Easter III

Easter III
May 11, 2025
 
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)
 
Eastertide is all about avoiding those things that are contrary to our profession and following such things as are agreeable to the same. (Collect Easter III) We do this, of course, because if we have been admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, the habit of life that will ensure that our pilgrimage is sanctified and that we shall be saved. In Eastertide, 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.
         
The Resurrected Christ invites us into a relationship that will deliver us to His Kingdom. This is difficult. We are so at home in this world, in the realm of immediate gratification. 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 as the ludicrous last gasp of late Victorian piety. Christian morality has suffered a severe setback. Lust, fornication, and adultery are never mentioned. 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 carelessly ignore them.

Of course, St. Peter lived in the then civilized world where both Jew and Greek, slave and free, submitted not only to Roman Law but to moral agreement about marriage, the family, and Natural Law. The old Romans were intrigued by Jewish morality. Roman thinkers were surprised to find that what they concluded from Natural Law was substantiated by the Jews through revelation in their Sacred Scriptures. The success with which the Apostles converted the Greeks and Romans to Christ was a testimony to a universal need for a common cure for man’s sin and alienation from God. Along with the Jews, both the Greeks and Romans were ready 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 blessing of ancient man’s moral conscience. We blame the youth of today for perverse immorality, and yet its source is found in their grandparents, whose fornication and adultery are now normalized. Even the churches have surrendered to the amorality of the present age. Secular nations, at least in the West, have regularized what to an ancient Greek, Roman, or Jew would have been forbidden as unnatural, perverse, and immoral. The words of the Psalmist discern the character of soul found in today’s world.

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)
 
The root of sin is found is practical Atheism. We live in a world of fools who have forgotten that every measure of goodness is God Himself. Fools trust their own judgment for what is right and what is wrong. He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool (Prov. xxviii. 26) and despiseth wisdom and understanding. (Prov. i. 7) The fool willfully ignores God as judge of all human choices. Because he is at home in this world, he exults only in the false gods’ provision of fleeting happiness. Possessed by idolatrous passions, he guesses dangerously that God isn’t much bothered by his sin. He has forgotten the wisdom that God is omnipresent and omniscient.

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
        

What haunts the fool is known by the wise man. The wise man knows that we ignore the Invisible God at our own peril. The wise man knows that here we are strangers and pilgrims, not to be at home in this world, and made by God to be one with Him. The wise man knows that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. (Romans iii. 23) The wise man has searched out and found that God’s Invisible Wisdom, Power, and Love have been present to the ancient Greek and Roman through nature and reason. He knows that God has been present to the ancient Jews by revelation. The wise man has also discovered that God came to save sinful man in Jesus Christ, the Judge who will reward us with either eternal happiness or eternal misery. The wise man knows that all men will be called to give an account for the lives they have lived.

In Eastertide, Jesus says ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. (St. John xvi. 20) For the wise man, mourning and lamentation are part and parcel of the redemptive process. Labor, toil, suffering, and even sadness constitute an essential part of the conversion from sin to righteousness, and death to new life. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that the wise man will be sad for three reasons. First, by sadness of evil, man is corrected. (Easter III: TA) In relationship with Christ, the wise man mourns over his sins, which were the cause of Christ’s passion, because he wants to be made better. The wise man can desire and find virtue only through mourning. Second, by temporal sadness, man escapes eternal torment. (Idem) Temporal sadness is worth suffering because it delivers us from Hell. Third, by a mean measure of justice, we acquire eternal joys. (Idem) Punishment as just punishment for our sins now acclimates us to the virtue that leads to eternal joys. Temporal sadness alone reaps the blessing of the exceeding and eternal weight of God’s glory.
         
Jesus teaches us, with St. Peter, that for as long as we live in these earthen vessels, we must become strangers and pilgrims in this world. If we acknowledge and respond to His abiding Invisible Presence, not at home in this world, we shall discover that every moral choice we make will determine our destiny. Jesus insists,

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. 5) 
 
If Christ lives in us now Invisibly and we practice His presence, we must come to terms with the truth about ourselves. The wise man must mourn before he is comforted. Jesus compares our labor to an expectant mother. St. Augustine writes:
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)

Our end is the consolation of the Divine Presence. So, over and against our ungodliness, St. Peter urges us to embrace 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 us into all joy, but not before we have become strangers and pilgrims in this world, allowing the love of the Invisible God to redeem and change us, a love that no man shall take away from us, (Idem) that saves us from sin and its eternal punishment.

Amen.
©wjsmartin
 

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