning and definition from Eternity for you and me. God revealed Himself to Moses in history as I am. Christ is God’s great I am in our history. The history of God’s great I am must find relevance for us today. Christ doesn’t say it, but He is holy, harmless, and undefiled, separate from sinners, ‘made higher than the heavens’, in His unique Sonship, knowledge, and being. (idem, Scott) However, I am will elaborate for the purposes of our faith, hope and love, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto to the Father, but by me. (St. John xiv. 6) He says this so that we might find in Him the way home to Heaven, by the Truth that He is, through His life, now for the future. I am the bread of life, (St. John vi. 35) that we might feed on Him as God’s Word, nourishing us inwardly and spiritually for the Kingdom. I am the light of the world, (St. John viii. 12), that we might walk to Heaven through the light that He is. I am the door (St. John x. 7) through whom we might walk, at present. I am the good shepherd (St. John x. 110 that He might herd us home, now. I am the true vine (St. John xv. 1) that here we might begin to bud as His branches. And, finally, I am the resurrection and the life (St. John xi. 25) that He who holds the keys of death and the grave might make it into the seedbed of faith, hope, and love that leads us now, on this Passion Sunday, this Atonement Sunday, to His glory, even forever. 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, our Lord insists, 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 up to Jerusalem is what our lives are all about. We walk with Jesus to see how, in the wilderness and desert of the human soul, He conquers the temptations of Satan and triumphs over sin for us. We walk with Jesus to discover that, like the woman of Cana, we are exiles, strangers, aliens to God’s promises, and even dogs who must humbly eat of the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table. (St. Matthew xv. 27) We walk with Jesus also to learn that we have been mostly deaf to the Word of God and, thus, incapable of speaking the truth. And today, we must learn that Jesus Christ comes to us to feed us miraculously with the Bread of Heaven. But you will have noticed that our Lenten pilgrimage with Jesus up to Jerusalem will not be easy. Lenten learning about ourselves – who we are and what we need, is spiritually exhausting. Lenten fasting and abstinence make us haggard and hungry. At times, we become distracted and even lose our way. The sins that so easily beset us 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 good intentions but find ourselves much like the children of the proverbial Hagar, Abraham’s mistress, and bond woman –giving birth to the earthly bastard offspring of vice. We want freedom as the children of promise, and followers of Jesus, who go up to Jerusalem which is above… and is free. (Galatians iv. 26) Yet it seems that 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 or Mothering Sunday, when 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, breathe, and contemplate the end and meaning of all our labors. 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 that will give us the dogged and dauntless determination to press on. Jesus commands, 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. John Chrysostom: Homily xlii) We must sit, listen, and hear. Yet it is Lent. We are worn out, and Jesus asks us, Whence shall we buy bread that [we all] may eat? (St. John vi. 5). Our minds are bent on earthly things. Jesus intends to test us with Philip, for he Himself knew what he would do. (St. John vi. 6) Philip has seen the finger of God at work in Jesus’ miracles. Will we, with him, believe that Jesus can provide food that no man can afford and for so many? What measure of faith does Philip have? What measure do we have? Are we the children of Hagar, born after the flesh or are we the children of promise? (Gal. iv. 23) Philip answers as one in bondage to the elements of this world. On our best of days, we do the same. He responds that even two-hundred penny worth is not enough for this crowd. (St. John vi. 7) An earthly-minded Philip is calculating the cost of feeding five thousand. Too many people, too little money, he reckons. Jesus intends to reveal the spiritual poverty of Philip’s faith. At the beginning of St. John’s Gospel, Philip found Nathaniel and said We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. (St. John i. 45) Philip is bold with words to predict who Jesus is. Now will his words be matched by true faith in what Jesus can do? As Archbishop Trench remarks, As yet, he knows not that the Lord whom he serves upon earth is even the same who ‘openeth his hand and filleth all things living with plenteousness,’ who feeds and nourishes all creatures, who has fed them and nourished them from the creation of the world…and can feed a few thousand now. Andrew will substantiate Philip’s doubt. 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 doubt, Andrew’s faith was overcome by too little evidence. To offer to fill so many when the resources were few would have been crushing and embarrassing. True faith can often be destroyed when natural demands and natural provision are wanting. To Philip and Andrew, the Lord’s hand seems to be waxen short. (Numbers xi. 23) Normally, when ordinary and natural means fail us, we neglect to remember the power of the Lord. 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) Jesus as much as said, You have nothing to set down before the men, but God provides you with a plush green dining area. 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) Our Lord thanks the Father in advance. All we have comes from the Father. What God gives to us from the hands of Jesus Christ will be more than sufficient to satisfy our hunger. Five loaves and two fishes will feed five thousand. In the normal course of life, food and drink are already multiplied into the larger gift of spiritual thanksgiving. The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field. 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) Those who are in bondage to the elements of this world (Gal. iv. 3) seldom have a thought for others who must share in our feast. With all that we are given, there must remain more for those who cannot yet feast with us. Food has been multiplied and shared with us. We must do the same. Are we the children of Hagar or Sarah? If we are the children of Sarah, with the Apostles, Matthew Henry suggests that we must See how large the divine bounty is; it not only fills the cup, but makes it run over; bread enough, and to spare, in our Father's house. The fragments filled twelve baskets, one for each disciple; they were thus repaid with interest for their willingness to part with what they had for public service. (Matthew Henry, Commentary) 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 is thankful and feeds the hungry five thousand. We must do the same. Christ intends that we should imitate His generosity. 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 food that faith must learn to feed on. In the fragments that remain are hidden gifts of mystic meaning. Herein is that Divine potential for those who begin to hunger and thirst after righteousness. (St. Matthew v. 6) Jesus always provides more food to the spirit for 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 food for thought, food for the soul. Are we being called to feed only on earthly manna? Or are we called to digest spiritual truth? There is more to be needed and ingested from this Giver and His gifts, but not until the eyes of faith are opened and the believer’s heart is softened. Our eyes are opened, and our hearts are softened as we partake of the superabundant nature of God’s love in the Holy Sacrament today. Even here, 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 to the Jerusalem of the Cross. 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., Christ’s death and ours. Amen. ©wjsmartin Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God, and keep it.
St. Luke xi. In last Sunday’s Gospel, we read about the kind of humility and meekness that generate faith in freedom from the Devil. There, a Syrophoenician woman, a Greek inhabitant of Cana, besought the Lord Jesus for the healing of her daughter, who was grievously vexed with a devil. (St. Matthew xv. 22) In confessing who and what she was, the good lady expressed that faith that finds freedom and liberty in Jesus Christ. She confessed herself to be a dog in relation to Christ and the salvation that He brings into the world. Her humility and meekness moved her into that faith that hangs desperately on God and His Grace. Today, our faith becomes situated more soundly in God’s Grace. Today, we learn that liberation is God’s work and that we shall not be free until we allow God in Jesus Christ to cast out our demons. In this morning’s Gospel, we read that Jesus had cast a demon out of a dumb (or mute) man, and the dumb spake. (St. Luke xi. 14) The healing is instantaneous and follows Jesus’ response to one of disciples, who had asked Him to teach us all how to pray. Jesus had furnished him with what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. To emphasize the inward and spiritual nature of prayer, Jesus heals a deaf-mute man, whose prayer is known to God the Father alone. Yet no sooner had Jesus healed the dumb-mute man, than an equally instantaneous reaction comes from the crowd of bystanders exclaiming that Jesus had cast out the demon or devil through Beelzebub the chief of the devils. (Idem, 16) The Ancients believed that physical handicaps were divine punishment for demonic possession. That some who witnessed the miracle judged that Jesus was in league with the Devil should not surprise us. If healing could not be proved to come from God alone, Ancient Man concluded superstitiously that the Devil was up to his old tricks. Thus, we read, that others demanded a sign from heaven to prove that Jesus was working with God. The problem is that men in general, and religious men in particular, do not understand the nature of prayer. Most men live on the outside of themselves and thus judge a world around them without giving much thought for themselves or the state and condition of their own souls. Unlike last week’s Syrophoenician woman, they never come round to seeing themselves as strangers to God’s Promises and unworthy of His Grace. Unlike today’s deaf-mute man, they do not so much as pray to God in secret that the God who seeth in secret shall reward them openly. (St. Matthew vi. 4) Most men never ask that they might receive, seek that they might find, or knock that it might be opened to them. (St. Luke xi. 9) As a result, they are unaccustomed to God’s Gracious benevolence. So, in today’s Gospel, and as absurd as it might seem, they demand a sign from heaven, or another miracle, to prove that goodness comes from God alone. On a basic level, in this morning’s Gospel, religious men in all ages are given a wakeup call and our need for the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us of our absolute dependence on God for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life. (General Thanksgiving) Today, Jesus reinforces the fact that we hang on God for all good things and that God alone can cast out [our] demons. The Syrophoenician Woman of last week’s Gospel becomes the deaf-mute man. Prior to his healing, he can neither hear nor speak. His impediment separates him from the world around him. He is helpless and hopeless. Unlike last week’s Syrophoenician Woman, he can neither reveal to all that he is a dog nor reveal his need. His suffering and prayer are incommunicable to all other men. His fellow Jews judge him to be suffering because of his sins. Only when Jesus comes upon him to answer his prayer does the dumb speak, no doubt behaving like an infant child whose chief delight is found in being able to connect with the created order and all other men. The deaf-mute man’s prayer is heard by God. God responds to him in Jesus Christ. He is no sooner healed than he hears that his healing must have come from Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. (idem) Next, he heard Jesus’ response. 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) Our liberated man now possessed a good heretofore denied to him. Jesus implies that he had been divided from God’s kingdom and lived in desolation. Because Satan was not divided against himself, with the help of his fellow demons he ensured that this man stood fast in his kingdom, for a time. Along the lines of his life, this man both felt and knew himself to be separated from God and his fellow men. That he had miraculously been carried into a world of potential goodness was no doubt the clearest truth presented to his newly liberated senses. Satan’s singular intention was to keep him deaf and mute. Jesus of Nazareth had freed him. Satan’s one aim is to divide a man from God’s creation, from God’s truth, and from truth’s healing and salvation has been overcome. His prayer to the Father had been answered. With the miracle, our sufferer might have wondered about the stranger nature of the world he had entered. Would that the bystanders had praised God for such a wonderful miracle as this! But we read that Jesus knew their thoughts. (ibid, xi. 17) Jesus confronted the malice and envy of the crowd, who seemed to see no illustration for their own needs and wants in the condition of deaf-mute man’s healing. If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges. (ibid, 19) If Beelzebub or Satan had cast out the demonic spirit, Satan would have been divided against himself. If some demons had brought about this good, then Satan and his friends must have been divided. As St. Bruno says, if the spirits of evil were waging war against each other, they would have little or no power against man. (St. Bruno, The Kingdom of Evil) But if Christ had brought about this evident good, by whom and for what reason did the Sons of Israel cast them out? But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you. (ibid, 20) Christ insists that the finger of God alone is sufficient to cast out any demons that plague the restless and sorrowful hearts of sinful men. The devils were united in keeping the deaf and mute man separated from God and his fellow men. The devils unite to distract and prevent us from asking God to heal and deliver us from our spiritually deaf and mute fallen natures. 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) The Devil and his friends have had their permissive power since the fall of man. The Devil and his friends had kept the deaf and mute man without hearing or speech, for a season. But a stronger than he has come down from Heaven and upon him. Satan was a strong man who kept his palace and his slaves – his goods, like the deaf-mute man, in peace. Satan’s goods were at peace since his power over him had gone unchallenged. But a stronger than he, Jesus Christ, has conquered him, broken his armour, and freed the deaf-mute man from his apparently permanent grip. The deaf-mute man has been healed by Jesus Christ. But what of the malicious mockers and envious naysayers? Jesus says that 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. (ibid, xi. 24-26) The Jewish bystanders have believed that they were more righteous than the healed deaf-mute man, who prayed for deliverance from an unclean spirit. The bystanders lacked the vigilant and humble faith to confess that they needed God’s strong man. They rested upon their own good works. They saw unclean spirits come and go. They walked through dry, empty places, sought rest, found none, and returned to their own houses. They were now vulnerable to seven other spirits more wicked than [themselves], who tempted and harangued them. The deaf-mute man’s demon had been cast out. The bystander’s unclean spirit had merely gone out – Satan disguised as an angel of light. He would, no doubt, return. The danger for them is much worse since without any need and thankful reception of the Grace that Christ brings into the world, the last state of them will be worse than the first. (idem) This morning the Word and Son of God made man, Jesus Christ, puts His finger on our problem, and desires to cast out all our demons. 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 the Father, through Jesus the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. With the deaf-mute man, the miracle of our faith must be the answer to our secret, vigilant, humble, and faithful prayer for Christ to cast out all our demons. The wonderful mystery of salvation that Jesus brings into the world, should move us to ask that we might receive. Something as simple as being able to hear the Word of God in Jesus Christ and speak words in giving of thanks should move and define us with the healed deaf-mute man. With the dumb-mute man 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 to walk as children of the light 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 studied Satan’s temptations of Jesus Christ, and Christ’s response to them. You will remember that we were interested in answering our Lenten question, Who is Jesus Christ. In rejecting the evil and cleaving to the good, Christ revealed to us who He must be in order to redeem and save us. We learned that if Christ was to save us, He must be the Son of God made Man. This, in turn, means that He must embrace our human condition and fight sin from within its nature. This week we shall come to see the nature of sin and our powerlessness over it. The way of man’s life involves manifold temptations. The same way is complicated by the seriousness of our fallen condition. Only the humility of the Son of God made Man can deliver us from the Devil’s hold over us. This morning, we read in the Gospel that Our Lord Jesus Christ comes to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, (St. Matthew 15. 21) to the borders of the pagan Gentile world. Jesus never went into non-Jewish territory. He would leave that for His Apostles once He had returned to the Father. Jesus’ motives should intrigue 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 He even finds Himself drawn to the borders of heathen nations? Today, He had just preached 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) Jesus’ Jewish brethren maintained the Old Testament Law through meticulous religious observance. Outwardly and visibly, they were pious. But inwardly and spiritually, their hearts were far from Him. So, the Spirit leads Jesus to the borders of Canaan. A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, among his own kin, and in his own house. (St. Mark vi. 4) A Syrophoenician woman, a Greek inhabitant of Canaan, will approach Jesus. From outside of Israel, 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 instantaneously efficacious, and she was determined to have it also. Jesus was led by the Spirit, 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. She bears the burden of her daughter’s illness in her spirit. Her daughter’s misery is her misery. She will supplicate Jesus to condescend to heal her daughter. 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, is keen to elicit from this woman a confession of faith. The Apostles clearly 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 the pious in every age, they are consumed with what Jesus does rather than with His intention and meaning. So, they exclaimed, Send her away, for she crieth after us. (St. Matthew 15, 23) The woman has interrupted the Apostles’ experience of Jesus. They want only to be rid of this pest. 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 will admit no impediment to their selfish ease. Jesus, however, will engage the woman, though at first, He tries and tests her with His silence. Christ is silent that the woman must be more earnest in her prayer. Jesus finally responds. He says, 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. Yet Jesus, the Great Physician, nevertheless begins to open this heathen woman’s spiritual swelling. The Apostles are silent. She is neither daunted, disheartened, nor disturbed. It appears that she needs Jesus with a more determined fervor and faith than the Apostles do. As audacious and brazen as she appeared to the Jewish Apostles, her faith moves closer to Jesus. The more acute the disease, the 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 will submit to His rule. 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) She will not be thwarted in her entreaty. Jesus is first silent and then discouraging. 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 hurls at her the ancient Jews’ prejudice of the Gentiles. Yet, if we look more closely, Jesus is trying to tease out of this woman not only faith but humility and meekness. Is he mocking this woman or the Jews? He knows that this woman, no matter what her race or cultural origin, possesses a faith that will put His faithful Jewish followers to shame. This Gentile is going up to Jerusalem with us, this Lent. She needs Jesus completely. She hangs upon His every word and refuses to let Him out of her grip. She will follow Him come what may. She believes that Jesus the Man comes from God. Jesus calls her a dog, and she responds. Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. (St. Matthew 15. 27) Humility comes to her with ease. She will endure 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 medicine. Jesus can become her Master. 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. She insists, Very well, let me be a dog. If you are the master, I shall eat of the crumbs that fall from the table, whose feast is meant 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) Her daughter is sick. If she must needs be a dog, so be it. She believes that Jesus 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 in Jesus’ heart. 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, always obtains Jesus’ healing. This woman’s faith answers our Lenten question. Who is Jesus Christ? This woman believes in the Son of God made Man. 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, He would do no good. (Idem) So, we must be willing to confess the truth about ourselves if the Son of God made Man is to humble Himself, come down to us, and redeem and save us. Christ comes down from Heaven to diagnose our condition and provide the cure. He intends for us to know and confess who we are –Yes, Lord, I am a dog. 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 open to His humility, His coming down to us, from Heaven to earth, from God to us as Man. Let us all admit that we are dogs. He calls us out as dogs because God calls us not to uncleanness, but unto holiness. (Idem) Jesus is always overcome by the faith of dogs who feed on His crumbs to conquer the Devil and break His hold over us. Jesus may resist us at times, but only to tease out that faith that will have Him, and Him alone as the Son of God made Man, whose humility rewards that of today’s Syrophoenician woman. Amen. ©wjsmartin Give us Grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit,
We may ever obey thy Godly Motions in Righteousness and True Holiness To thy Honor and Glory, Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, One God, world without end. Amen. (Collect Lent I) One of the most important questions facing any human being who strives to know and love God is Who is Jesus Christ? The answer to the question very much reveals to us if and how God and Man can be reconciled. We seek to answer the question as our faith seeks understanding for the very practical purpose of our salvation. Who is Jesus Christ? Throughout Lent, we shall ask this question. Lent reveals Who Jesus Christ is by way of His having been tempted to be Who He is not. He was tempted not to be the Son of God as man. This means that Jesus Christ was tempted never to become the Son of God made man. Put more simply, He was tempted to redeem and save us not as Man. And today’s temptation narrative by St. Matthew follows on the heels of John’s baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan when the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon Him: and lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. (St. Matthew iii. 16, 17) Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father and anointed in the descent of the dove. Mystified mortals are mesmerized by Messiah, who has come to save us all and will defeat the enemies of our Heavenly Father. This is our hope. But what we read next confuses us. Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. (Ibid, 1) Who is Jesus Christ? Our faith seeks understanding in these words. The Spirit – the Holy Ghost, who has descended from Heaven with the Father’s blessing leads Jesus not into Jerusalem for a triumphal coronation but into the desert and wilderness for struggle, trial, and temptation by Satan. The Son of God begins the mission of our redemption with suffering! For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews iv. 15) John’s Baptism demands another Baptism, a Baptism by Fire and the Spirit. Jesus’ first order of business is to undergo the temptations that we all endure. Jesus was anointed to suffer and to be tempted, as we are called into suffering and temptation. Baptism is followed by the manifold assaults of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Who is Jesus Christ? He is the Son of God made man. If He is to save and redeem us, as Man, He will redeem, repair, and reconstitute human nature. Who is Jesus Christ? We read that when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an-hungered. The Spirit has led Jesus the Man into the isolated wilderness of the desert where He fasted successfully for forty days and forty nights. Thus, the Son of God made man, like us, is hungry. As Man, the Son of God knew real and extreme hunger. Satan tempts Man hardest when we are hungry and alone in a place of deprivation. Satan takes his cue. If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. (Idem) The Son of God, God’s Word, who brought waters out of the stoney rock (Ps. lxxviii. 16) nourishing the ancient Hebrews in the wilderness, can surely use His Divine Power to satisfy His earthly hunger by turning the flat rocks into bread. Satan tempts Jesus to prove that He is the Son of God by putting Man’s bodily needs before Divine nutriment. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus will redeem us first by hungering and thirsting for [God’s] righteousness. (St. Matthew v. 6) The Son of God was made Man so that man might become a son of God once again. Later, Jesus will insist Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that….all things may be added unto you. (St. Matthew vi. 33) Submitting bodily need to the desire and love for God is the first order of business in Christ’s redemption of Man. Who is Jesus Christ? He is the one who knows for certain that Man is tempted to prioritize earthly hunger and thirst before his need for God. But Jesus’ meat is to do the will of Him that sent Him. (St. John iv. 32,34) Jesus Christ responds to Satan, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. (St. Matthew iv. 4) With St. Paul, in today’s Epistle, Christ knows that in patience, afflictions, necessities, distresses, stripes, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watchings, and in fastings (2 Cor. vi. 4) – in the flesh, Man is forever tempted to make a false god out of earthly sustenance. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus is the Son of God made Man, whose example calls us into a new way of life that places spiritual nourishment before bodily fulfillment. Stones are stones. Bread is bread. Yes, Man’s body needs bread, but it can never be satisfied truly until first we allow ourselves to feed on the bread of God’s Will. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus is determined to become the bread of God’s will. Satan persists and will tempt Jesus a second time to imperil His calling. Satan’s temptations prolong the hunger of the Son of God made Man. The body is deprived of food; so the soul is tempted to provoke God. The Man is famished. Perhaps Jesus should tempt the Father to prove that He is the bread of God’s will. He trusts in God, then let Him deliver Him now, if he will have Him: for he said, I am the Son of God. (St. Matthew xxvii. 43) Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy city, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto Him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou thy foot against a stone. (St. Matthew iv. 5,6) Satan tempts Jesus to prove His true nature as the Bread of God’s will by throwing Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Pious men are gathered in the court of the Gentiles, always waiting for heaven’s signs. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus is the Son of God made Man. Grace does not destroy but perfects human nature. The Son of God made Man will not command faith from miracles, as Satan commanded bread from stones. Christ is tempted to avoid and flee His call to become the bread of God’s will for man. Man was not made to be redeemed by threatening to risk His own life with death, banking on Divine intervention. Man is a rational creature. Man’s reason and free will, the most divine attributes of his nature, have alienated him from God. The Whole Man must be redeemed as the Bread of God’s Will. Christ must redeem man from sin. The Bread of God’s Will must suffer the effects of fallen man’s reason and free will – his sin, to make him good, true, noble, and acceptable to God once again. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ will redeem reason and free will by suffering at the hands of sinful men. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. (St. Matthew iv. 7) The Bread of God’s Will made Man never provokes and tempts God irrationally and arrogantly for Divine approval or intervention. Faith does not seek to turn stones to bread or death into life. Faith seeks to understand sin and conquer it through suffering and sacrifice. Who is Jesus Christ? Satan has one last temptation. Surely if Jesus is the Son of God made Man, He can still be tempted by the will to power. The Son of God made man is tempted to covet with greed the Divine Nature. The Bread of God’s Will is tempted lastly to be as God before He has endured all that He must as Man and for Man. Jesus’ last temptation is secure His own power and glory over the world. Jesus the Man is tempted to become His own god as the master of his own destiny. Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. (St. Matthew iv. 8,9) Satan tempts Jesus to become the Bread of God’s Will as God and not as Man. The Bread of God’s Will is tempted to redeem all men as God and not as Man. The last temptation is the worst. It tempts Jesus to become not earthly bread as Man becoming not earthly but the Devil’s bread. Jesus is tempted to become one with the Devil and separated from God. Jesus is tempted to give it all up –to do evil that good may come of it. (Idem, Knox, p. 65) Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (St. Matthew iv. 10) The Son of God has come to reveal the Father’s wisdom and truth as Man and for Man. The Bread of God’s Will must become broken bread and poured out wine, or broken body and poured out blood. Then the devil leaveth Him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him. (St. Matthew iv. 11) Who is Jesus Christ? The Bread of God’s Will made Man. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. (St. Matthew xx. 28) At the end of our Gospel lesson, we read that Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him. (St. Matthew iv. 11) Luther tells us that the good angels came down from Heaven to feed Him. The Bread of God’s Will, Jesus Christ, the Man, can now be fed in body. The Bread of God’s Will can now be ministered to by angels charge concerning [Him]. The Bread of God’s Will made Man can now become the suffering and sacrifice that identifies with fallen Man’s nature to repair and redeem it. Now Christ can become our broken bread and poured out wine, our broken Body and poured out Blood. The Bread of God’s Will made Man. Food for Men Wayfaring, ever obeying [God’s] Motions in Righteousness and True Holiness (Collect), as Man for all men and their salvation. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful,slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. (Joel ii. 12,13) Today is the first day of Lent. Ash Wednesday marks the first of forty days of Lent, in which you and I are exhorted to fast, abstain, and repent. Tradition has it that Pope Gregory the Great ordered the custom of keeping Lent in the West in the 6th century and was the first to call today the Dies Cinerum, or Day of Ashes. Ashes in the Old Testament were coupled with sackcloth, and they were outward and visible signs of repentance and the desire to be changed by the goodness of God. In the early Middle Ages, Aelfric, the English Benedictine abbot, wrote We read in both the Old Law and in the New Testament, that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast. You will notice that the Medievals were sprinkled with ashes rather than anointed with oil and ashes, as is our contemporary custom. At any rate, the outward and visible sign is meant to lead us to inward and spiritual confession, contrition, and satisfaction. The three parts of penitence come to us, again, from the Middle Ages. What is always the greatest danger with the Sacrament of penance or confession is, of course, its relation to the external and visible world of other people. The danger is heralded by our Lord in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus is speaking about fasting, but Jewish Tradition of His day linked fasting to abstinence and penance. He says, When ye fast, be not not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly. Immature spirituality or bad religion is forever about keeping up appearances. Keeping up appearances is done only in relation to what other people think about us. Jesus is not interested in what others think about us but what God thinks about us. Fasting, abstinence, and penance are done in relation to God and for our betterment. The immature Christian is moved and defined by what other people think about him, or what he thinks other men ought to think of him! Our Lord makes clear that such outward and visible displays and parades of holiness are unholy and arrogant. The true meaning of penance or penitence must involve an inward turning of the heart or soul to claim and confess our sins, to be sorrowful over them, and to make amends by God’s Grace. Confession is all about the soul’s journey into God. Our Lord’s admonition is not wholly dissimilar to what the ancient Greeks taught about self-knowledge. Originally, the Greeks appealed for Divine Truth at the Oracle of Delphi. From this place, tradition has it that the Seven Sages of Greece or the god Apollo, exhorted their Greek devotees with these words: Know thyself. Confession in Christianity and know thyself are really two similar concepts. In either case, we are encouraged to confess and admit who and what we are, our limitations, and our desire to be made better. Confession is self-knowledge. When we confess who and what we are, we are honest about what we have done and what we have left undone in relation to God and His goodness. When we acknowledge our limitations, thanking Him for strength, we nevertheless express sorrow or contrition over our weaknesses and failures. When we long to do better, to make satisfaction for our errors and sins, we desire to open ourselves to a process of advancement and betterment that the Divine or God alone can bring about. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Jews ever imagined becoming better without being made better by the Good or God. But there is something radically new in what Jesus Christ brought into the world. As we prepare to undertake another Holy Lent that will lead us to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, we do well to inform our confession, contrition, and satisfaction with the remarkable facts of Christ’s most holy Incarnation. With the ancient Greeks and Jews, there was always the need for making atonement externally and visibly, through the offering up of sacrificed animals, to appease the Divine wrath or displeasure at man’s sins and failures. That the ancients could never make full atonement for sins is obvious from the fact that they sacrificed animals for as long as they lived. But even today, with Christ’s exhortation to a deeper and more personal relationship with God, our Lord is preparing us for His own Sacrifice, which would eradicate the necessity of all others. By rooting and grounding confession, contrition, and satisfaction with the Father, Christ is laying the groundwork for what He is always doing for us in His lifelong journey up to the Cross of His love. Christ’s whole life is a fasting that always involves confession, contrition, and satisfaction. Of course, Christ might be tempted by sin but eschews it and cleaves to the Good. Christ knew no sin. But still, His whole life takes on our confession of sin, sorrow over sin, and satisfaction for it. Christ knows us and He knows our sin. He alone, therefore, can take it on, bear all its ugly effects, endure it, and finally conquer it. He is our confession of sin, our sorrow over sin, and He makes atonement and satisfaction for it. He does what we cannot do to establish a new pattern and model for the new life with the Father. He is doing what the first Adam should have done but could not do. He puts Himself in our shoes and walks us back to the Father who seeth in secret but will reward us openly. (idem) Again, as St. Paul says, in his own enigmatic way, For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (2 Cor. v. 22) In some mysterious way, the Word of God made flesh, was able to suffer and endure our sin, express a sorrow over it that we cannot, and make satisfaction for it in a way that is beyond our fallen nature’s capability. This is the satisfaction that the God-Man, Jesus Christ, makes for us. He satisfies the need for sinful man to be returned to God. He takes on our sin, takes in our sin, allows our sin to have its best go at himself, and He finally conquers it through the purity of His heart and nature. Today, Christ invites us to commence a Holy Lent. Our fasting and abstinence, our confession, contrition, and satisfaction must be done in and through Jesus Christ. In this season, we shall be invited to participate in the Salvific Life of our Lord. This means that our pious dispositions and intentions must be rooted and grounded in the One whose suffering and sacrifice alone give all meaning and hope to our redemption. In Gesima Tide, we learned to journey with faith that seeks understanding. Our faith believes that Christ has established a relation to the Father that He alone could effect. Fasting and abstinence enable us to make a good confession, contrition, and satisfaction. Our pious exercises have eternal merit only through what Christ has done for us. Christ’s fasting and abstaining from the world, the flesh, and the Devil lead to the suffering and death that will win our salvation. Christ’s confession, contrition, and satisfaction while expressing no sin on His part, will be taken on by Christ as a confession of sin for us and on our behalf, contrition and sorrow for sin for us and on our behalf, and He will make satisfaction for us and on our behalf. In Christ alone, can we find the right relation of ourselves with our Heavenly Father. In Christ alone, can we find satisfaction for our sins, as He alone can return our humanity to God and re-present human nature to God for recreation and redemption. Now, I realize, this is all very difficult to understand. But if we try to believe and imagine that He becomes something for us so that we might become something beautiful for God, we might find it a bit easier. We end all our prayers with the words through Jesus Christ our Lord. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we believe that we shall have the confidence to be accepted by the Father, forgiven by the Father, resurrected by the Father, and redeemed and atoned to the Father. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we believe that we can Submit ourselves to God, Resist the devil, and he will flee from us. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to us. Cleanse our hands, as sinners; and purify our hearts, as double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let our laughter be turned to mourning, and our joy to heaviness. Humbling ourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift us up. (St. James iv. 7-10) If we do this, our faith will find understanding in Jesus Christ, who has done for us what we could not do. If we do this, our fasting and abstinence, our confession, contrition, and satisfaction shall derive all efficacy from the good work of Jesus Christ for us, from the Father, and through the Holy Ghost. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be? (St. Luke viii. 9) We said last week that the Gesima Season is all about embracing the self-discipline that will help us to keep a more holy Lent. Part of that discovery involves a real effort at persevering in our pursuit of understanding what Jesus Christ teaches us. Last week, we began our pursuit with Jesus’ Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. As Archbishop Trench remarks, Jesus uses parables to withdraw from certain hearers the knowledge of truths which they were unworthy or unfit to receive. (Notes on the Parables, p. 7) Of course, being unfit or unworthy to receive means that their souls were neither ripe nor ready to think and pray about the truth. And in an age as intellectually uncurious and slothful as ours, this might seem to register as highly insulting. But we must remember that Christ, like Plato and Aristotle before Him, not to mention the Jewish prophets, was intent upon thinking faith. Thinking faith is wholly necessary to our salvation. By using parables, then, Christ leads men’s faith to search for meaning and understanding. With parables, much effort is required to move from the external and visible realm to the inward and spiritual. Notice, too, that the parables of the New Testament always make use of earthly and human illustrations to teach the truth. Jesus uses parables that are familiar enough to human life to reveal the moral truth and to elicit the willing of it for the sake of His Kingdom. Pope Benedict XVI says that Jesus can speak openly about the Kingdom of God to others or all sorts of people. But to those who will follow Him and become His disciples, He speaks in parables, precisely to encourage their decision, their conversion of the heart…. St John Chrysostom says that ‘Jesus uses parables to draw men unto him, and to provoke them and to signify that if they would covert, he would heal them” (Idem, cf. Homily on the Gospel of Matthew, 45, 1-2). Parables encourage us to think about what we believe, to discover the true meaning, and to will the truth of it all in our lives. Parables stir wonder, asking, seeking, and knocking. The man who seeks out their meaning is the one who desires to know and find happiness in the discovery of a truth that, at first, remains hidden to him. In the parables, each of us is given the opportunity to follow Jesus and to discover God’s hidden meaning, beneath the superficial layers of an otherwise emotional and appetitive existence. Think about how very hard it is to decide to follow Jesus, to find the meaning in his Parables, and to embrace the truth for our lives. Last week, we prayed for the temperance that runs after God’s justice. This week, we are reminded that self-discipline is no easy business. This morning, St. Paul takes up the point as he addresses a community of new Christians in Corinth who are being swayed by false prophets to believe that no moral effort or self-discipline is needed at all. They were telling St. Paul’s Corinthian converts that he was blowing the process of conversion out of proportion. True Christianity, they insisted, involves really nothing more than a kind of new-age mysticism that assents to the truth without any need for applying it to human life. True Christianity, they insisted should involve an easier, softer way that shouldn’t command any moral effort or suffering at all. But St. Paul respectfully disagreed. St. Paul had digested the Parables of Jesus. For Paul, the life of Jesus Christ itself was a Parable intended to lead men to the long and hard study that should elicit imitation! Far from wishing to justify himself, St. Paul even desired to use his life as a kind of parable that might lead other men into the imitation of Christ. Remember, the parable uses real human experience to carry the seeker’s mind into spiritual wisdom. St. Paul’s life is used as a parable to teach his flock what Christian conversion entails. He shows us that true discipleship requires the same effort that discovers the meaning of any good parable and applies it. He asks, Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck…in perils of robbers, in perils of waters, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen…in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness…(2 Cor. 23-27) St. Paul’s conversion and discipleship involved running the race with temperance in all things to obtain an incorruptible crown. In other words, true conversion and discipleship will demand the training and discipline for running a spiritual race. This will require suffering and toil. As Paul suffered to die to himself and come alive to Christ, he was rejected by the outside world. Paul knew that the world and its pleasures threaten the presence of Christ within. Who is weak, and I am not weak (Cor. xi. 29), he asks? This business of becoming a Christian and staying the course are as real as the parable that his own life reveals. In other words, it hurts. Yet, he concludes, that the end justifies the means. If I must needs glory, I will glory in the things which concern mine infirmities. (2 Cor. xi. 30) The parable of Paul’s experience teaches us that with prudence and in humility Christ comes to implant God’s hidden Word, which is to be known and obeyed with the deepest sense of honor and privilege. St. Paul’s life and witness comprise a parable for us all. But why were his Corinthian converts so easily swayed by new teachers with a message of comfort and ease? I think that we can find all or part of the answer in this morning’s Gospel Parable of the Sower. Jesus tells us that A sower went out to sow his seed. (St. Luke viii. 5) At first, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. (Idem) Some of the Corinthians had heard God’s Word superficially; the soil of their souls was like the wayside, trodden down by the ongoing traffic and business of this life so that they could not hear the Word. They had exposed their hearts as a common road to every evil influence of the world, till they had become hard as the pavement, till they had laid waste the very soil in which the Word of God should have taken root…(Parables, Trench, p.60) Such men, in every age, are always prey to the Devil and his minions since they live in a world that has been hardened, cold, and indifferent to the Word of God in Jesus Christ. Next, …some [of the seed] fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. (Ibid, 6) Others had hearts like gravely rock. For them, the Word of God in Jesus Christ was first received with joyful expectations because it seemed so full of immediate gratification. They prematurely anticipated its benefits without counting the cost of growing the seed in the soul. They fell away because they would work out [their] salvation….with fear and trembling. (Phil. ii. 12) Salvation, they soon discovered, is a parable of real life, full of pain and suffering, doubt and confusion, hard labor and effort. Thinking is painful and costly. Like the sun scorching the blade that has no depth in the earth, these men’s hearts [are] failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth….(St. Luke xxi. 26) Next, we read that some [of the seed] fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. (Ibid, 7) Perhaps not a few of the Corinthians honestly received God’s Word but choked and killed it with cares and concerns of this life. Here the Word grew for a season but only alongside inner anxiety and fear over the cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life (St. Luke viii. 14) that killed the growth of the Word within the soul. They were crushed, as the Gospel says, for the old man was not dead in them; for it may have seemed dead for a while…but unless mortified in earnest, would presently revive in all its strength anew. (Ibid, p. 65) These thorns and briars take the form of earthly happiness, to be found or lost. In either case, they had neither been killed nor banished from the soil of the soul, and so the Word could not grow. One or all these kinds of hearing, might explain what happened to St. Paul’s young flock and what can happen to us. Finally, today’s Parable concludes with, And other [seed] fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. (Ibid, 8) The Parables are always about real life. In real life, seed can grow up effectually only in deep, dark soil that has been weeded and fertilized. Thus, in the soul, the seed of God’s Word can grow in our hearts only with much care, cultivation, and determined effort. Like St. Paul, we must expect both punishment from without and suffering from within if the Word of God in Jesus Christ is to spring up and bear fruit in our souls. With reason, each one of us can see the temptations that threaten the meaning and operation of God’s Word in this morning’s Parable. With St. Paul, we must proclaim, If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities. (2 Cor. xi. 30) To will the good against all temptations is to find glory in the process. In admitting that we are weak, Christ responds to us with the love that alone can grow His Word. God has made the soul; God plants His Word in it to save us. If we begin to hear God’s Word, to clear and cultivate the soil of our souls with sorrow and repentance, to tend the seed with carefulness and devotion, and not superficially and carelessly, by God’s grace we shall bring forth fruit with patience. (St. Luke viii. 15) Then you and I shall become a parable, where we hold the Word in earthen vessels. And we can ask with Milton: …What if earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? (Paradise Lost: v, 574-576) Earth is a parable for the soul. In this morning’s Collect, we pray that the soul might be defended against all adversity. (Collect) We are protected against all adversity when our souls, in all humility, suffer to know the Word and will it by God’s Grace alone. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen. We have just completed our journey from Advent through to Epiphany tide. In it, we contemplated Christ’s coming to us and manifesting Himself as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John i. 14) Now we turn to the period spanning between Septuagesima Sunday and Ascension Day. Septuagesima Sunday is the beginning of our short Gesima season; Gesima means days. Septu means seventy. So today is the 70th day before Easter. On these three Sundays, we prepare for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter Sunday. Our pre-Lenten season is probably a Western Latin approximation of the Eastern Church’s much longer Lent. In the West, it bridges Epiphany Tide with Lent. It is a season for self-discipline and for embracing the four Cardinal Virtues of temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude. The Four Cardinal Virtues come to us from the Latin word cardo, which means hinge. These virtues are the hinge virtues, without which we cannot hope to lay a foundation for the Three Theological Virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Just as the Gesima Sundays hinge one season with another, the Cardinal Virtues comprise the hinge that opens the door to deeper union with God. The Cardinal Virtues are derived from Plato’s Dialogues, were later refined by Aristotle, and were then part and parcel of the Graeco-Roman world’s pursuit of the Good or God. The early Church Fathers designated them as Cardinal Virtues and acknowledged their indebtedness to Greek Philosophy for providing forms that enable the mind to journey to God. For the Church Fathers, the Cardinal Virtues provided a stimulus for fallen man’s mind to discern God rationally at work in the world. These virtues generate a limited but valuable relationship to the Divine by way of reason. The Cardinal Virtues enable fallen man to find God and to will His goodness, if it be ever so partially. The goodness that they establish teaches the soul both its strengths and its weaknesses. The Cardinal Virtues, in a Christian context, lay a kind of foundation for knowledge of the good, the extent to which we can will it, and the vast gulf that remains between us and God. Today, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter IX, St. Paul introduces us to the first Cardinal Virtue that we must study. He tells us that our pursuit of the Good or God is like the spiritual and bodily preparation made by ancient Greek runners who competed in the Isthmian Games. Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? (1 Cor. 9. 24) Using an earthly paradigm, St. Paul inspires us to run so that we might win a prize. His illustration relates to a competition in which one man is determined to win the laurel wreath, the crown of triumph and victory. The desired end is the prize of a crown and the means is running. St. Paul knows that all men run to obtain some reward. And no man can run without hope. So, with hope we must run to obtain whatever crown we seek. So run, that ye may obtain (Ibid, 24), St. Paul insists. Yet, our running must be ordered and tamed. Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. (Ibid, 25) As it turns out, temperance or moderation must condition our running in hope towards our end. Our end is not the corruptible crown of the laurel wreath that commands the admiration, wonder, praise, and veneration of earthly athletic enthusiasts. That end is corruptible and passing. Our end is incorruptible and lasting. And this was the end for Plato and Aristotle as well. The problem for them was that all the efforts of reason’s appropriation of temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude couldn’t generate lasting union with God. For Christians, moderation and temperance are fueled by more hope. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. (Ibid, 26) The Apostle urges us to make use of Greek Moral Theology for the pursuit of an incorruptible crown. The temperance and moderation that we embrace must be applied to our souls as well as our bodies. The runners at the Isthmian Games kept to a strict diet and discipline. They refrained from food, drink, and sex to stay focused. How much more, then, should we Christians keep to a strict diet and discipline as we condition our bodies to serve our souls with hope of obtaining the incorruptible crown?Thus, the Apostle warns us against that incautious and immoderate indulgence of the world that is always at enmity with God and likely to distract us from running the race. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection, lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a cast-away. (Ibid, 26, 27) Runners’ arms beat the air as they push their legs onward to obtain a corruptible crown. Christians, with certainty through hope, run all together, tempering their bodies through self-discipline, hoping to gain one reward. Paul uses the Greek runners to illustrate the focus, dedication, and discipline or temperancewhich is key to obtaining any crown. Moderation and temperance condition our body to serve our soul’s end. For the Greeks there was one crown for one runner. But for St. Paul an incorruptible crown is promised to all who run the Christian race. The ancient Greeks all cultivated the same virtue in pursuit of their end. And so too must we. But we have an added interest in helping one another to moderate and temper our earthly passions and appetites so that we all can appreciate more fully the crown that awaits us. Our crown is the gift of God the Giver. We do not deserve, earn, or merit it. We have been invited to run or to labour in the Vineyard of the Lord, as today’s Gospel would have it. For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.(St. Matthew xx. 1) The offer to work in the Vineyard of the Lord is God’s gift. The work is offered at different times of the day or always along the lines of any man’s life in the morning, noontide, or evening. Those who come first to work are promised a penny. They have been awakened by the Lord in the morning of their lives, and so come early to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. Others are roused or stirred later in the day of their lives. They have been idle, negligent, slothful, careless, or ignorant. Nevertheless, they are given a chance to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. They are told that they will receive what is right in payment for their labour. Others are found at the sixth and ninth hours of their lives. Some are even found in the twilight of their lives, at the eleventh hour or the end of the day. They too are welcomed to run the race or work in the vineyard of the Lord. They too will receive what is right as a reward. These men are even rebuked for their sloth. Why stand ye here all the day idle? (Ibid, 6) Yet the householder’s desire for the work is greater than his bewilderment at their delay in accepting the offer to run to the work that leads to an incorruptible crown. In today’s Gospel Parable, at the end of the day, all are paid. The last to come are paid first, and the first to come are paid last. The moderation and temperance that have conditioned the running and working of the Johnny-come-lately men are of equal value and worth to the first in the heart of the householder. Every man receives a penny. Every man receives the same reward. All run. Some come early, and some come late. All are called to work for one end. But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. (Ibid, 10-12) Christians are called to run and work without envying and begruding that all may run together to receive the gift of one and the same prize, an incorruptible crown. The householder responds: Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen. (Ibid, 13-16) Moderation and temperance prepare us for the virtue of justice. Strictly speaking, as fallen and sinful men, we deserve nothing but just punishment for our sins. That is earthly justice. God’s justice, however, is always tempered by His mercy. He takes our Cardinal Virtues and rewards them with the hope of gaining His goodness. He offers us an incorruptible crown as the reward of being invited into the hope of running and a work that leads back to Himself. God tells us that if we accept the gift of His invitation, to run and to work, we shall be rewarded with a crown, whose worth and value far exceed anything that is right or just for us. And, as St. Gregory says: He who desires to escape the fires of jealousy, let him seek that love, which no number of shares in it ever narrows. Running the race with temperance is the unmerited gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. (Eph. Ii. 9) The last shall be first and the first last. (Matthew xx. 16) For the Christian, work or running the race is never to be quantitatively measured by the time spent but by the freed gift of God’s Grace. If we cherish and treasure the honor and privilege of working in God’s vineyard and running the spiritual race, we might even forget whether we started at the first hour, the third, the sixth, the ninth, or the eleventh. Whatever hour we came, our attention is on the Giver and His Gift. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. (Romans xii. 16) Thus far in the season of Epiphany, we have been invited to believe and come to know the revelation of God’s power, wisdom, and love in the life of Jesus Christ. We have followed the Star that drew the Wise Men to the origin and meaning of all truth in the Infant Babe of Bethlehem. We have seen his star in the east, and art come to worship him…(St. Matthew ii. 2) We have discovered, also, God’s life in the young Jesus, listening and responding to the Doctors of Theology in the temple. Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? (St. Luke ii. 49) We have gleaned that God’s Word was made flesh to redeem us all in the potent new wine of His blood. But thou hast kept the best wine until now. (St. John ii. 10) Love, wisdom, and power reveal themselves to us in Epiphany as marks of Jesus’ intention to do even greater things than these. (St. John xiv. 12) The greater things than these will involve not only what God does in Jesus Christ then and there, but what Jesus will do in us here and now. Epiphany is not only about vision but is also, and more importantly, about the redemptive power of God’s Grace in your life and in mine. Today, having traveled from the manger to the temple, we move from the Wedding in Cana of Galilee to another Epiphany in Jesus’ encounter with a Roman Centurion. A Centurion was a professional officer in the Roman Legion who commanded roughly one hundred men. He, like the soldiers under him, would have been a celibate – Roman soldiers were not permitted to marry until active duty was completed. For the Roman Centurion in this morning’s Gospel, his family was the Roman Legion –soldiers and servants committed to his paternal care. And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. (St. Matthew viii. 5) Capernaum was the home of Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew, the tax collector. It also housed a Roman garrison. Oddly enough, the pagan Centurion approached Jesus and addressed him as Lord. Jesus responds and says, I will come and heal him. (St. Matthew viii. 7) But the Centurion protests, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. (St. Matthew viii. 8) The Centurion trusts that Jesus’ word will be enough to save his suffering servant. Prior to his appeal, the Centurion would, no doubt, have known of Jesus’ reputation. He must have had a deep sense of the holiness attached to Jesus’ person. Thus, he ranked himself unworthy for the Lord to come down to his house and heal his servant. The Centurion believed that because Jesus was all-holy, he himself was unworthy of Jesus’ visitation. Thus, in humility, he begs Jesus to speak or send His Word only, that his servant might be healed. Only humility can win from Christ the transformative power of God’s Grace. Today, more than experiencing only the manifestation and revelation of God’s power, wisdom, and love in Jesus, the Centurion reveals to us something of the spiritual character that will secure Jesus’ healing power. Clear-headed about his own moral and spiritual weakness, emptied of any pretense to self-importance, and uncertain of his spiritual fate, the Centurion reveals to us what it looks like to become the space that will be filled with the Epiphany of Christ in His word. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. (St. Matthew viii. 9) This Centurion knows the power of his own words. In the earthly domain of Caesar, his words bear authority, and they are obeyed. He speaks and it is done. Yet, notice how he says: I am a man under authority. He too must hear the commands of words of one higher than he and submit himself to their power. But like his own sick servant, he too is a servant, whose words are powerless to command a cure. But he has heard of a Man whose words have power to transform and to heal. He has faith in the Man, Jesus Christ, and believes that His all-holiness manifests, reveals, and shows forth the power, the wisdom, and the love of God. He believes that Christ possesses such Divine power that His words alone are sufficient to help. So, with faith, he reaches out humbly to Jesus for the healing of his servant. The overwhelming otherness that the Centurion finds in Christ will bring a cure. He believes and seeks; he seeks and finds; he finds and knows. In powerlessness, he moves from self-knowledge to faith, through faith to knowledge, and with knowledge to healing love. His self-confessed weakness reaches out to touch the Word of redemption that Christ brings. The Epiphany manifestation that we find today, then, is twofold. First, we learn of the powerless state of sinful man. Second, if we claim it ourselves, in all humility, we discover God’s response to it in Jesus Christ. But as Archbishop Trench reminds us, Jesus perceives another facet in the Centurion’s soul. Speak (or send) the Word only, and my servant shall be healed. (St. Matthew viii. 8) Indeed, every little trait of his character…points him out as one in whom the seed of God’s word would find the ready and prepared soil of a good and honest heart. (Trench: Miracles, Chapter XI) According to St. Luke’s version of today’s miracle, the Centurion was a righteous Gentile, who loved the nation of Israel, and had built the Jews a place of worship for the worship of the true God. In addition, he had earnest care and anxiety, not to mention love, for his servant. (Idem) Epiphany Tide reveals to us that character of soul that is needed for Christ’s healing visitation. The Centurion’s soul is ripe for the planting of Jesus Christ’s Word in the soul. And this is all the Centurion asks: speak and send the Word only and my servant shall be healed. (Idem) The Centurion reveals his humble assurance and confidence in Jesus the Word. Jesus reveals and shows forth His amazement. He marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (St. Matthew viii. 10, 11) What is revealed to Jesus is Gentile faith in the power of Jesus’ Word. What Jesus finds is the character, state, and condition of soul in which the healing Word of God, Jesus Christ, can be planted to bear fruit! This is the message of our Epiphany-tide. But it comes also with a real warning. Jesus says that the Centurion’s gentile faith in God’s Grace will lead to His Kingdom. He tells us too that the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (St. Matthew viii. 12) What He means is that there were too many Jews then and too many Christians now who never experience their own Epiphany – one that manifests to them their need and another that reveals the cure. Their faith is not rewarded because they have not had an epiphany of their own sinful powerlessness. And their faith finds no healing because they have not had an epiphany that reveals their own state of being under authority. Christ tells us that those who consider themselves to be the children of the kingdom, are not. They think that they are good enough, and thus Epiphany’s light has not shed its light on their sorry state. Furthermore, these religious people do not love others enough to seek out a cure because in others they see only men sorrier than themselves. They who have nothing of the Centurion’s humility, faith, and love. Jesus says, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (St. Matthew vii. 7) Epiphany teaches us that salvation is for the humble. Salvation is for the needy. Salvation is for those who know that they are weak and who know that God in Jesus Christ alone can save all men. Our Centurion saw God’s Epiphany in Jesus Christ, and with humility, believed that Christ need speak the word only and his servant would be healed. (Idem) From the ground of humble self-emptying, he reached out with every fiber of his being to procure healing from Christ the Word. Touched by that Word in the poverty of his soul, his faith found healing, not only in the life of his servant but within himself. His servant was healed. But he too was healed because his faith was enlarged as he made room for Jesus in his soul. He was healed because his hope was strengthened, and his love was not disappointed. In the Centurion we find a miracle even more significant than that of his servant. Be not wise in your own conceits, but… condescend to men of low estate. (Romans xii. 16), St. Paul says this morning. He means that we should, with the Centurion, bow down, and realistically discover in the suffering of others, those less fortunate than ourselves, servants -men of low estate and our absolute need for Christ’s Word to heal them and us! He means that from this low and humble seat we ought to seek out God’s mercy with all faith, hope, and love. Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof but speak the Word only and my servant shall be healed. (Idem) Today we must ask ourselves, Do we find and discover ourselves truly in the Epiphany illumination that reveals our own deepest need for Christ the Word? Are we pouring out our complaint to Christ? What we need is the humble faith of today’s Centurion. What we need is that humility that rests not in paranormal miracles but, rather, on faith in Christ the Word. Then humble faith with love for all others will seek a cure for the sin sick soul in Christ. Then, with the Centurion, we shall experience the Epiphany of God’s Word in Christ, who says, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant, [and his own soul], were healed in the selfsame hour. (St. Matthew viii. 13) Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason, by entering into a state in which the Divine Essence is communicated unto you." (Enneads: Plotinus) Illumination and enlightenment are the themes of Epiphany tide. Επιϕανια is the Greek word for Epiphany, and it means manifestation, revelation, showing, or shining forth. For Christians, Epiphany reveals God’s love, wisdom, and power in the life of Jesus Christ – the Divine Life alive in the humanity of Jesus and calling us Home to our Heavenly Father. It is like the sun that opens the eyes not only to sight but understanding. Its rays carry the eyes of our minds into understanding God in Man. This illumination or enlightenment gives us not only knowledge but also the power to change and convert. Through it, men sense and perceive the Divine Essence through which we all can be changed in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. (1 Cor. Xv. 52) Yet the light through which Christ reveals God’s life to us is not easily apprehended. If it could be, reason would understand it perhaps as swiftly as it assents to the proposition that two plus two makes four. But, as Plotinus reminds us, a faculty greater than reason is needed to apprehend God, discover His presence in Jesus the Man, and embrace His will. That faculty is called faith. Faith alone believes what it cannot prove and does not yet know. Take the example of the first moments of attraction to another. When a man is first drawn to a woman who arrests his attention, he is drawn to her both externally and visibly. He is intrigued with wonder. We might say that he has faith in something mysterious waiting to be discovered and known in his further pursuit of the woman. His faith believes that there is something worth finding out, knowing, and loving. His faith seeks to know in order to love. God works in the same way. He intrigues us by calling us forward to search Him out with faith. Our faith believes there is someone to know. What is waiting to be discovered is the inward and spiritual nature of God. We can find Him only if our faith believes that someone beautiful and meaningful intends to be known. If all that there is to know about Him were revealed externally, visibly, and instantaneously to the human mind, there would be no place for a faith that follows and a love that grows. In Epiphany tide, our faith believes that God is at work in Jesus Christ. We seek to know Him more intimately. Yet on the first three Sundays in Epiphany we feel a degree of confusion. In our Epiphany readings, we are confused and hopefully intrigued. We have not reached understanding, but our faith must continue in hot pursuit of God in Jesus. The Wise Men ask Where is He that is born king of the Jews? We have seen His star in the east and have come to worship Him, (St. Matthew 2. 2) We believe but where is He, that our faith may know Him? They believe that an extraordinary Star calls them forth to find and know an unusual king. They carry sacred gifts with mystic meaning because they believe that this king will bring them out of darkness into His own marvelous light. Confusion and intrigue are the hallmarks of a faith that seeks understanding and knowledge. Last Sunday we found that Joseph and Mary were alarmed and frightened at the prospect of having left their son Jesus behind in the Temple. They sought Him not only out of confusion but also out of fear. Their faith was weak, but still they followed it. They hurried back to Jerusalem because they believedand hoped that their son was safe. They sought Him out with trembling faith and then were sore amazed with where they found Him and with what He was doing. Their faith was rewarded fwith relief. Still, they were upset. Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us, behold thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing. (St. Luke 2. 48) His answer: Why is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business? (Ibid, 49) confused them even more. Mary and Joseph understood not the saying which He spake unto them. (Ibid, 50) But Mary’s weak faith still sought to know and to love her son more fully.She kept all these sayings in her heart. (Ibid, 51). Jesus is the Wisdom of God that is not self-evidently known or understood immediately. Jesus is also the Power of God who comes to transform the world. In today’s Gospel, some years later, Mary, having kept Jesus’ sayings in her heart, believes that, finally, she knows Her Son. Today she is with Him at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The wedding party has run out of wine. She knows and remembers the Divine love that her Infant King revealed to the Three Wise Men. She knows and remembers the Divine wisdom in her twelve-year-old son when he rebuked her for her unbelief and ignorance. Now she believes that she knows Him. She will enlist His Divine power to furnish a Sacramental event with added bliss. Being a good Jewish mother, she believes that she must verbalize what Her Son surely knows! Son, they have no wine. (St. John, ii. 3) The Mother knows that Her Son can overcome every earthly need. Here, she believes He should do so. Mary has deep faith in what her son can do. Her faith has pondered much in her heart. Surely, He can use His Divine Power to forestall looming embarrassment for the bridegroom and his family, whose poverty, no doubt, accounts for the depletion of the wine. This, she thinks, is not too much to ask from the Son of the Most High God. But Jesus rebukes Mary. Woman what have I to do with thee? Woman, what does this have to do with Me and thee? (Ibid, 3) The rebuke is needed because her faith is, as George MacDonald writes, unripe and unfeatured. This faith, working with her ignorance and her fancy, led her to expect the great things of the world from him. (George MacDonald, The Miracles of our Lord.) We tend to think that Jesus was being condescending towards his mother when he calls her woman. But Jesus is drawing Mary’s faith into deeper knowledge of Himself. Mine hour has not yet come. (Ibid, 4) Jesus is calling Mary to consider a faculty far greater than reason. (Idem) He wants her to believe and know that He has not come into the world to turn water into wine in order to save men from earthly shame. Rather, He will turn water into wine as a sign that He alone can make what is common into something divine, something earthly into something heavenly, and something human into something Godly. He will turn water into wine as He turns sin into righteousness and death into new life. Mary believes and knows that her Son’s rebuke is just and good. She commands the servants, Whatsoever He says, do it, (Ibid, 5) Mary believes and knows that her Son possesses all truth. She has been humbled. Jesus responds. Fill the waterpots with water, (Ibid, 7) and the servants obey. Mary’s premature and ill-placed faith, knowledge, and love will be redeemed and rewarded. Jesus continues: Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. (Ibid, 8-10) Jesus has not come down from Heaven to perform earthly miracles on earthly men for earthly joy and happiness. Here, He does not merely produce new earthly wine at an earthly wedding for earthly men who had already drunk too much in an earthly manner. Were this all that He had done, drunk men wouldn’t have known the difference. Mary wasn’t drunk. Neither was the governor of the feast. The governor tasted the difference. Mary believed and came to know her son more truly. Of course, today’s miracle is a sign and symbol of what Christ always intends to do with us. If we are in search of miraculous earthly solutions to earthly deficiencies, we are far too drunk on earthly things to see how Christ the Light longs to bring new spiritual wine into our fallen lives in this holy season of Epiphany. Christ Jesus is the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. i. 24) He comes to put new wine into new bottles. (St. Mark ii. 22) The Blessed Virgin Mary had to rebuked for her earthly love. With her, we must believe and know that they have no wine then, and we have no wine now. We must believe and know that we need new wine. We must believe and know that Christ alone can make this new wine from the blood that He sheds for you and me on the Tree of Calvary. Jesus insists Mine hour is not yet come (Ibid) for He is on the way to His Cross. For now, He might provide earthly wine or not. Whatsoever He says, we must do it. We must believe in order to know. His Hour does not yet come until we go up to the Cross of His Love and beyond. Then, a new kind of wine will pour forth from His hands, His feet, and His side in the Blood that He has received from His mother and offers back to His Father. The Sacred Gift of Mystic Meaning will be found in the Blood that alone is the new wine that gives new life to a fallen world that can taste the difference. We believe that Jesus saves the best wine until last. We believe that His Blood is a Sacred Gift with Mystic Meaning, the new wine poured out for us in the death we could not die. Christ pours out His Blood as He dies to the world, the flesh, and the devil for us. His Blood is the new wine that brings us into His death. His Blood is the new wine that brings us into the New Life of His Resurrection. We believe and know that His Blood is the new wine of His love, that gives us all joy. As the poet reminds us, Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,/ Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine. (Agony: George Herbert) Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() That day is called the birthday of the Lord on which the Wisdom of God manifested Himself as a speechless Child and the Word of God wordlessly uttered the sound of a human voice. His divinity, although hidden, was revealed by heavenly witness to the Magi and was announced to the shepherds by angelic voices. With yearly ceremony, therefore, we celebrate this day which saw the fulfillment of the prophecy…(St. Augustine sermon clxxxv) Tonight, we come to the cradle, the manger, and the cave in Bethlehem to worship God’s own Word made flesh, beginning with a meditation upon the Incarnation by St. Augustine of Hippo. From the human side of this reality, we can hear only silence. The Word of God made flesh has no words; he is as speechless as every newborn babe. The Word of the Eternal Father, His only and everlastingly begotten Son, is made man for us and for our salvation. From conception in the Virgin’s womb, and now in His birth, he is intent upon redeeming man, all men, you, and me. Conception has been redeemed in the womb and now birth is redeemed. There is the silence of the child himself. From the child, the only sounds that emerge are the inarticulate cries of a new-born babe. The sound of this infant’s voice must be heard. But first, it is not to be understood. God never forces His Word and Will upon anyone. The gift of God in Jesus Christ must make its way into the unruly, antagonistic, unfriendly, and hostile world of good and evil. The gift of God’s redemption for us that will be found in this child will not be received truly and sincerely until it is heard by the ears of the human heart. What we must hear first are the cries of an infant babe. Jesus Christ is God’s eternally begotten Wisdom and Truth. St. Augustine tells us that, Truth is sprung out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven. Truth, eternally existing in the bosom of the Father, has sprung from the earth so that He might exist also in the bosom of a mother. Truth, holding the world in place, has sprung from the earth so that He might be carried in the hands of a woman. Truth, incorruptibly nourishing the happiness of the angels, has sprung from the earth in order to be fed by human milk. Truth, whom the heavens cannot contain, has sprung from the earth so that He might be placed in a manger. (Idem) Some two thousand and twenty-three years ago, Truth or the Word of the Father looked down from Heaven to Earth. Eternal Truth, the Everlasting Thinking and Speech of the Father will come alive in birth from an earthly mother. Truth and the Word that hold the world in place, gives it meaning, desires its perfection will be held in the hands of a woman. Truth and the Word that inform, define, and nourish the life of the sempiternal angels, will begin to live in the Babe of Bethlehem, nourishing the same Babe on mother’s milk. God has become Man. The Word has been made flesh. The Truth and Word that the heavens cannot contain, limit, constrain, and constrict now comes alive in the Babe lying in a manger, poor, hungry, constricted by the earthly elements and yet destined to live, breath, think, know, understand, and reveal the will of God the Father in human flesh. The Truth and Word shall be discovered and revealed in the Second Adam, Jesus Christ. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. (St. John i. 14) Jesus Christ is God’s Word, Wisdom, and Truth made flesh. God did not send His Son into the world with a blast of paranormal, miraculous otherworldliness. He is God. He needs nothing. He is alive in His Word made flesh, needing only a mother’s milk, care, and love. The eternally begotten Word made flesh is Truth. He needs only the simplest of things to begin His journey. We should cherish and treasure the gift of the Word made flesh in an Infant Babe. God wants to share His own great goodness from conception into birth. Silently and quietly, we must go to the Manger. With all humility and meekness, we must contemplate the way our God comes to us. Selflessly and generously, we must bring our hearts and souls to Him in order to see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. (St. Luke ii. 15) St. Augustine stirs us up to God’s awakening of the world in those infant eyes that look out on the cosmos that He has made now with awesome wonder. Be still and see that the Word though whom all things were made and without Him was not anything made that was made. (John i. 3) now sees it all for the very first time as a baby. All the potential for new human life is taken on by the Infant Babe of Bethlehem. Jesus Christ enters human life to recapitulate and reconstitute human nature from the very beginning, first in the womb and not as a newborn infant. We must hear the message of the angels: Arouse yourself, O man; for you God has become man. Awake thou that sleepest, and rise up from the dead, and Christ Shall give thee light! For you…God has become man. If He had not thus been born in time, you would have been dead for all eternity. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, if He had not taken upon Himself the likeness of sinful flesh. Everlasting misery would have engulfed you, if He had not taken this merciful form. You would not have been restored to life, had He not submitted to your death; you would have fallen, had He not succored you; you would have perished, had He not come. (Idem) The world and all of us have lived in sin and its reward — death. For man to be saved and for our human nature to be redeemed, God must get under our skin and come into our condition. He would later remind us that Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. (John iii. 3) We cannot be born again unless the Spirit of God revivifies the flesh of man in Jesus Christ. And he was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. Heaven has come down to earth. God has come down to man. The Divine has become human. Not only does He submit to our conception and birth. He submits to our death. He is conceived as one of us, He is born as one of us, He lives, learns, grows, as one of us. And He dies as one of us. Had he not come, we would die a death that never ends. Let us joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festal day on which the great and timeless One came from the great and timeless day to this brief span of our day. He has become for us ... righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption… (Ps. lxxxv 11) (Idem) Will this Word be made flesh for us and in us tonight? Or are we people of the Law of Sin and Death? Will the Word of God be conceived in us as He was by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary long ago? Will the timeless One, the Word of God enter the brief span of our day and be born in us as He was in Bethlehem? If He is to be born in us, He must be born in silence, in quiet, in awesome wonder at the creation He had made, depending only the simplest of things, as on a lowly mother, thankful for nothing but the milk of Mary’s kindness. You and I must become infant babes of Bethlehem. Many Christians will depart this life having never revealed to the world that Christ was born in Bethlehem. But we must remember that Truth is sprung out of the earth because Christ who said: ‘I am the truth’ was born of a virgin; and righteousness hath looked down from heaven because, by believing in Him who was so born, man has been justified not by his own efforts but by God. ‘Truth is sprung out of the earth' because 'the Word was made flesh’/ and 'righteousness hath looked down from heaven' because 'every good and perfect gift is from above.’ (Idem) This memory must become the reality of our lives. Christ’s new birth which we celebrate this night is Truth sprung out of the earth, truth born of a virgin, and longing to be born in you and me. This is Heaven’s truth which will be born in us by Grace, by God, by the Gift of Christ. 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. (James i. 17) The Babe of Bethlehem longs to be born in ustonight so that we go tell it on the Mountain that Jesus Christ is born and bringing us to salvation! Tonight, Heaven and Earth meet in the heart of Jesus Christ, the Babe of Bethlehem as one life, one energy, one wisdom, and one love. The author of the Hebrews reminds us: God…hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the Word of His Power, when he had purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent glory than they. (Hebrews, 1-4) The Eternal Son of God became a baby. So too must we. Babies have all the potential to become more excellent than angels. Angels are pure spirits. But we can become spirits in bodies, the Word made flesh, a culmination of all creation. Humility and faith must be our virtues. The wisdom of the poet exhorts us to the Imitation of Christ. WITH a measure of light and a measure of shade, The world of old by the Word was made; By the shade and light was the Word conceal’d, And the Word in flesh to the world reveal’d Is by outward sense and its forms obscured; The spirit within is the long lost Word, Besought by the world of the soul in pain Through a world of words which are void and vain. O never while shadow and light are blended Shall the world’s Word-Quest or its woe be ended, And never the world of its wounds made whole Till the Word made flesh be the Word made soul! (Arthur Edward Waite) Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice. On the Last Sunday in Advent, you and I are called to come to know the Word made flesh and to Rejoice. Our recognition of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, and our rejoicing are gifts coming to us from the heart of John the Baptist. Today John the Baptist prepares us for Christ’s coming into his Body, the Church, and especially for His first coming, which we remember on Christmas Day. We are called to discover the character which both knows Jesus Christ as the Word and Wisdom of God made flesh and to rejoice in Him. But first, in today’s Gospel John the Baptist teaches us to know ourselves and our need for Jesus Christ. The Jews sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. John the Baptist never pretended to be Christ, and neither should any Bishop, Priest, Deacon, or Layman. He confesses that he is not even Elijah the prophet. Malachi had foretold that Elijah would come before the Second Coming of the Lord. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD. (Mal. iv. 5) But the Angel Gabriel insists that it is John who shall go before [Jesus Christ] in the spirit and power of Elias (Lk. i. 17). Both are messengers and forerunners. Neither one of them is the Christ. John prepares for the first coming and Elijah for the second. John shares with Elijah the vocation of precursor and preparer. John Baptist says, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah. (St. John i. 23) John has come to prepare the Jewish people for the coming of the Lord. His preparation begins with a confession of who he is truly. He calls us too to knowourselves as those who need always make straight the way of the Lord. (Idem) John comes and teaches us to know who we are. Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at Hand. (Matt. iii. 2) John teaches us to repent because we are always sinners in need of the Saviour. With John, we are called to confess our sins. John, like Elijah, is a messenger of repentance. Because we are neither righteous nor virtuous, we must make repentance an habitual part of our spiritual lives. But his confession also reveals to us that repentance is only a beginning. Repentance prepares us for the salvation that Jesus Christ alone can bring into our lives. John tells us: I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not: he it is who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose. (St. John i. 26) From the depths of John’s heart we come to know that repentance empties us, unselfs us, and make us that spiritual place in which Christ can come alive. John has a baptism with water for repentance, but Christ shall baptize…with the Holy Ghost. (St. Mark i. 8) John’s baptism will cleanse us; Christ’s baptism will sanctify and save us. The one removes sin and the other infuses righteousness. With John the Baptist, you and I must move out of the world and into the soul. We are too much at home in this world. John comes to teach us that this is not our home. Christians ought to know that this world is a place of passage and pilgrimage, from wilderness and exile to the true homeland and City of our God. Like John the Baptist, like the Apostles, you and I must become courageous searchers and seekers, “who would not cease from exploration…until at… the end of all exploring they would arrive where…they… started from and know the place for the first time. (Eliot, Little Gidding) With them, we must earnestly prepare for the Lord’s coming? We live in a time when the human heart seems so far removed from any need to seek out and find God. We live in a world whose idolatry conceals the knowledge of God. John the Baptist, bearing the spirit of Elijah, calls us away from our idolatry. Anything that claims our time, attention, and money more than God is an idol or false god. Anything that consumes, owns, and possesses us more than God is an idol. The idol could be a political platform, a romantic notion, or even an arrogant assertion of our own will to power. It could be a large house, an expensive car, an obsession with money and taxes, or an addiction to another person. None of these things must ever claim our hearts more than our love for God. If anyone of these things stands between us and God, we must know to get rid of them. Anything that does not reveal to the world our humble, unmerited, and undeserved receiving of God’s costly and precious mercy is an idol. Anything with which we cannot part is an idol. And that idol may stand in the way of another’s coming to Christ. Not only does our attachment to idols stand between us and God but it might very well turn others away from Him also! Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew vi 24) John Baptist comes to join him in that spiritual journey that calls us to sever our ties to the false gods and idols of this world. He knows that repentance and self-denial might be dangerous. We might become proud of our good work of repentance and self-emptying while failing then to undertake the more difficult labor of embracing God’s goodness into our souls. Bear fruits that befit repentance, he cries, for even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (St. Matthew iii. 8, 10) With John’s contemporaries, we might ask, What then shall we do? John the Baptist tells us not only to repent but to purge. He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise. (St. Luke iii 11) He tells us not to desire more than is our fair share in the earthly city. Collect no more than is appointed you. (Ibid, 12) To the soldiers he says, Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages. Why? Because while John baptizes…with water for repentance, He who is coming after me is mightier than me, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. (Ibid, 14-16) This is serious business. It might even get confusing. Charles Williams remarks, Let the man who has two coats give one to the man who has none. But what if the man who has none, or for that matter the man who has three, wants to take one from the man who has two- what then? Grace of Heaven! My Sainted Aunt! Why, give him both. If a man has stolen the pearl bracelet, why, point out to him that he has missed the diamond necklace in the corner! Be content… The outside world and our dependence on it could land us in Hell. With John, let us know that we have been too attached to the things of this world. Let us repent. The old man must quit splicing hairs and counting the cost! The old man must see that the time has come to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (St. Luke vi 31) John wants us to know that the character of the soul must be prepared to know and welcome the coming mercy of God. We must know also that it is more than we either desire or deserve. God’s Mercy is coming to us and will be made flesh. The coming Christ invites us to knowthe pattern and movement of perfect love. John tells us to share everything, and if we think that we have given too much, we must interrupt our self-congratulations and know that the most that we can give is nothing in comparison to what Christ comes to give us! The Virgin Mother of our Lord has a nice rebuke for us: The rich he hath sent empty away. (St. Luke i. 53) It is all consistent with John Baptist’s insistence that our souls should know Christ’s coming. John also exhorts us to mourning. We acknowledge our sins, and we ought to mourn over their effects. We mourn our own lost opportunities to die to ourselves and prepare more seriously for Christ’s coming. We must pray for the gift of tears. Our physical tears begin to heal those who grieve. Our spiritual tears begin to cleanse us from sin, as St. J. Chrysostom says. Our repentance and mourning promise to play the greatest part in our coming to know God and rejoice in His coming. Our bodies will begin to heal, and our souls will be altered for the better. The water that John pours over the heads of penitents symbolizes the tears that purify the soul that awaits the coming of Christ. The tears that unceasing prayer offers…are resurrectional. (Philokalia) Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. (St. Matthew v 4) Rejoicing and Joy constitute our end. Our preparation for the coming of Christ, heralded by St. John the Baptist intends to make us new and ripe for rejoicing in Christ’s Holy Incarnation. St. Paul says today Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say Rejoice. (Phil. iv. 4) We must rejoice in Jesus Christ’s coming to the soul. John’s cry for confession, contrition, and compunction prepares us to be filled with the salvation that Christ’s birth brings. Sorrow must yield to joy. If this power becomes operative in our lives, we shall instinctively perfect confidence and hope in God’s future glory. Today, Christ promises to infuse us with His presence to generate, deepen, and perfect our belief and hope that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. So let us close by praying with St. Ignatius of Loyola: Fill us, we pray, with Your light and life, that we may show forth Your wondrous glory. Grant that Your love may so fill our lives that we may count nothing too small to do for You, nothing too much to gizxve, and nothing too hard to bear. Teach us, good Lord, to serve You as You deserve: To give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do Your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another? (St. Matthew xi. 2) We have said that Advent season is all about our preparing for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas time. In history, Jesus Christ, the Desire of God, was made flesh some two-thousand years ago in ancient Palestine. At that time, the historical Jesus had come to summon His followers to God’s Kingdom through the one oblation of Himself once offered. (Consecration Prayer, BCP 1954) As the Holy Spirit began to touch and move people through Him, He initiated the return of man to God the Father. He desires to do the same today. History has been in the process of being swallowed up into eternity ever since God the Father called Abraham out from Ur of the Chaldees. Having overcome all potential obstacles to communion with our Heavenly Father in His Son, the Father continues to draw back to Himself those who are ready and willing. The Ascended Christ continues to make history as He does the Father’s bidding and comes to be made flesh in us through the indwelling of His Spirit. We have a future, and our destiny is to be with God the Father. In today’s Gospel we are charged to prepare for that future in a very specific way by John the Baptist. John’s mission is to make ready and prepare the way for the coming of Jesus Christ, and so his life is a paradigm and pattern for our Advent preparation. His life is summarized in these words: He must increase, and I must decrease. (St. John iii. 30) John the Precursor, John the Preparer, is on a mission to discover that spiritual character that makes room for the coming of Jesus Christ. Yet, he knows that Christ cannot come to us until we have been emptied of our sins. Our sin takes up too much space! Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. (St. Matthew iii. 2) He calls us to make room in our hearts for Jesus Christ. John lives in the wilderness where he discovers himself. He sees himself clearly in a place far removed from relations to other people and things. He sees himself, mostly, as far removed from God. Here he discovers his sins and his need to repent of them. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing. (Isaiah 35, 1,2) John Baptist’s wilderness is unlike nature. Nothing grows in a lifeless desert. But in John Baptist’s wilderness God will give the increase. John Baptist commands the coming of Christ. As Romano Guardini writes, The herald proclaims his message with authority, and what he says is framed in terms of a command. There is always a sense of urgency in what he announces. Though it may conflict with what is in men’s thoughts and interrupts them in their business, he cares less to conciliate them than secure their attention. (The Lord...) The hard truth that John proclaims is that God alone can save us from the wilderness that He demands. John commands us to share his repentance over his self-willed alienation from God. Repentance is the hard dry truth that knows of no growth or harvest in self-will. Repentance generates an abyss, a void, a barren wilderness, into which alone the coming Lord can work His healing redemption. John knows that the wilderness that his repentance has created is an empty cistern that can hold no water. With John, we must experience this emptiness that comes in and through ourselves and our best efforts. We must be unselfed in a purely potential state so that Christ might begin to redeem the raw materials of our being. And yet how can we do this? It sounds so much easier than it is. Repentance is difficult. What we are speaking about is not being sorry to others for sins committed against others. What we are talking about is being convicted by the Holy Spirit of our sin against God. Oswald Chambers tells us that, when the Holy Spirit rouses a man’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with other men that bothers him, but his relationship with God –‘against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.’(Ps. li, 4; My Utmost, p.342) We cannot become the space that is prepared to welcome the meaning and purpose of Christ’s coming until our carefully contrived worlds of respectable goodness come crashing down. (Idem) What we have made and what we protect jealously must be destroyed. Even our good works, our law-abiding and moral habits must perish. Being satisfied with ourselves in relation to all else must die. Natural goodness and pious habits cannot save us. Self-conscious satisfaction is a barrier to the coming of Christ in our souls and bodies. With John the Baptist, we must say, [There is one] who coming after me is preferred before me, the latchet of whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose…Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world…(John i. 27, 29) He must increase and I must decrease. It is not ‘I’. I am not He. I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. (St. John i. 23) With John the Baptist we must embrace our own undoing before we can comprehend Christ’s coming to us. With John Baptist we remain in sin if we cease to understand the value of repentance. With him we must examine ourselves and see if we have forgotten how to be truly repentant. (Ibid) This means that we must be found faithful to Christ in reflecting and repenting in good times and bad. We find the extreme of bad times in today’s Gospel. John Baptist is in prison awaiting execution, having been tortured severely. John is near death and his role as Herald and Forerunner is coming to an end. He awaits the blessing of the Messiah’s coming. He sends his disciples to ask Jesus, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? (St. Matthew 11. 3) He must decrease and Christ must increase. They are sent back with no promise of John’s liberation from prison or of Herod’s demise. John must be swallowed up in Christ alone. Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: 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. (Ibid, 4,5) In other words, give to John what he longs to hear. Give him the promise of healing, sanctification, and salvation. Tell him that what he has prepared for is coming to pass. John may not be able to live to see how the great mystery of Godliness unfolds. But he can leave this world being blessed by Christ’s coming with hope. Jesus knows that John is sufficiently emptied of himself to receive the good tidings of great joy that shall be to all people (St. Luke ii. 10) that are already pouring forth from the His heavenly heart into the suffering of the Baptist. Christ goes on to say: And, blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. (Idem) Monsignor Knox has it as, whosoever shall not be scandalized by me. The idea is that, as He says, blessed is the man who shall not be suddenly out of his stride, just when everything seemed to be going all right, by running up against an unforeseen snag or obstacle…or by falling into a trap. In other words, blessed is the man who is faithful come what may, despite all manner of unforeseen drawbacks. (Knox: The Epistles and Gospels, p. 16) Blessed is John Baptist into whose self-denial and looming death Christ can come with the spiritual hope that will save all men through all times and conditions. Christ goes on to show that His coming is most acutely welcomed by those, like John Baptist, who are suffering and dying to this world. What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. (Ibid, 7-10) What should we expect to find in John the Baptist? Unwavering faith. Utter unworldliness. Suffering. Death. To repent and be forgiven as God passes by or winks at men’s sins is Old Testament Religion. The new religion will demand death like that of the Baptist. It means that every inch of my being must decrease and die that Christ may come alive in me. Can Jesus who is the one that should come really intend that I should suffer in this way? Can a loving God demand such agony of soul as a condition for His coming? Jesus’ answer is a gentle, merciful but firm. Yes. Blessed is he who is not offended in Me. (Idem) Christ says that those who follow Him must die. They may, like John Baptist, die at the hands of wicked men. In whatever condition we find ourselves, we must die spiritually to anything that opposes Christ’s coming redemption. Christ tells us that John’s way is correct. John turns our hearts of disobedience to the wisdom of the just [One]. John invites us into the wilderness of repentance as death and bids us welcome Christ’s coming. As Romano Guardini writes: Stillness is the tranquility of the inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden stream. It is a collected, total presence, a being all there, receptive, alert, ready. There is nothing inert or oppressive about it. Attentiveness –that is the clue to the stillness in question. The stillness before Christ. (The Stillness and Silence of the Mass) We have a future if we embrace John Baptist’s stillness. Only in stillness can we welcome Christ’s coming. He must increase, and I must decrease. (idem) As Fulton Sheen remarks, Herein lies the secret of mental and spiritual stability. It is only by creating an emptiness that Heaven has a place to fill. The Baptist is a steward who has been found faithful (1 Cor. iv. 2) in stillness and emptiness. Stillness and emptiness enable Christ to unself us, bring us into death, and bless us. Only then, with John, will we know that God’s coming Word made flesh will suffer more than any for us so that we may be called the children of God, and hope for a future of eternal union with His Father and ours, through the Holy Ghost. Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. -St. Luke 21:33 We have said that Advent means coming, and in it, Christ comes to prepare us for His coming at Christmas. Last week, Jesus Christ came to awaken us out of spiritual sleep in order to purge and cleanse our souls. The urgency of the call was illustrated in Christ’s purging of the Temple at Jerusalem. The temple as the image of the soul and its condition – a den of thieves, indicative of the character of our souls on the best of days. For this reason, then, we prayed that He might give us Grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life. (Advent Collect) We prayed that Christ, the Everlasting Light, might come to us and penetrate our hearts and souls, freeing up as much room as possible for His imminent coming with new birth in us at Christmas time. Advent’s coming light is the unchanging Word of God, heard and moving the hearts of faithful men, as recorded in the pages of Holy Scripture, and made flesh in the life of Jesus Christ. In both manifestations, Advent’s coming light intends to make our souls spiritual spaces that Christ can indwell by Grace. Now, on this Second Sunday of Advent, we are called to open our spiritual eyes and understand more fully the nature and work of Christ’s Coming Light. St. Paul makes it very clear in this morning’s Epistle that Jesus Christ is the Light that has come into the world to confirm the promises made to [our Jewish] fathers so that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. (Romans xv. 8,9) Jesus Christ is the Coming Light or God’s Word of Promise made flesh. For the Jews, He will be the fulfillment of promised salvation and deliverance from the Law of Sin and Death. For the Gentiles, He will be the revelation of that mercy and forgiveness that they never imagined could emerge from the heart of a God whom they knew but with whom they could never find lasting communion. He was, in a sense, an idea rather than a Person, or something that seemed more conceptually conceived than actually received in the hearts of pagan men. Because the promises of deliverance and salvation were made only to the Jews, the spiritual preparation for Christ’s Coming can be found expressed on the pages of the Old Testament as the Word of a Personal God heard and hoped for by the Jewish patriarchs, priests, prophets, and kings. St. Paul tells us that ancient books of the Old Testament were written aforetime…for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. (Ibid, 4) The Word of a Personal God was full of promise for His Chosen People, Israel. To them, God spoke His Word. His Word was Christ. Through Christ the Word, God promised to come to save His People from the sin and death that separated them from Himself. In the Old Testament, we read of hope for deliverance from Original Sin. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, the Jews persistently remembered God’s Word of Promise and believed that God would come to save them. To the hearts and souls of the ancient Jews, the coming light was God’s written Word as Promise. The Coming Light to the early Christians was the fulfillment of that promise in the life of Jesus Christ. For both Jew and Gentile, the Coming Light was embraced in the heart by faith as the unchanging Word of God. The struggle for both the ancient Jews and the early Christians was the temptation that Christ’s Coming Light might be darkened and even extinguished by the changes and chances of this fleeting world. And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. (St. Luke xxi. 25,26) Men in every age would come to see that the powers of heaven themselves will be shaken as the Word of God judges history. We Christians must realize that Jesus’ depiction of His Second Coming reveals creation as always changing, coming to be, and passing away. When men are mostly moved by earthly things and what comes to them naturally, they are always in danger of failing to use the creation in the service of their salvation. Distress, anguish, and disappointment are the logical consequences of misplaced hopes and confused loves. Those who put their trust in the false gods of mammon, power, or prestige shall always be filled with fear over the future. They are hewing out for themselves broken cisterns, which can hold no water. Jesus uses the parable of the fig tree to describe how most men receive Christ’s coming. Behold the fig tree, and all the trees; when they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. So likewise, ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. (Ibid, 29-31) St. Remigius says this: Or, when this fig shall again bud, that is, when the synagogue shall receive the word of holy preaching, as the preaching of Enoch and Elijah, then ought we to understand the day of consummation is at hand. (Catena Aurea) Men with the eyes of faith will see that ancient Jewish Law and even Greek pagan Wisdom will be judged by Christ the Coming Light like the fig tree. St Gregory writes, the fruit of the world is [always in] ruin [and] the powers of heaven shall be shaken. (Idem) To both the Jews who seek for a sign and the Greeks who search for wisdom, the Second Coming will judge man’s earthly Law and secular Wisdom as limited and incomplete, at best. What both missed was that the first coming of Christ in the flesh was the Incarnation of God’s Word and Demonstration of His Loving Will for Man. This Coming Light of Christ that we embrace in Advent is the brilliance of the Word who comes to judge the world here and now. We can see Him only with the eyes of faith. We need not wait for the Second Coming for Judgment. For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? (1 Peter iv. 17) Jesus says that heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away. (St. Matthew xxiv. 35) So Christ the Coming Light and Word of God, must judge us now. Jesus says In patience possess ye your souls. (Ibid, 19) He means, Be vigilant, wait, and watch. He comes to us in this season of Advent, as one who judges the world and reveals that it is always passing away. Our Gospel teaches us that the fear of the Lord, holy terror in this present time should move us to endure patientlyChrist’s Judgment of us. So, we should pray: O Lord, let us fear thy Coming Light here and now with wholesome wonder that submits humbly and heeds faithfully thy judgment of our lives. Shed thy Coming Light upon our sins, that we may claim and confess them. Give us deeper sorrow for them. Help us to love the thing that is good and hate that which is evil. Give us patience to suffer for holiness and righteousness’ sake. To this end, today’s Collect exhorts us to the devout perusal of Holy Scripture: Blessed Lord who hast caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise, hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy Holy Word we may ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life…(Advent ii, Collect) Our relationship with God comes through His promised Word, the manifestation of Christ the Coming Light and the Word made flesh. Christ the Coming Light is the Unchanging Word of God for us made flesh encountered on the pages of Holy Scripture. In patience, we must possess our souls and embrace His Holy Word in our flesh. We must allow Him to judge, punish, discipline, and correct us so that we might more fully become His own. Patience is the companion of Wisdom, St. Augustine writes. With patience, Christ’s Coming Light will enable us to receive with meekness the engrafted Word which is able to save our souls. (St. James i. 21) But as we await Christ the Coming Light with patience, we are not excused from cultivating desire. As real religion is filled with the fear of the Lord and holy terror, so too must our hearts be filled with desire for the coming Judgment. Ancient Christians were known for looking for Christ’s Second Coming so earnestly that they were full of impatience because it appeared to be delayed. (The Christian Year in the Times, p. 5) Much more than preparing themselves for Christ the Coming Light in the here and now, they longed for the Second and final Coming. In times of persecution, which might begin to feel again, Christians must cultivate love and desire for their End. To Early Christians the thought of the Judgment was a constant encouragement, an inspiration to continued fidelity in the face of opposition. (Idem) Christ the Light of the World, who will pronounce judgment at the Second Coming, is the One whom we should know as Our Lord. Christ the Light is the Loving Word made Flesh who wins our salvation. The desire and love of God in the flesh, the Forgiveness of Sins must be dearest to us. Christ came into the world to conquer sin, death, and Satan from the Tree of New Life on the Wood of the Cross. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He sees most clearly what is in the heart of another. He knows our struggle to embrace His Light, for He is pure Goodness. (Idem) Christ the Coming Light is the God’s Word of Divine Desire for us in His Death and beyond. This Advent, we must prepare for Christ’s coming to see that from the Crib to the Cross there is no phase of human life that is not redeemed as Man’s desire for God and God’s desire for Man. The key to its success in us will be found in our responsibility or irresponsibility, in our approval or condemnation forever. Here and now, there is still time for repentance. Judgment bids us take heart of Grace in the conviction that the opportunity is still ours to attain a life free from past failure and worthy of Divine Approval forever. (Idem) Amen. ©wjsmartin And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought
in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. (St. Matthew xxi. 12, 13) The traditional Anglican lectionary goes back to the Ancient Church. As Father Crouse reminds us, If you consider the selection of lessons for the Sundays in Advent in [our] Book of Common Prayer, you will find that they are those appointed in the Sarum Missal of the Medieval Church of England and are in fact the same as those prescribed in the “Comes of St. Jerome,” which goes back to the Fifth Century. Our own Anglican Reformers decided to opt for the readings selected by the Ancient Fathers since they knew that they were safer guides to our salvation journey than any others. Today’s readings are no exception. We have read this morning about Jesus’ exultant entry into Jerusalem, and literally minded post-moderns wonder why we are using readings for Palm Sunday. Why did the Ancient Fathers choose this reading for Advent Sunday? Aren’t we supposed to be getting ready for Christmas? But the Church Fathers understood that Advent prepares Christians for the coming of Christ’s birth at Christmas time. His birth is, of course, a triumphant coming into our souls once again, on Christmas night. St. Paul tells us this morning that, 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. (Romans xiii. 12) Christmas is all about the coming Light, the Light which was the Life of men…the Light [which] shineth in the darkness, and the darkness [overcame] it not…the Light that ligtheth every man that cometh into the world. (St. John i. 4,5,9) Advent, with the Ancient Latin Fathers, means preparing spiritually for the birth of Christ the Life and Light, and this involves readying the soul so that we may joyfully receive Him for our Redeemer. Our Advent season encourages us to prepare ourselves through repentance for Christ’s dramatic visitation at Christmas. Advent is a season of fasting, prayer, and abstinence. St. Paul insists that we should walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, and making no provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. (Ibid, 13, 14) Preparing for Christmas in Advent means readying ourselves of Christ’s dramatic coming at Christmas. Preparing for Christmas in Advent demands spiritual and bodily mortification so that we might welcome the Christ Child in a deeper way. Casting away the works of darkness, through sorrow, penance, and contrition will give us a keener vision into the need for Christ’s birth historically and spiritually. Compunctious contrition over sin reveals our distance from God. Our alienation from God demands a response to our fallen condition that God alone in His Son, Jesus Christ, can remedy. Christ came into the world to exorcise and expel all darkness from human life. Christ comesto us continually to root and ground us in His Redemption and Salvation. To perceive the Light of Christ’s birth on Christmas Day, we must courageously face the darkness. The contrast and contradiction between darkness and light was emphasized last Sunday when we asked the Lord to stir up [our] wills to plenteously bring forth good works in Advent’s time of preparation for Christmas. Advent’s call is prepare to meet thy God. We are called to meet our God at Christmas, but more poignantly at the Great and Dreadful Day of Judgment. Christmas itself must be a trial run for Judgment Day. Casting away the works of darkness means facing our sins and ridding ourselves of them now in the time of this mortal life. Darkness is comprised of that hardheartedness that neglects and dismisses sin because we fear the coming of Christ the Light. Another way of facing the darkness which has a firm grip on our souls is to remember that Advent is all about the Four Last Things. What are the Four Last Things? They are Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. How do we relate to darkness? We are afraid of Death. We shall be better used to it if we start dying now. Dying to what, you ask? To ourselves, the world, and to sin. Thus, we might begin to allow the Judge Eternal throned in Splendor, Jesus Christ, to judge us now before it is too late. If Jesus Judges us now, He shall teach us how our thoughts, words, and works measure up against His Will for us. He shall show us Heaven and Hell. Either one or the other awaits us all. It is up to us which we choose by acclimating our lives to Jesus Christ or not. Advent begins with Christ’s riding into Jerusalem. With the crowds of old in this Advent season, we should respond to Him with Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. (Ibid, 9) We should rejoice that, once again in Advent, Christ is coming to us. We sing Hosanna because the God of all glory and holiness has stooped down from His heavenly throne to enter our souls to give us one more time to repent, one more time to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light. When we proclaim Hosanna, we should mean it. We mean it if, indeed, we allow Him to be the Great Physician who comes to heal our souls. The Christ who comes in Advent intends to awaken us to the darkness that defines our lives. He doesn’t have time for cheap Grace or lukewarm religion. He knows [the] time, [and] that now it is high time to awake [us] out of sleep, for now is our salvation closer than when we first learned to believe. (Romans xiii 11: AV & Knox) Christ comes to cure our souls and to call us out of darkness. Next, we read that Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. (Ibid, 12, 13) Christ means business. If we want Jesus to cast away the works of darkness in our souls, we had better allow Jesus to purge our systems of the worship of all false gods, like money, mammon, and the false security they deceptively provide! Christ is like any good doctor. Do we resent sharing our riches with others? Christ means to knock it out of us. Do we help others a little and ourselves a lot as we jump onto the computer to buy another frock, another trinket, or another house? Jesus is grieved over this worship of mammon. Do we make a God out of our loneliness and fail to take the time alone with ourselves to get close to Jesus? Jesus is angry because we forget that we are never alone. He is forever with us, longing for us to get to know Him better. On this Advent Sunday, we must open our souls to the penetrating, invasive, determined, and dynamic Light of Christ’s coming! St. Paul tells us this morning that our patient preparation for Christ’s spiritual surgery must involve love. If Christ is to enter our souls to purge, cleanse, and wash away our sins, we must not be resentful, angry, or bitter. If Christ is to enter our souls, we must die to putting ourselves first and try putting ourselves last. We are sinners in need of a Savior. Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. (Romans xiii 8) This means that we must stop acting out of insecurity and selfishness and begin to love and give freely. The night is far spent and the night is at hand. (Idem) Christ the Light comes to us freely in love to offer us the priceless gift of salvation. Do we want it? Now it is high time to wake out of sleep. (Idem) For they that sleep, sleep in the night. And they that be drunken, are drunken in the night. (1 Thes. V. 7) Alas, for the Day. The day of the Lord is at hand. (Joel i. 15) All sinful things are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. (Ephesians v. 13,14) My friends, today we are called to slow down and contemplate our darkness in relation to Christ the Light. Advent is all about waking up, being roused, and becoming conscious of our need for Jesus Christ. We need to admit that this world’s false gods have left us in unhappy darkness. We need to admit that they have left us further removed from Christ the Light. We need to repent. Advent is about waiting and watching for the coming of Christ’s birth at Christmas. Without repentance, there will be no room in the inn of our souls for Christ’s birth. The Advent fire of Christ’s Light can purify and heal the temple of our souls of all false commerce with darkness. In closing, we might remember that forewarned is forearmed. Now is high time to wake out of sleep. (Idem) A friend of mine is fond of saying that is not my problem. But what if God has sent those who struggle and have needs into our lives not as problems but as opportunities. Perhaps others come to us as a Divine Opportunity to help and assist them not by compulsion or force but to prove our free love. Freely ye have received, freely give. (Matt. X. 8) It might just be that Christ is testing us against the Great and Dreadful Day of Judgment to see if we can practice love like His, love freely given and with no expectations! God loves us in Jesus Christ, no matter what! Owe no man anything but to love. (Idem) We are redeemed and saved by the Blood of Jesus Christ to commence and continue paying the debt of love. We can never pay off Christ’s debt of love to us, but we can offer it always and freely. Perhaps if we learn to love others and give to others, no matter what, in this Advent Season, Christ will come to us and be born in us, and we shall be called Christians, maybe even for the first time, on Christmas Night and others will awaken out of sleep too! Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Thy faith hath made thee whole…(St. Matthew ix. 22) The green season of Trinity Tide emphasizes spiritual growth and fertility by drawing our attention to the miracles of Jesus. Our English word miracle is a translation from the Greek word dunamis, meaning mighty work or power. Archbishop Trench says that a miracle is an outcoming of the mighty power of God, which is inherent in Christ himself, that great power of God. (Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord) A miracle is a manifestation of God’s power imparted by Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, into human hearts by the Holy Ghost. Most of God’s miracles found in Scripture can be traced to Christ in the days of His Incarnation. They are disclosures and revelations of God’s strength which are effected directly or indirectly through Christ himself. John Donne tells us that there is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world and a tacit reprehension of them that require, or who need, miracles.(Trench, p. 16) Miracles are offered from God to man to remind us of that power, which we are habitually in danger of forgetting. This is the power that must, at times, startle and shake us out of an otherwise somnolent and sleepy spiritual sloth. Through miracles, God reveals Himself to the Jews on Mount Horeb. Through miracles, God reveals Himself, in Jesus Christ, to their descendants. Through miracles, we find that curative dynamism of Divine Power that visits men in Jesus Christ, heals them, and offers to carry them home to God. From what does man need healing? Sin. Every man needs to be healed of what stands between him and his Maker. The instance of healing is not what is important. God lends His power to man to elicit a deeper consciousness of his absolute dependence upon His Maker for his redemption and salvation. The miracle might cure a man of blindness. The greater miracle is his spiritual realization that God’s Wisdom, Power, and Love alone can ensure his transition to the Kingdom. In today’s Gospel lesson, we read of two miracles that should encourage us to seek out the power of God in Jesus Christ for our own lives. We read of one miracle that is sought out vicariously through entreaty and another that is sought out directly through contact with Jesus. There is desire for healing a relative and passionate determination for healing of the self. In today’s Gospel the order is abruptly reversed. This morning we learn that before a man can pray aright for the healing of others, he must be healed himself. Thus, the power of God is obtained individually so that the sanctified soul might know how and when to pray for others. This, of course, runs clean contrary to what most people do. Most people are consumed with praying for other people’s sin and sickness. It may be well-intentioned, but most men are more co-dependently consumed with other people’s sins than their own. So, to today’s lesson. We read that there is the ruler who comes to Jesus, honors him, and begs Him to come down to heal his daughter who has just died. My daughter is even now dead, but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. (St. Matthew ix.18) Jesus takes His disciples to follow the gentleman home. Something then interrupts their journey so that Jesus can reveal to the ruler what should have preceded his intercession for his daughter. Remember, the order of the healings is all important. Out of the blue and in the press, someone touches Him. Behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him and touched the hem of his garment: for she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. (St. Matthew ix. 20,21) Someone has interrupted Jesus’ response to a nobleman’s petition. The woman with an issue of blood twelve years impedes the journey into healing, for the benefit of our enlightenment and instruction. This woman is an example to us of that personal diligence and determination that must always precede our prayers and supplications for others. She reveals who and what the ruler should have been before he begged Jesus to heal his daughter. She represents that spiritual character and disposition that must characterize the life of the soul that must be healed before it can know how, when, and in what manner to pray for others. What does this mean? How can we possibly approach God with cares and concerns about others before we are made right with Him ourselves? No doubt, there is nothing wrong with wanting the healing of others and our loved ones. The example of the ruler provides us with a degree of natural good will; here we find a man honored and esteemed in the earthly city who is heartbroken over his daughter’s sickness and death. Yet we must see the interruption of the woman with the issue of blood as a call to our own need for getting right with God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. The woman in this morning’s Gospel provides us with a witness to that faith that seeks out and finds, that perseveres and persists until it has secured the power of God for its own healing. She needs Christ’s healing. She has suffered physically for twelve years with uninterrupted menstruation. Yet, she is humbler than the earthly ruler. Her ongoing and unhealed sickness has ostracized her from society, she is embarrassed, and she seeks a cure. St. John Chrysostom reminds us that she was ashamed on account of her affliction, accounting herself to be unclean. For if the menstruous woman was judged not to be clean, much more would she have the same thought, who was afflicted with such a disease; since in fact that complaint was under the law accounted a great uncleanness. (Hom. Xxxi) She knew that she could not help herself, and St. Luke reminds us that she had suffered many things of many physicians, and spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. (St. Luke viii. 43) Her faith convinces her that the mere touch of Jesus’ garment will heal her. With faith and courage, she will push through the crowd to touch Jesus. She cannot speak out of shame, but she can touch. Because of who Jesus is, the very garments that He wears must be conduits to the newness of life that will issue from Him to her. Then, Jesus, perceiving that virtue has gone out of Him (St. Luke viii. 46), says to her, daughter be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole. (St. Matthew ix. 22) Jesus has been moved by the faith that has sought Him out and found Him in a unique way. Silently she prays, God be merciful to me a sinner and hopes to return healed to her hidden obscurity. The woman is a sign of our need to judge ourselves, feel our spiritual sickness, and seek a cure. She reveals a faith that Christ knows what is best for her without her asking. To reach out to God in Jesus Christ, to touch the hem of His heavenly garment, and to desire His power with a humble passion silently are of highest value to Christ, our all-merciful Lord! There can be no doubt that Jesus was thronged by a multitude of sick and diseased people. But one woman touches Him with humble faith. The commentators remind us that she might have touched His garment, been healed, and gone away with a healing and restoration that was as concealed and hidden as her original disease. For, she thought within herself, her own healing paled in significance to that of the ruler’s daughter. She was no aristocrat! But Jesus would have none of it. The unique, humble faith of this woman must be brought out into the clear light of day so that its earnest passion might inspire others to imitation. This is the faith that must travel out of fear and trembling into the clear light of Christ’s healing embrace. Archbishop Trench remarks: She hoped to remain in concealment out of a shame, which, however natural, was untimely in this the crisis of her spiritual life; but this hope of hers is graciously defeated. Her heavenly Healer draws her from the concealment she would have chosen; but even here, so far as possible, He spares her, for not before, but after she is healed, does He require the open confession from her lips. She might have found it perhaps altogether too hard had He demanded this of her before; but, waiting till the cure is accomplished, He helps her through the narrow way. Altogether spare her this painful passage He could not, for it pertained to her birth into the new life. (Trench, Ibid, 150) Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole. (Idem) Her faith has conquered Jesus’ heart, procured His virtue, and Jesus will hold her as an example to us all. Again, John Donne tells us that in every miracle there is a silent chiding of the world. (Idem) The woman with the issue of blood chides or reproaches us all. Do we have her deep humility and faith to persistently pursue Christ’s power to heal? Christ brings out the faith of the woman with the issue of blood to make public what must shame us. Many throng Christ; His in name; near to Him; in actual contact with the sacraments and ordinances of His Church; yet not touching Him, because not drawing nigh in faith, not looking for, and therefore not obtaining, life and healing from Him, and through these. (Trench, Ibid, 149) Will we pursue Christ persistently in the crowded ways of modern life with humble and faithful hearts that seek His cure for our sins? The woman with the issue of blood committed no sin but is ashamed and alienated. Christ intends for us to imitate her humility, faith, and persistence. We must be humbled. Our faith must feel deeply our need for His healing power. We must never think that Christ’s Redemption is for other people. We must never take Christ for granted. We must stop thinking that we can touch the hem of Christ’s garment in the Sacraments without believing in the power that they convey! The Son of God paid for our Salvation with His Blood. Do we receive His Body and Blood as what alone can cure our sin sick souls? Christ is God’s Word. If we touch the hem of His Garment, we must intend to receive His healing power. Jesus displays the woman’s faith to all for our imitation. (St. J. Chryst.) We wonder why we don’t heal. Our faith is too weak. Our faith is a private affair. Jesus says, thy faith has made thee whole (Idem). In our lives, this miracle should reveal to the world an outcoming of the mighty power of God, which is inherent in Christ himself, that great power of God. (Idem) Amen. ©wjsmartin ![]() Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (St. Matthew xxii. 21) One of the most difficult enterprises in Christian life involves holding things together. Christians try to hold together their bodies and souls in the service of God. They try to hold together their marriages and families. They attempt to hold together the church and even civil society as one nation under God. Christians are quite intent on holding together who are intended to be united by God. Yet the devil is in our midst to divide and rend asunder and break down. We tear babies out of mothers’ wombs and call the separation a healthy choice. We rend asunder marriages because narcissistic heathen cannot abide the sacrifice that is called to struggle to keep vows. We divide our bodies from our souls, thinking that their connection is arbitrary and without any spiritual meaning for the psychosomatic unity of a person. Of course, we’ve done nothing but divide ourselves from ourselves. What God intends to be one – one in oneself, one with others, one with Himself – we Christians are in danger of losing through division. But God always intends to hold us together through Jesus Christ our Lord and by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Yet, our prayerful desire to hold it all together is not made easy. We pray in this morning’s Collect that the author of all Godliness…[might] hear the devout prayers of the Church, and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Of course, our prayers should be devout and sincerely aim to be one with God. Devout praying asks God to hold us together individually and collectively. Christians should want to go to God’s Kingdom first and foremost by not offending God who is all good and deserving of all of our love, and by conquering sin and death. But Christians who are awake will find that God’s desire for us has competition from the world, the flesh, the Devil, and even from the realm that the Caesars of this world rule and govern. The Devil’s attacks are more direct and discernible. The Rulers and Governors of this world are more subtle. Gone are the days when they fought valiantly against the enemies of the Christ and His Cross. In fact, these days, it seems that the Caesars of this world are offended at nothing but Christ, His Cross, and the beautiful history of the West that it engendered. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s has become increasingly difficult in a world where the Caesars are positively godless and a serious threat to those journeying to Christ and His Kingdom. Caesars who disrespect freedom of conscience make it very hard for contemporary Christians to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. It is even more difficult for intelligent Christians who know that modern freedom, of course, comes only from Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. The Caesars of this world fill men with fear over the gain and loss of perishable treasures, determined to hold them captive to the false gods of a human nature that is at odds with itself and all others. Through faith and reason, Jesus Christ intends the happiness and communion of another world. Of course, the forces of division present in the contemporary world have been around since the dawn of time. In the world of today’s Epistle and Gospel, they were alive and well in vice or even heresy. Vice is common to all men in all ages and leads most men to Hellfire and Damnation. Heresy is a bit more interesting since it, at least, attempts to give man religion, as misconstrued as that may be. As we read last week, in his Epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul is writing to the first Christian Church in Europe. Today, we learn that he is warning them of both heresy and moral corruption. Moral corruption divides man from the good of his body, soul, and spirit, the good of his neighbor, and from God through sin. Heresy divides man from the knowledge of how God redeems the body, soul, and spirit, how He enables man to love his neighbor, and how He draws all men back to Himself. Moral corruption and heresy threaten salvation and man’s return to God. St. Paul was dealing with heretics in the Early Church. He is worried about the Judaizers. Judaizers were early Jewish Christians who demanded that salvation be contingent upon strict adherence to the Jewish Law. Jewish Christians insisted that circumcision, dietary laws, and ritual observances were necessary to salvation since salvation is of the Jews. St. Paul, who knew the Jewish Law perfectly, believed that Judaizers were encouraging Christians to be held by the Law and not by the God of the Law. St. Paul knew that the Law could never save a man. He writes to the Galatians, I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain. (Gal. ii. 21) Again, he writes, For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh….(Rom. viii. 3) St. Paul believes that the Jewish Law revealed man’s habitual weakness and inability to be faithful. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. (Gal. iii. 24) The Law brought the Jewish people into the consciousness of being held by sin and death. For those who insisted upon a rigorous submission to the Law, St. Paul has a solution. Strict adherence by ritual observances has been overcome by the Law made Flesh, Jesus Christ. Christ alone has fulfilled the Law, has obeyed it perfectly, has suffered its end in unjust death, redeeming it in Himself. Through His unearned, unmerited, and underserved death on the Cross of Calvary, Jesus Christ has brought the Law of Sin and Death to Death in His Death. Jesus Christ, the Forgiveness of Sins made flesh, has made Atonement for the sins of the whole world. The true meaning of the Old Law is found in Christ. The New Law brings life and Resurrection if we allow that Forgiveness of Sins, Jesus Christ, to overcome our sin in death to the world. The New Law means that we can be held together in body and soul, with one another, and with God once again in Jesus Christ. We can once again Render unto God the things that are God’s (Idem) because it was not possible that Jesus Christ should be holden of death. (Acts ii. 24) Remember, Jewish Law and Roman Law, upheld by the Pharisees and Caesars, respectively, are two expressions of the same Law: the Law of Sin and Death. Neither the Jew nor the Gentile could overcome them. That neither Law could hold Christ in Death is the Miracle of Redemption. That Christ continues to hold us in His Liberating Hands is the Miracle of sanctification that leads to our salvation. God in Jesus Christ fills those who mind earthly things with holy terror. They fear what they cannot control or ever really possess. God renders Caesar’s good impermanent and unreliable. If the Gospel is true and men learn of it, the hold that godless rulers have over us becomes tenuous. Yet, still, we as Christians must pray about what rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s (Idem) really means. The heretics of the ancient world and the Caesars of our own seem Hell-bent on breaking Christ’s hold on our memories, minds, and hearts. St. Paul says, Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision. (Phil. iii. 2) He continues, Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.) (Idem, 17-19) Long ago, St. Paul criticized the Jewish heretics and immoral believers to shed light on the dangers of Christians who are held by false gods and mind earthly things too much to be of any heavenly good to themselves, others, and God. He showed us that Christians can be as earthly-minded as the Pharisees or any pagan Caesars. Christians too can be dividers and sewers of discord, held by Satan and lost to Heaven’s hold. How can we render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s if we are trying to escape his hold on us? Why do we owe Caesar anything? It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Jesus referred to paying taxes to the Roman Emperor for the protection, law, and order that his Legion provided. That was a reasonable tax. But how does it apply to us? Jesus means it in a spiritual sense. We can show Caesar that our [true] citizenship is in Heaven. (Ibid, 20) We can honor Caesar and his heathen friends by showing them that Caesar and all men belong to God. For our conversation is in Heaven, from whence also we look for our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Idem) We can tell our unbelieving neighbors that we too were once held in Satan’s grip by sin. We can relate to the Caesars that we are being saved by God’s Grace, which has an eternal hold on our souls because our frail flesh hasn’t any hope without the love of a more Glorious Ruler. We should render to Caesar the witness of how King Jesus holds us in His loving embrace. We should render unto Caesar ourmourning. With St. Paul, we weep…for those who are the enemies of the Cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, who mind earthly things. (Idem) When we render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, may the Caesars realize that we mourn for them. Caesars have a hold on citizens with which he intended to make a handsome return. As Matthew Henry remarks, If purses be Caesar’s, our consciences are God’s. Caesar has us superficially; God has us substantially. Caesar belongs to God. St. Augustine says, Christ’s coin is man. In him is Christ’s image, in him Christ’s name, Christ’s gifts, Christ’s rule of dignity. (Vol. vi. NPNF (1st) Let us return ourselves to Christ fully in will and in deed. In urging us to render to Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s, Jesus, our King, at least stumps the Pharisees. When they had heard these words, they marveled, and left Him, and went their way. (ibid, 22) Amen. ©wjsmartin |
St. Michael and All Angels Sermons:
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