St Paul tells us that the Gospel he proclaims is not of earthly origin, from no human source (Galatians 1.11). When we hear this, our present-day assumption is that he means it comes from “the other side”, that it is supernatural, that it is in the department we separate off to one side of human life, the department we call religious.
But it is not what he means. Yes, he said he had a religious experience; yes, he was speaking of a profound spiritual incident that changed everything he thought and altered everything he did from then on. This is why he called it “not of earthly origin”, because it certainly did not come from anything he had experienced in the world before.
What he was really speaking about is that the impact made upon him that came from Jesus Christ, a real human being born of Mary, yet who came from the Father: the Man from heaven. The revelation he had was of the same order as the disciples after the Resurrection. It was inexplicable in earthly terms as far as they knew them - because the dead man that they all saw was not merely a resuscitation, but instead the same person they had known now living in a new creation. It was shedding its brilliance in this world, but was not being determined by it.
St Paul had been accused of making up his new found proclamation from his own changed tunes, or from schemes he had devised with other people. He was accused of inventing a new kind of preaching about Jesus that was different from the original Kingdom proclaimed by the Lord Himself. To this day, he is accused of founding a new religious institution, the Church, against the spiritual intentions and teaching of Jesus. Thus he was also blamed for not consulting the apostles before beginning his preaching, of being vain in pursuing his personal version of the infant Church’s mission, and thus undermining the authority of the Twelve. But it is all nonsense, then and as now. The other apostles found now fault with it and realised it was fundamentally the same as their own gospel. This was not so much because of the words and terms to be used, or the way they were expressed, but because for all of them it was clearly about a Person, who had come into the world as its Light.
Peter, the rock on whom Christ built His Church, saw this. James, the Lord’s own brother, corroborated it. Paul had truly been in the Light of the same Person as had shone through them too: the Son of Man, the Lord’s anointed, the Son of God, Emmanuel-God-with-Us, the Master, the Good Shepherd, the Ascended Lord of Earth and Heaven, the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Most of us do not have such dramatic revelations as St Paul’s and our encounter of religion feels much of the time as though it is firmly bound up with earthly origins, ideas and people. But think again of how it was for St Peter and St James. James, who we remember today (Galatians 1.19) knew Jesus all his life in such a very human way, as a relation in the same household and family. For James, therefore, the revelation that came to Paul in a flash came through a lifetime of growing up together from boyhood through adolescence, during which familiarity did not breed contempt but formed the close bond of affection and admiration that we can understand from our own families and life-long friendships. St James knew he had grown up with heaven – he would not realise it all the time, for it would have been like second nature. Thus for all that it was in earth, it was of no earthly origin. Jesus his brother was God among Us. For St Peter, the relationship was more recent. He began with being spellbound by a charismatic teacher coming to find St Andrew and then him on the shore of Galilee where they worked as fishermen. After that, it was a series of incidents in which Peter is brought up short by Jesus, Who shows him where he has not grasped the Kingdom of God, culminating in the one where he misjudges the purpose of the Lord’s Arrest, first in the garden and then in the palace courtyard to which he follows Jesus, but where he also denies Him not once but three times. And yet this was all the outward symptom of a deep inner connection with Jesus, the way in which the Lord intrigues those who seek Him out, so that the faulty foundations in Peter’s life of faith can be reconstructed by the resurrection and bear the life-long confidence in Christ to be built on them, a confidence that will one day cost him in turn not less than everything.
All of us, perhaps, have experienced a little of what it is like to know Jesus like St Paul, St James, or St Peter, to find ourselves in the presence of the Man from Heaven and to be changed as a result. Most of us have been growing up in our faith and belief in Him like St James. All of us have been trying to comprehend Him, yet repeatedly found ourselves letting Him down like St Peter, but nonetheless persevering and finding our way through to some kind of constant faithfulness. There may have been the flash of light, perhaps just once in our lives, like St Paul, a vision or an experience of God’s closeness to us, that has stood us in good stead all the way through and irrevocably altered the way we think and live. Perhaps it is a mixture of all three.
The point is that, whoever we are and whatever the Christian life is like for each one of us, our fellowship in the Church and the Christian faith itself are about the Lord Who came to the world with no earthly origin, in order to have the one thing he lacked - human nature - and to work within our human nature our human redemption, so that there could be human fellowship in the life of God Himself.
What the Lord meant to St Peter, St James, St Paul, St Joseph whom we also remember today (Matthew 2.13), and pre-eminently to the Mother of God was that to meet Christ in His Church is to be at the very entrance of heaven into the world, and the world into heaven: “I am the gate –whoever enters through me will be saved. My sheep will come in and go out and find pasture. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10. 9-10)
In other words, today’s celebration of the Sunday after the Nativity is a feast of our rebirth as human beings in the Spirit of Christ, Who is born among us in the flesh. What had an earthly origin thus receives the eternal living that is heaven’s. Today the Lord of no earthly origin shows us how He takes on the form of human beings, so that we creatures can take on the form of God. He shows that just as God can unite with human nature in one and the same Person, so human beings can enter into and be part of the life of God. It does not require us to leave the world to live with God in His heavenly Kingdom, just as it did not require Christ to be unheavenly to convert the human Paul. “For God is with us” (Isaiah 8-9, from Great Compline on Christmas Night), and with God is how we are too.
11 January 2015
04 January 2015
Homily for Christmas Day, Mass of the Day, St Mary's Church, Cadogan Street, Chelsea
It must have been about twenty years ago – you couldn’t do it nowadays – but it was on the radio all one Christmas week: three modern day Wise Men decided to retrace the steps of the Magi from old Mesopotamia, taking their time on camels or donkeys, camping their way through Iraq, Baghdad, Jordan and finally into Palestine and on to Bethlehem. The modern Magi were three scientists, whose expertise corresponded to the knowledge and interest of the Wise Men of old: one was a chemistry professor; another was an astronomer; and the third was a theologian.
The BBC thought they would have a cracking programme, as three great people made a journey in search of the Jesus that the Wise Men were seeking, full of insight and clever conversation from three completely different disciplines colliding in flashes of brilliance: perfect radio. What happened was rather different. After a week or so, the modern Magi got used to each other and fell into a rhythm. A few days more and they had run out of things to say. When they came back, they said how for much of the time, as they walked and rode, their thinking calmed and they just made their way through the Middle East toward Bethlehem in each other’s company in silence. But it was not that they were lost for words. It was more that they were infused, you might say, with being tranquil. They spoke when they needed to and when they had something to say. But otherwise, they were content to rest in the silence they had come to share.
And here we are today, like many before us, coming to seek out the Word made Flesh; and we find He is likewise saying nothing. But we are paying close attention, straining to hear any sound or inkling of the Word that we might miss. To the first Christians who spoke Greek, this title of Jesus’s – The Word (John 1.1) – meant something a little more than ‘word’ means to us. They would also have understood it in something like the way we talk of a rationale, God’s reason for being God, God’s reasoning in his desire for us to come to be part of Him. There had been many words in prophets, laws and Temple liturgies; but now God was going to explain Himself and reveal His reasoning , His rationale, His reason for being Himself - a God Who saves His creation from its self-destruction - not in phrases and arguments to justify His purposes, but in a Person. Actions, we tell ourselves, speak louder than words. And here it all is: the ‘Wording’ from God in flesh and blood, not breathed out onto the air, but full of unspoken meaning.
Jesus often resorts to being the Word in this way in the stories that we love throughout the Gospels. We have the parables and the pronouncements of healing; but when it counts, the Word we first beheld in His manger once again creates the space of silence around Him. So the Archangel appearing to Mary who is to be Mother of God says to her, as the first thing to be achieved, “Peace.” (Luke 1. 28) When the storm is at its height on the Sea of Galilee and the disciples are frightened for their lives, the Lord says, “Peace, be still.” (Mark 4.39) When He works His great miracles of healing, He tells those who have been saved to say nothing of what has happened to them and instead, we might say, to live in the moment and let the work of the Kingdom of Heaven speak for itself. (Mark 1. 44) When the woman is accused of adultery, while her accusers take their rage out on her, the Lord proceeds through silence to the foregone conclusion of mercy (John 8. 6). When He Himself is accused before the High Priests, King Herod and Pontius Pilate, He says little in response to their interrogation and public denunciation (Mark 14. 61). All the words happen around Him, as the Word of God in Person speaks for itself. As He is led to His Cross, the Lamb to the slaughter, He opens not His mouth (Acts 8.32). What He is doing and being is all that there is to say.
Then there were all those times when Jesus is wandering through Galilee with His disciples and, next, going up to Jerusalem, to the events that would lead to His Cross and in the end the dumbfounding Resurrection. We know quite a little of His talks to the people and what He said when He taught and healed. Yet we hardly know most of what He may have said in the vast tracts of time spent with His closest friends, the future apostles. Surely this is because it must have been for these disciples like it was for the three modern Magi: on their wanderings to encounter Jesus, they found themselves in a rhythm of silent company. We are told that Jesus would go off to pray on His own (Luke 5.16). But when He was with them He still had this habit of silence. Sometimes He would ask a question and wait without expectation of an answer. Sometimes we was just being the man of quiet, leaving mysteries up in the air, setting silence around Him as you wondered. Thus to the disciples he was not just their teacher, but their Master, their spiritual master.
You can imagine that disciple who had followed Jesus for months and years, yet who had neared a conclusion that he was still very much at the beginning of the way to the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus spoke so much of it that He seemed to be living in it even here and now. You can hear all his anxiety bursting out: “Lord, teach us how to pray.” (Luke 11.1) In the text of our Gospel, the Lord’s answer follows immediately, as He reveals to them the words of the Lord’s Prayer. I expect it was somewhat different. Likely there followed silence, into which the disciples’ attention was drawn ever more closely, as there gradually emerged the words of the prayer for how to live on earth as in heaven, how to live with God and in the world, and how God’s Kingdom comes when it becomes our will to desire only the will of God. This was no conversation. This was all happening in that rhythm of company and quiet that the Modern Magi discovered on their route to Bethlehem.
For us, Christmas with its joys and celebrations is full of energy, of tasks and meeting family and friends; and that is how it should be. We have little time to settle into the rhythm of company on our way with God; but we can still be very clear-sighted that a quiet presence lies on the heart of this feast, and the rationale for the coming of the Word in Person is for Him to be with us, so that we may repeatedly desire nothing but to be with Him and fulfil His will for us. This awareness has another name: prayer. Praying, for us with our busy minds and our lives packed with activity, is difficult for many; it is just as difficult for priests as it is for lay people: we are all in this together and getting us to pray truly is God’s life’s work. It can be a less than obvious path to find, or a hard journey to make, until we realise that praying is not just about thinking holy things over, or coming up with words, or performing devotions, though all these have a part to play: praying is spending time in the company of God. More truly it is God spending his eternity in our company. Certainly our mind wanders; certainly we are lost for words. But which one of us in a long marriage, or with our family, or in our friendships, has not known times with another human being we know so well when, likewise, there is nothing to say for the moment and it is all right to say nothing, all right just to be in the other’s company? For, when we find there are no words, we may fret that no words are coming to the surface, but we do not walk away from our family, or give up on our friendships as unsuccessful, or fruitless. Instead, we stay and we go with the moment. It is the same with praying.
It is does not even matter in our praying if there is argument, recrimination and estrangement, just as intense as the highest expressions of love and devotion. It is the same in human families and friendships. What matters is the rhythm of company that endures in the other’s presence. It does not depend on us, our mood, our worthiness, or our effort. If it did, we should fail at every attempt. And I am sure there are times when each of us feels that praying is difficult, we are failures at it and might as well just give it up. How good the devil is at discouraging us, when we think to ourselves, “I believe, but I can’t get the hang of this praying thing; it’s not really for me”; or “It isn’t my personal spirituality,” or, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” All these are justifications for obscuring ourselves from realising that we live at every moment with God who is present to us. Yet praying is not a burden, or a technique. To begin, our part is a simple. It is just to recall that we are lost without Him, to ask for His help and mercy, and decide again and again to stay in that company which has come to seek out our company, not because we are deserving, but out of His love. Beyond that, looking for the words to say, or coming up with reasons, is not our worry. Ours is to trust the One Who keeps our company. Distractions come and go; the imagination wanders; every thought, grudge, problem, sin, or fantasy can intrude and then pass on their way. But the Saviour who is Lord of all that happens out in the world is also Lord of all that happens within us. This is why he is in our company not only when we pray but also while we do and say and are whatever it is; for praying is not our being with God, but our God being with us – Emmanuel means God with us (Matthew 1.23). And who can separate us? (Romans 8.39)
Mindful that He is there, and time and again deciding to call on His help to stay with Him, we can be assured the Lord is building a certain quiet space inside our soul (Mark 1.35), in which the presence of the One we love can breathe and take on a life of its own within us. The English classical scholar and hymn writer, Edwin Hatch (1835-89), put it this way:
Breathe on me, Breath of God, until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will, to do and to endure.
Or, as St Paul said of all this, “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” (Galatians 2.20)
This space is where we drop into the rhythm of His company, just as the Magi found on their way with the Word of God. By the same token, it is why it is so important that we must make our churches sacrosanct oases of stillness, not places for our noises, of conversation and activity, but places full of those moments when people encounter God’s company on our journey and drop into the natural rhythm of the soul, the soul alongside its Creator Who is come to be with us and while He is with us to open us to heaven (Luke 3.21).
In the next parts of our Liturgy there will be frequent moments of silence among the rites and the singing, during which God will make His approach known to us in the love and joy we experience and the holiness we are being drawn into. Then, at the end, many of us will go to the Crib, to pray for our loved ones and those in need, pour out our devotion and unburden our hearts to the Christ Child who is also our Redeemer. When you do so, I ask you a favour. In the silence of the company of the Word of God with us, please remember the suffering Christian Church of the lands through which the Wise Men of old and the Modern Magi rode. Today the members of the Chaldean, Melkite and Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian Churches in Syria and Iraq, Orthodox and Catholic alike, are facing expulsion, persecution, martyrdom and extermination in the lands where Christ has been praised since the beginning of the life of the Church in history. In the midst of our celebration and happiness, please pray that the Light of Christ will long shine bright in the lands where Christianity was born, that He will make the way to the future for His people there clear and confident, and that the God Who is silent is the Word of God dwelling richly within them (Colossians 3.16), God with us, as near now as He was when He was found in Bethlehem, as when He mounted the Cross to suffer death for our sake, and when He rose past the death He had destroyed, promising to endure with us to the end of time (Matthew 28.20).
The BBC thought they would have a cracking programme, as three great people made a journey in search of the Jesus that the Wise Men were seeking, full of insight and clever conversation from three completely different disciplines colliding in flashes of brilliance: perfect radio. What happened was rather different. After a week or so, the modern Magi got used to each other and fell into a rhythm. A few days more and they had run out of things to say. When they came back, they said how for much of the time, as they walked and rode, their thinking calmed and they just made their way through the Middle East toward Bethlehem in each other’s company in silence. But it was not that they were lost for words. It was more that they were infused, you might say, with being tranquil. They spoke when they needed to and when they had something to say. But otherwise, they were content to rest in the silence they had come to share.
And here we are today, like many before us, coming to seek out the Word made Flesh; and we find He is likewise saying nothing. But we are paying close attention, straining to hear any sound or inkling of the Word that we might miss. To the first Christians who spoke Greek, this title of Jesus’s – The Word (John 1.1) – meant something a little more than ‘word’ means to us. They would also have understood it in something like the way we talk of a rationale, God’s reason for being God, God’s reasoning in his desire for us to come to be part of Him. There had been many words in prophets, laws and Temple liturgies; but now God was going to explain Himself and reveal His reasoning , His rationale, His reason for being Himself - a God Who saves His creation from its self-destruction - not in phrases and arguments to justify His purposes, but in a Person. Actions, we tell ourselves, speak louder than words. And here it all is: the ‘Wording’ from God in flesh and blood, not breathed out onto the air, but full of unspoken meaning.
Jesus often resorts to being the Word in this way in the stories that we love throughout the Gospels. We have the parables and the pronouncements of healing; but when it counts, the Word we first beheld in His manger once again creates the space of silence around Him. So the Archangel appearing to Mary who is to be Mother of God says to her, as the first thing to be achieved, “Peace.” (Luke 1. 28) When the storm is at its height on the Sea of Galilee and the disciples are frightened for their lives, the Lord says, “Peace, be still.” (Mark 4.39) When He works His great miracles of healing, He tells those who have been saved to say nothing of what has happened to them and instead, we might say, to live in the moment and let the work of the Kingdom of Heaven speak for itself. (Mark 1. 44) When the woman is accused of adultery, while her accusers take their rage out on her, the Lord proceeds through silence to the foregone conclusion of mercy (John 8. 6). When He Himself is accused before the High Priests, King Herod and Pontius Pilate, He says little in response to their interrogation and public denunciation (Mark 14. 61). All the words happen around Him, as the Word of God in Person speaks for itself. As He is led to His Cross, the Lamb to the slaughter, He opens not His mouth (Acts 8.32). What He is doing and being is all that there is to say.
Then there were all those times when Jesus is wandering through Galilee with His disciples and, next, going up to Jerusalem, to the events that would lead to His Cross and in the end the dumbfounding Resurrection. We know quite a little of His talks to the people and what He said when He taught and healed. Yet we hardly know most of what He may have said in the vast tracts of time spent with His closest friends, the future apostles. Surely this is because it must have been for these disciples like it was for the three modern Magi: on their wanderings to encounter Jesus, they found themselves in a rhythm of silent company. We are told that Jesus would go off to pray on His own (Luke 5.16). But when He was with them He still had this habit of silence. Sometimes He would ask a question and wait without expectation of an answer. Sometimes we was just being the man of quiet, leaving mysteries up in the air, setting silence around Him as you wondered. Thus to the disciples he was not just their teacher, but their Master, their spiritual master.
You can imagine that disciple who had followed Jesus for months and years, yet who had neared a conclusion that he was still very much at the beginning of the way to the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus spoke so much of it that He seemed to be living in it even here and now. You can hear all his anxiety bursting out: “Lord, teach us how to pray.” (Luke 11.1) In the text of our Gospel, the Lord’s answer follows immediately, as He reveals to them the words of the Lord’s Prayer. I expect it was somewhat different. Likely there followed silence, into which the disciples’ attention was drawn ever more closely, as there gradually emerged the words of the prayer for how to live on earth as in heaven, how to live with God and in the world, and how God’s Kingdom comes when it becomes our will to desire only the will of God. This was no conversation. This was all happening in that rhythm of company and quiet that the Modern Magi discovered on their route to Bethlehem.
For us, Christmas with its joys and celebrations is full of energy, of tasks and meeting family and friends; and that is how it should be. We have little time to settle into the rhythm of company on our way with God; but we can still be very clear-sighted that a quiet presence lies on the heart of this feast, and the rationale for the coming of the Word in Person is for Him to be with us, so that we may repeatedly desire nothing but to be with Him and fulfil His will for us. This awareness has another name: prayer. Praying, for us with our busy minds and our lives packed with activity, is difficult for many; it is just as difficult for priests as it is for lay people: we are all in this together and getting us to pray truly is God’s life’s work. It can be a less than obvious path to find, or a hard journey to make, until we realise that praying is not just about thinking holy things over, or coming up with words, or performing devotions, though all these have a part to play: praying is spending time in the company of God. More truly it is God spending his eternity in our company. Certainly our mind wanders; certainly we are lost for words. But which one of us in a long marriage, or with our family, or in our friendships, has not known times with another human being we know so well when, likewise, there is nothing to say for the moment and it is all right to say nothing, all right just to be in the other’s company? For, when we find there are no words, we may fret that no words are coming to the surface, but we do not walk away from our family, or give up on our friendships as unsuccessful, or fruitless. Instead, we stay and we go with the moment. It is the same with praying.
It is does not even matter in our praying if there is argument, recrimination and estrangement, just as intense as the highest expressions of love and devotion. It is the same in human families and friendships. What matters is the rhythm of company that endures in the other’s presence. It does not depend on us, our mood, our worthiness, or our effort. If it did, we should fail at every attempt. And I am sure there are times when each of us feels that praying is difficult, we are failures at it and might as well just give it up. How good the devil is at discouraging us, when we think to ourselves, “I believe, but I can’t get the hang of this praying thing; it’s not really for me”; or “It isn’t my personal spirituality,” or, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” All these are justifications for obscuring ourselves from realising that we live at every moment with God who is present to us. Yet praying is not a burden, or a technique. To begin, our part is a simple. It is just to recall that we are lost without Him, to ask for His help and mercy, and decide again and again to stay in that company which has come to seek out our company, not because we are deserving, but out of His love. Beyond that, looking for the words to say, or coming up with reasons, is not our worry. Ours is to trust the One Who keeps our company. Distractions come and go; the imagination wanders; every thought, grudge, problem, sin, or fantasy can intrude and then pass on their way. But the Saviour who is Lord of all that happens out in the world is also Lord of all that happens within us. This is why he is in our company not only when we pray but also while we do and say and are whatever it is; for praying is not our being with God, but our God being with us – Emmanuel means God with us (Matthew 1.23). And who can separate us? (Romans 8.39)
Mindful that He is there, and time and again deciding to call on His help to stay with Him, we can be assured the Lord is building a certain quiet space inside our soul (Mark 1.35), in which the presence of the One we love can breathe and take on a life of its own within us. The English classical scholar and hymn writer, Edwin Hatch (1835-89), put it this way:
Breathe on me, Breath of God, until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will, to do and to endure.
Or, as St Paul said of all this, “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” (Galatians 2.20)
This space is where we drop into the rhythm of His company, just as the Magi found on their way with the Word of God. By the same token, it is why it is so important that we must make our churches sacrosanct oases of stillness, not places for our noises, of conversation and activity, but places full of those moments when people encounter God’s company on our journey and drop into the natural rhythm of the soul, the soul alongside its Creator Who is come to be with us and while He is with us to open us to heaven (Luke 3.21).
In the next parts of our Liturgy there will be frequent moments of silence among the rites and the singing, during which God will make His approach known to us in the love and joy we experience and the holiness we are being drawn into. Then, at the end, many of us will go to the Crib, to pray for our loved ones and those in need, pour out our devotion and unburden our hearts to the Christ Child who is also our Redeemer. When you do so, I ask you a favour. In the silence of the company of the Word of God with us, please remember the suffering Christian Church of the lands through which the Wise Men of old and the Modern Magi rode. Today the members of the Chaldean, Melkite and Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian Churches in Syria and Iraq, Orthodox and Catholic alike, are facing expulsion, persecution, martyrdom and extermination in the lands where Christ has been praised since the beginning of the life of the Church in history. In the midst of our celebration and happiness, please pray that the Light of Christ will long shine bright in the lands where Christianity was born, that He will make the way to the future for His people there clear and confident, and that the God Who is silent is the Word of God dwelling richly within them (Colossians 3.16), God with us, as near now as He was when He was found in Bethlehem, as when He mounted the Cross to suffer death for our sake, and when He rose past the death He had destroyed, promising to endure with us to the end of time (Matthew 28.20).
Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, November 9, 2014
Galatians 6.11-18 – Luke 8.26-39
Picture Saint Paul dictating his letter to the Church in Galatia. When his assistant has finished, Paul takes up the pen personally, and adds some final thoughts. He speaks of writing with large letters. Perhaps he is losing his eyesight, for he was once an expert writer and religious official himself; or, perhaps, writing as small as his scribe could, to get as much wording on the page of the expensive parchment as possible, was now too painful for him – he speaks of being unable to deal with the Church troublemakers, because he bears the marks of Jesus on his own body.
These are very interesting last few sentences, conveying the thoughts right at the forefront of St Paul’s mind. He compares and contrasts outward physical appearances with the inner truths that last because they mean something. He begins with the outsize appearance of his handwriting; and he ends with the outward appearance of wounds upon his skin. But he turns to attention to the greater fact of life that lies among and within what we experience as real in the world. Thus he questions the Galatian Christians, a community of Jews and Gentiles alike, if they have lost sight of what being a Christian is all about. Christ was circumcised not because it was a cultural convention, but because from time immemorial it had been a sacramental sign of the people’s faith in their covenant with God. “An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” it was the mark of an undertaking by the Hebrews and the Jews to take the law of God to their own hearts and keep it as the light of their lives. But here were people who did not take the law of God seriously themselves, yet insisted that the new people who wanted to follow Christ’s conform to an outward appearance, an appearance that on its own meant nothing without the inner meaning of love, obedience, and bonding with our God.
We are reminded of the words of the Prophet Micah, expressing the patience of God at humanity’s continual cycle of betrayal, disobedience and trying to buy back God’s favour with a surfeit of religion and sacrificial offering. The Lord asks, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you?” The response is predictable: the offer of year-old calves, rams in their thousands, rivers of oil to burn the Temple lamps, even a human sacrifice. Wearily, Prophet Micah explains it all over again: “You have been told what would be good; you have been told what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love goodness, and to work humbly with your God.” (Micah 6. 3, 8)
It is, of course, easier to perform the outward appearance of religion – the customs, the behaviours; the fretting over the way other people bow, or make the sign of the Cross; the sharp eye on other people’s morals, while presuming forgiveness for one’s own shortcomings; the profession of righteous activity backed up with a word of criticism (a hint of our own insecurity perhaps) for those who we want to show are not up to the mark. There is nothing new under the sun; and St Paul was as worn down by self-righteous troublemakers as his successors have been right down the ages to this day. He told the Church at Corinth that people like that are like brass gongs – a lot of sound is made when the hammer strikes, but they make no music of their own: much reverberation, but no heart; much noise, but no love (cf. I Corinthians 13.1). Pope Francis says exactly the same about the poison of gossip, telling religious superiors this week that it actually be more honest to come to blows, so much more insidious and harmful is the hidden attack of pitiless, unloving gossip (Address to 54th National Assembly of Religious Superiors of Italy, 7 November 2014).
He has spoken, too, of Christians who are lukewarm and mediocre, people who look like Christians, but who are really worldly. He says, “They are enemies of the Cross of Christ. They take the name but they do not follow the responsibilities of Christian life. Do I like to brag? Do I like money? Do I like pride, arrogance?... These types of people get corrupted bit by bit and end up becoming pagan Christians” (Homily on 8 November, 2014, Santa Marta, Rome on Philippians 3.18). He is quoting St Paul, who saw the remedy to all this in self-giving love. For he points all those people who make trouble - all those obsessed with outward form, all those intruding their own anxieties into the souls of others - to the only thing that matters, to Jesus Christ on his Cross, the Cross that makes everything else beside the point. Appearance, law, immemorial custom, personal identity, self-realisation, individual spiritualities: all these mean nothing, unless we have become a new creation at the hand of Christ nailed to its Cross.
It is no accident that St Paul seizes on what must have seemed to be an endless and enervating fine argument about circumcision. It is as though he is saying, “Do you foolish Galatians not realise that when Jesus was circumcised, it was the first time He shed His blood for us? Do you not realise you are arguing about the Cross itself? Do you not see that all this argument about who gets to belong to the people of God - who can and can’t come in - has itself been crucified. With Christ’s death it has been killed off and, unlike Him it has not risen from the dead. Only Christ is alive and His resurrection is what has freed us to be made into new creations.
He tells them that marks he bears in his body are those caused by a Cross that ended his old life. They are also caused by the Resurrection freeing him to be made into something different now. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he has explained to them. “It is not any more I who live, but Christ who lives within me” (Galatians 2.20). His parting word is that this grace, the very living of Christ in a human soul, will be in their spirit too.
And what of us, with our conflicting thoughts, wants, feelings, grudges, self-pity, words, thoughts, excuses, dreams, conceit and sin? Are we the pagan Christians of which Pope Francis spoke, gradually corrupted by mediocrity, settling for less when we are free to have everything if, like the Lord we follow, we did but do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God? The devil would certainly like us to think so, crowding into us so many of his unclean spirits, to make us feel defeated and overwhelmed, tormented even by the attempt of Christ at relief, neuralgic even at the thought of his touch.
Instead, let us be the ones who call out “Save us,” to the one we can see is not the Punisher but the Lover of Mankind (Kontakion of Sunday, Tone 5). Let us long even to endure that crucifixion with Christ that made St Paul into a new creation. Let it be that just one spirit casts out all else, one spirit that dwells in us richly: Christ who is God’s love, Christ who is our unbreakable bonding with His Father.
Fr Mark Woodruff
Picture Saint Paul dictating his letter to the Church in Galatia. When his assistant has finished, Paul takes up the pen personally, and adds some final thoughts. He speaks of writing with large letters. Perhaps he is losing his eyesight, for he was once an expert writer and religious official himself; or, perhaps, writing as small as his scribe could, to get as much wording on the page of the expensive parchment as possible, was now too painful for him – he speaks of being unable to deal with the Church troublemakers, because he bears the marks of Jesus on his own body.
These are very interesting last few sentences, conveying the thoughts right at the forefront of St Paul’s mind. He compares and contrasts outward physical appearances with the inner truths that last because they mean something. He begins with the outsize appearance of his handwriting; and he ends with the outward appearance of wounds upon his skin. But he turns to attention to the greater fact of life that lies among and within what we experience as real in the world. Thus he questions the Galatian Christians, a community of Jews and Gentiles alike, if they have lost sight of what being a Christian is all about. Christ was circumcised not because it was a cultural convention, but because from time immemorial it had been a sacramental sign of the people’s faith in their covenant with God. “An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” it was the mark of an undertaking by the Hebrews and the Jews to take the law of God to their own hearts and keep it as the light of their lives. But here were people who did not take the law of God seriously themselves, yet insisted that the new people who wanted to follow Christ’s conform to an outward appearance, an appearance that on its own meant nothing without the inner meaning of love, obedience, and bonding with our God.
We are reminded of the words of the Prophet Micah, expressing the patience of God at humanity’s continual cycle of betrayal, disobedience and trying to buy back God’s favour with a surfeit of religion and sacrificial offering. The Lord asks, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you?” The response is predictable: the offer of year-old calves, rams in their thousands, rivers of oil to burn the Temple lamps, even a human sacrifice. Wearily, Prophet Micah explains it all over again: “You have been told what would be good; you have been told what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love goodness, and to work humbly with your God.” (Micah 6. 3, 8)
It is, of course, easier to perform the outward appearance of religion – the customs, the behaviours; the fretting over the way other people bow, or make the sign of the Cross; the sharp eye on other people’s morals, while presuming forgiveness for one’s own shortcomings; the profession of righteous activity backed up with a word of criticism (a hint of our own insecurity perhaps) for those who we want to show are not up to the mark. There is nothing new under the sun; and St Paul was as worn down by self-righteous troublemakers as his successors have been right down the ages to this day. He told the Church at Corinth that people like that are like brass gongs – a lot of sound is made when the hammer strikes, but they make no music of their own: much reverberation, but no heart; much noise, but no love (cf. I Corinthians 13.1). Pope Francis says exactly the same about the poison of gossip, telling religious superiors this week that it actually be more honest to come to blows, so much more insidious and harmful is the hidden attack of pitiless, unloving gossip (Address to 54th National Assembly of Religious Superiors of Italy, 7 November 2014).
He has spoken, too, of Christians who are lukewarm and mediocre, people who look like Christians, but who are really worldly. He says, “They are enemies of the Cross of Christ. They take the name but they do not follow the responsibilities of Christian life. Do I like to brag? Do I like money? Do I like pride, arrogance?... These types of people get corrupted bit by bit and end up becoming pagan Christians” (Homily on 8 November, 2014, Santa Marta, Rome on Philippians 3.18). He is quoting St Paul, who saw the remedy to all this in self-giving love. For he points all those people who make trouble - all those obsessed with outward form, all those intruding their own anxieties into the souls of others - to the only thing that matters, to Jesus Christ on his Cross, the Cross that makes everything else beside the point. Appearance, law, immemorial custom, personal identity, self-realisation, individual spiritualities: all these mean nothing, unless we have become a new creation at the hand of Christ nailed to its Cross.
It is no accident that St Paul seizes on what must have seemed to be an endless and enervating fine argument about circumcision. It is as though he is saying, “Do you foolish Galatians not realise that when Jesus was circumcised, it was the first time He shed His blood for us? Do you not realise you are arguing about the Cross itself? Do you not see that all this argument about who gets to belong to the people of God - who can and can’t come in - has itself been crucified. With Christ’s death it has been killed off and, unlike Him it has not risen from the dead. Only Christ is alive and His resurrection is what has freed us to be made into new creations.
He tells them that marks he bears in his body are those caused by a Cross that ended his old life. They are also caused by the Resurrection freeing him to be made into something different now. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he has explained to them. “It is not any more I who live, but Christ who lives within me” (Galatians 2.20). His parting word is that this grace, the very living of Christ in a human soul, will be in their spirit too.
And what of us, with our conflicting thoughts, wants, feelings, grudges, self-pity, words, thoughts, excuses, dreams, conceit and sin? Are we the pagan Christians of which Pope Francis spoke, gradually corrupted by mediocrity, settling for less when we are free to have everything if, like the Lord we follow, we did but do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God? The devil would certainly like us to think so, crowding into us so many of his unclean spirits, to make us feel defeated and overwhelmed, tormented even by the attempt of Christ at relief, neuralgic even at the thought of his touch.
Instead, let us be the ones who call out “Save us,” to the one we can see is not the Punisher but the Lover of Mankind (Kontakion of Sunday, Tone 5). Let us long even to endure that crucifixion with Christ that made St Paul into a new creation. Let it be that just one spirit casts out all else, one spirit that dwells in us richly: Christ who is God’s love, Christ who is our unbreakable bonding with His Father.
Fr Mark Woodruff
16 December 2014
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, 14 December 2014
Here in our Byzantine church in London in December 2014, we seem for an hour to have stepped out of time. A few yards away Oxford Street is heaving with shoppers, engrossed as one mind in the drudgery of shopping for Christmas. Yet here we are keeping an ordinary Sunday, and our celebration of the Nativity of our Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, according to the flesh is a month away.
It is true that two weeks ago we began the Nativity Fast, but it is only next week that we will begin to sing a chant that looks to the coming feast with an anticipation that we share with the expectant Mother of God. We are also a few weeks away from the Sundays that will honour the ancestors of Christ who prepared His coming. But coming out of the time around us, does not mean that we have put the world on pause. We are not at a stand-still. Yet standing is the theme taken by both the Apostle and the Evangelist today.
For St Paul (Ephesians 6.10-17), standing is readiness and resistance, holding your position against the coming struggle. He alludes to the prowess of the soldier, the champion standing head and shoulders above the rest, the athlete whose years of physical training have prepared him to go to, in the defence of peace. This spiritual warrior is confident in the Lord of hosts and assured in what he is to do. His standing is strong, and recalls to us the way St Paul talks about how we may all attain the fullness of the stature of humanity in Christ. With this stature, such a soldier of Christ may be like a coiled spring; but the image of him is static. He stands in the strength of waiting and resilience.
In St Luke’ story (Luke 13. 10-17), at first sight the standing comes after release for an old lady of her years of being bent double. It is healing; it is freedom from misery and the spirit-sapping energy of adversity and disability. We are drawn into a bewildering scene where a woman, who has not only been disabled for eighteen years but marginalised for it because her condition is blamed on a baleful spirit, is spectacularly healed. In the dramatic moment, we expect universal rejoicing and wonder at the power of God among us. But the magic of the moment is snapped, when a clergyman with an answer for everything declares that healing on the Sabbath is against the rules. It did not dawn on him that this was not earthly effort, but can only have come from the initiative of God. You can just hear him turning on Jesus, and saying, “It’s not what you did, it’s the way you did it”; or, “You should have consulted me first.” The Lord can readily point to the double standards and the failure to see the purpose of God: that God made the Sabbath to show off the completeness of the world and of humanity that was once achieved by creation, and now by healing and salvation. Ironically – again, you can picture it – the head of the synagogue congregation and the Lord have a “stand-up” row; and between them a dumbfounded woman, also standing up, but for her it the first time properly in two decades, her lips frozen in mid-praise to God, while the very person who should have been most glad for her, the man of God, is shown up and blames the Son of God for making the world a little more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it was before. Yet the image we have is still static; we and the old lady are not moving now; again things are static. There is a hint of it in today’s troparion (Sundays of the Second Tone): “When You went down to death, O Life immortal, You struck Hades dead…” There is something abrupt, and we hold our breath as we wait for something to happen next.
In our language, standing tends to give that impression – waiting, resisting (confronting, perhaps), talking, meeting, arriving, even holding things up. Standing is after the end of things, or before their beginning, or a pause in their midst. But to the first hearers of the Lord and the readers of St Paul, standing is all about an act that is in the process of being done, a dynamic movement on which there is consequence and progression.
When St Paul writes of standing, the word he uses is part of the same word he uses for the resurrection of Christ. Telling us to stand, he is telling us to live the life of those now risen from the dead, even before their deaths. Imagine if we in English never knew of the word “resurrection”. Imagine if all the time, like the Dutch and Germans, we referred to the Upstanding of Christ. In other words, St Paul is not telling us to train and arm ourselves for a fight, even a spiritual one, so that we can stand and be ready. He is telling us to stand up, just like Christ stood up from lying in His grave. St Paul is telling us to live not as those preparing to live out our days on earth, as we head towards our deaths, but with the capacity for living the life that is already ours – the life of resurrection that is already at work in us, countering the effects of evil and destruction, which did their worst until Christ rose up and stood over them and can now never separate us from Him. This is why we sing every Easter, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and to those in the tombs giving life”. In the famous hymn by Charles Wesley, “Soldiers of Christ, arise” (The Whole Armour of God, Charles Wesley, 1747), he speaks likewise of overcoming, of “tread[ing] all the powers of darkness down” – not by mere victory, but by living the resurrection life in which we “stand entire at last” – entirely filled with grace, entirely filled with freedom from sin, from the destroying limitations of earthly life, thus entirely human again, being filled with the Upstanding of Christ himself within us.
So look again at the Gospel. It is not just the story of a healing miracle. It is a description of Christ’s own resurrection and the new life that comes from it for all. Like Him, the woman is brought down to nothingness until, by the end of her own Good Friday and then the beginning of the Sabbath –do not forget that days begin on the sunset the closes the preceding day, the Friday evening – she is finally laid low and all her strength is drained. The miracle of the destruction of death is worked through her on the Sabbath, which means cessation – not merely cessation from work activity, but the enforced cessation of sin and evil’s activity too. While no act appears to be have been happening, the power of God to heal and set the earth-bound soul to the eternal liberty intended for it takes effect. Lo and behold, she rises; she stands up. It is not the end of an old infirmity. It is not the afterword towards the end of a life, whose most active years, once full of potential, have been lost. It is the Upstanding of Jesus at work in her.
As we look forward with those around us to the forthcoming celebrations, we have stepped out of their time but we have not frozen our chronology, or pressed the “pause” button. The fast of moderation and the entering of a saner, less frenzied dimension may come as a relief. But we are not here for respite. We are here because we know that the real hurry of humanity is not for material things that will pass on their way in a few weeks’ time. The real hurry of humanity that we are occupied with is to meet the timing of God, who started His standing up even before there was a resurrection to show for it, as the story of the old lady has shown us. His constant standing up in every day and season takes us by surprise too, because we entertain the notion that the Resurrection is a thing of the past; and then it comes up to us, stands before us, and reminds us that we belong not to this world - or even to this passing world’s next world - but to a new, enduring and eternal world that has been begun in the midst of us and our time, and of which we are the population. Living in such a world, it is possible for us not to sin. In such a world, dying, behold we live (II Corinthians 6.9), and yet it is not we who live, but Christ who lives within us (Galatians 2.20). In such a world, it is possible for us to realise the Kingdom of God. In such as world, standing is not a matter of waiting or keeping still, but of movement upon movement, energised by grace to aspire for the blessedness of living in the very heaven, and constantly to hurry to catch up with it and get into it.
St Paul tells us that “you will be able to stand, and after having done everything, to stand”. It is a strange phrase, if you think it is all about withstanding, holding ready and staying still. But if you remember that it is about Christ’s ceaseless moving to stand up, to stand up within us, to be our rising as well, our will is nothing other than to be one with our God, and to desire above all things His Coming Kingdom, saying,
It is true that two weeks ago we began the Nativity Fast, but it is only next week that we will begin to sing a chant that looks to the coming feast with an anticipation that we share with the expectant Mother of God. We are also a few weeks away from the Sundays that will honour the ancestors of Christ who prepared His coming. But coming out of the time around us, does not mean that we have put the world on pause. We are not at a stand-still. Yet standing is the theme taken by both the Apostle and the Evangelist today.
For St Paul (Ephesians 6.10-17), standing is readiness and resistance, holding your position against the coming struggle. He alludes to the prowess of the soldier, the champion standing head and shoulders above the rest, the athlete whose years of physical training have prepared him to go to, in the defence of peace. This spiritual warrior is confident in the Lord of hosts and assured in what he is to do. His standing is strong, and recalls to us the way St Paul talks about how we may all attain the fullness of the stature of humanity in Christ. With this stature, such a soldier of Christ may be like a coiled spring; but the image of him is static. He stands in the strength of waiting and resilience.
In St Luke’ story (Luke 13. 10-17), at first sight the standing comes after release for an old lady of her years of being bent double. It is healing; it is freedom from misery and the spirit-sapping energy of adversity and disability. We are drawn into a bewildering scene where a woman, who has not only been disabled for eighteen years but marginalised for it because her condition is blamed on a baleful spirit, is spectacularly healed. In the dramatic moment, we expect universal rejoicing and wonder at the power of God among us. But the magic of the moment is snapped, when a clergyman with an answer for everything declares that healing on the Sabbath is against the rules. It did not dawn on him that this was not earthly effort, but can only have come from the initiative of God. You can just hear him turning on Jesus, and saying, “It’s not what you did, it’s the way you did it”; or, “You should have consulted me first.” The Lord can readily point to the double standards and the failure to see the purpose of God: that God made the Sabbath to show off the completeness of the world and of humanity that was once achieved by creation, and now by healing and salvation. Ironically – again, you can picture it – the head of the synagogue congregation and the Lord have a “stand-up” row; and between them a dumbfounded woman, also standing up, but for her it the first time properly in two decades, her lips frozen in mid-praise to God, while the very person who should have been most glad for her, the man of God, is shown up and blames the Son of God for making the world a little more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it was before. Yet the image we have is still static; we and the old lady are not moving now; again things are static. There is a hint of it in today’s troparion (Sundays of the Second Tone): “When You went down to death, O Life immortal, You struck Hades dead…” There is something abrupt, and we hold our breath as we wait for something to happen next.
In our language, standing tends to give that impression – waiting, resisting (confronting, perhaps), talking, meeting, arriving, even holding things up. Standing is after the end of things, or before their beginning, or a pause in their midst. But to the first hearers of the Lord and the readers of St Paul, standing is all about an act that is in the process of being done, a dynamic movement on which there is consequence and progression.
When St Paul writes of standing, the word he uses is part of the same word he uses for the resurrection of Christ. Telling us to stand, he is telling us to live the life of those now risen from the dead, even before their deaths. Imagine if we in English never knew of the word “resurrection”. Imagine if all the time, like the Dutch and Germans, we referred to the Upstanding of Christ. In other words, St Paul is not telling us to train and arm ourselves for a fight, even a spiritual one, so that we can stand and be ready. He is telling us to stand up, just like Christ stood up from lying in His grave. St Paul is telling us to live not as those preparing to live out our days on earth, as we head towards our deaths, but with the capacity for living the life that is already ours – the life of resurrection that is already at work in us, countering the effects of evil and destruction, which did their worst until Christ rose up and stood over them and can now never separate us from Him. This is why we sing every Easter, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and to those in the tombs giving life”. In the famous hymn by Charles Wesley, “Soldiers of Christ, arise” (The Whole Armour of God, Charles Wesley, 1747), he speaks likewise of overcoming, of “tread[ing] all the powers of darkness down” – not by mere victory, but by living the resurrection life in which we “stand entire at last” – entirely filled with grace, entirely filled with freedom from sin, from the destroying limitations of earthly life, thus entirely human again, being filled with the Upstanding of Christ himself within us.
So look again at the Gospel. It is not just the story of a healing miracle. It is a description of Christ’s own resurrection and the new life that comes from it for all. Like Him, the woman is brought down to nothingness until, by the end of her own Good Friday and then the beginning of the Sabbath –do not forget that days begin on the sunset the closes the preceding day, the Friday evening – she is finally laid low and all her strength is drained. The miracle of the destruction of death is worked through her on the Sabbath, which means cessation – not merely cessation from work activity, but the enforced cessation of sin and evil’s activity too. While no act appears to be have been happening, the power of God to heal and set the earth-bound soul to the eternal liberty intended for it takes effect. Lo and behold, she rises; she stands up. It is not the end of an old infirmity. It is not the afterword towards the end of a life, whose most active years, once full of potential, have been lost. It is the Upstanding of Jesus at work in her.
As we look forward with those around us to the forthcoming celebrations, we have stepped out of their time but we have not frozen our chronology, or pressed the “pause” button. The fast of moderation and the entering of a saner, less frenzied dimension may come as a relief. But we are not here for respite. We are here because we know that the real hurry of humanity is not for material things that will pass on their way in a few weeks’ time. The real hurry of humanity that we are occupied with is to meet the timing of God, who started His standing up even before there was a resurrection to show for it, as the story of the old lady has shown us. His constant standing up in every day and season takes us by surprise too, because we entertain the notion that the Resurrection is a thing of the past; and then it comes up to us, stands before us, and reminds us that we belong not to this world - or even to this passing world’s next world - but to a new, enduring and eternal world that has been begun in the midst of us and our time, and of which we are the population. Living in such a world, it is possible for us not to sin. In such a world, dying, behold we live (II Corinthians 6.9), and yet it is not we who live, but Christ who lives within us (Galatians 2.20). In such a world, it is possible for us to realise the Kingdom of God. In such as world, standing is not a matter of waiting or keeping still, but of movement upon movement, energised by grace to aspire for the blessedness of living in the very heaven, and constantly to hurry to catch up with it and get into it.
St Paul tells us that “you will be able to stand, and after having done everything, to stand”. It is a strange phrase, if you think it is all about withstanding, holding ready and staying still. But if you remember that it is about Christ’s ceaseless moving to stand up, to stand up within us, to be our rising as well, our will is nothing other than to be one with our God, and to desire above all things His Coming Kingdom, saying,
Still let the Spirit cry
in all His soldiers, “Come!”
Till Christ the Lord descends from high
and takes the conquerors home.
The Whole Armour of God, Charles Wesley, 1747
11 October 2014
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London
The icon depicting the events of this Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 5.1-11) shows the Lord standing on the shore
of the lake. A crowd presses in on Him and there are too many, too close, for
Him to make Himself heard. He sees Peter’s and James & John’s boats, and climbs
in while the fishermen are mending their nets. He gets them to put out into the
water just far enough, so that everyone can see Him and hear Him easily, using
the surface of the lake to convey the sound of His voice.
At first, you might have thought He was putting some
distance between Himself and the crowd, trying to get away from people’s
demands. He has done this before, slipping through the crowds when accusers
wanted to attack Him; or sensing someone in the crowd had taken power from Him,
when it turned out that the woman with the bleed touched Him for healing.
But this is no act of escape. The true meaning of this story
is not that He left the people behind on dry land, but that He “entered in”. He
entered into a boat and from a vantage point actually turned back toward the
crowd to drawn it into His world of the Spirit.
“Enter in” – where have we heard that phrase before? Think
back to Christmas:
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to
us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today…
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today…
O come to us, abide with us, Our
Lord, Emmanuel.
This story of the Lord, getting into a boat, coming among His
people, is a story of the incarnation, of the God of heaven taking human form
and voice, to be the Word of God living among humanity. The significance of the
boat is that it alludes to another ark – the Ark that preserved God’s creation
from the Flood and brought it to salvation. This Ark in turn alludes to the Ark
of the Covenant, the throne of the Great King in the Temple, that held both the
Law and the presence of God among His people. To us in the Church, both of
these are vivid symbols of the Mother of God, who is often referred to as the
Ark, on whom sits the Lord as God made Flesh, Emmanuel, God among us, and in
Person the very arrival of salvation.
So it is that in the Theotokion for today we sing to the
Mother of God,
“The Master of all became flesh
in you, the Holy Ark … you have become wider than the heavens carrying your
Creator. Glory to Him Who freed us through birth from you.”
We often think of heaven as our destination after life, and
the world as the path of struggles we take to it. But truly the Kingdom comes
to us here. Christians do not believe in life after death; we believe in
eternal life now. “Death has vanished,” we declare, and Eve is “redeemed from
bondage now” – now, not at some point in the future. We sing, “You arose … and
gave life to the world” – here to the world, not hereafter to its faithful few
survivors. This is what the fishermen saw, especially when the Lord told them,
in that luminous phrase, to “put out into the deep water”, asking them too,
like Him, to “enter in” to something; something now all round them, yet
something they had never known to look for before. Because here, in the deep
water, is the breadth of the heavens – don’t get confused by the story –
carrying not more fish than the nets can haul out of the sea, but hauling out
their Creator Whom they cannot contain. Simon Peter beholds what Jesus is, and
what he himself is standing before Him, having beheld the deep. Here is
humanity, inadequate, failing by its own efforts, frustrated by its
limitations, undermined by its shortcomings, sinful and self-defeated. Yet here
too is the Creator, Who does not steer clear of what He has made but enters
into it.
Simon Peter and the sons of Zebedee - the crowds too - have
seen the Word of God and heard Him. Just as this Word turn from heaven to face
the people, so too these people have been made, by the very entry of God into
their midst, to turn round and face themselves in the deep. They experience
amazement, but also do not like what they begin to see about themselves. As St
Luke puts it, they were filled, but “begin to sink”.
Simon Peter’s words speak for us all in the face of the
Kingdom of God that constantly comes to us, not as some afterthought to our
life on earth, but arriving whenever we too put out into the deep water and
attend the Liturgy, say our prayers, or behold the majesty of the Creator and
Redeemer set in comparison beside so much suffering and cruel disfigurement of
the goodness and beauty He has made in the world and our humanity. Simon Peter,
who has ventured beneath the surface of life, says, “Go away from me, Lord, for
I am a sinful man”. We join him at every moment when we say, “Lord, have mercy,
Hospodi pomylui, Kyrie eleison”. But Simon Peter’s words are also prophetic,
the gift of his realisation of the Kingdom standing before him in Person, that
- he has also found - lies within. The Lord has entered in, and Simon Peter has
begun to behold the Kingdom of God; so why does he ask the Lord to go away from
him? He realises that there is more putting out into the deep to be done. If
Jesus does not now go on His way, the fishermen have no way to go either. If Jesus
does not move ahead, they have nothing and no one to follow.
So Christ enters in, casts out their sin. The boat that
almost sank under the weight of a miracle of heaven, is the Ark of Salvation
that bears God among us on earth, “born in us today”. The deep water is not in
the lake, but the Kingdom of God that would well up from within us and flood us
into being a superabundance of the coming of heaven to the world.
For it is we who are to be the Resurrection – this is why
Christ turns to face us with it, eternal life entering in now, not after. For
this the disciples left everything and followed Him. For this we join the heavenly powers crying
out, “O Giver of life, glory to Your kingdom; glory to Your saving plan, O only
Lover of mankind.”
No life else but Christ’s eternal life! No one else but
Christ loves us so much as to enter in, cast out our sin and be born in us
today. “O Virgin … Glory to Him Who freed us through birth from you.”
05 October 2014
Sermon for the Annual Feast of the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina, St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge
20 September 2014
In early twenty-first century England we think of the Queen as a person of immense public and international esteem, a lifelong servant of the people, a model and guardian of constitutional democracy, and the embodiment of the rule of law. We are proud that in this kingdom, we are the last on earth to anoint our sovereign, not just crowning her head for the supreme office of just government, but consecrating it, body, mind and soul, to the obedience of Christ and his Kingdom.
When Pope Benedict made his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, in the Palace Yard at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, he paid tribute to our Christian constitution, personified in England and Scotland by Christian monarchs, givers of divine law and holy justice, sinners though they be, continuously for fourteen hundred years. Uniquely among other nations, in Britain the Christian Church has both an official standing and is entwined with the active role and symbolic purpose of the reigning monarch, giving the spiritual dimension not just the opportunity but the expectation to influence our civic discourse and public decisions. In his remarkable address to Parliament in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict identified the vital importance of the gift we have in our hands in this country. In our common society, the Church people, the people of other religions, politicians and parliament, the worlds of finance and commerce, and the citizens as a whole can rely on the long crafted awareness that each has a rightful part to play and a duty to play its part. He pointed out that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, faith and reason seen by faith’s light, religion and society can be related to each other, in the knowledge that they cannot do without each other and must remain engaged in a constant dialogue - if we are to make the decisions that answer the deepest questions that human beings face, and if we are to address the malaise in contemporary human living that has broken out in a fevered crisis in public and financial morality that still afflicts us.
In other words, the Church, the Lord’s own people, constantly says to the world’s rulers and hidden wielders of power, “Ecce Homo – Behold the Man.” “Who would you rather be released for you, this Man, or Barabbas?” We the Church are for ever asking the world, “Who is your King?” or, as the psalm puts it, “Who is the King of glory?” Many are the kings and leaders, even church leaders, who have been amazed at their own glory, only to see it slip their grasp because they forgot the reminder of the Franciscan friars who used to precede the Roman Pontiff on processions in the days of pomp, burning flax as they declared, “Sic transit Gloria mundi”; “Thus passes the glory of the world.”
The trouble is that the world has rather been allowed to think of our King as yet another leader whose time was up; thus too the influential public organisation that represents him, his Church. Perhaps it is our own fault for relying too heavily on imagery such as monarchy, because now it does not conjure up the distinct conviction of wide sway, commanding prestige and undeniable moral authority. If we were honest, I suspect even we, when we think of Christ the King and Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, picture a dignified and remote public servant, a constitutional monarch with no powers of their own and always acting on the advice of ministers. If we are even more honest with ourselves, we believe those ministers are us and Christ and His Mother are there, largely speaking, to be persuaded of what we tell them to do, however much we call it prayer.
The fresh-thinking young Australian writer, Matthew Tan has written a remarkable book to explain how we have got into this way of thinking and thus disempowered our own Church on earth. It is called Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, and describes how in the 1960s the Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that humanity had so grown up that it could be set free from the claims of the Church, Christ’s kingdom on earth, to rule it. Those who called for this new approach to the world saw it in terms of maturity and freedom, not compulsion, to choose the path of Christ. They assumed that with this spiritual liberty the human choice for God and the blessedness of the Kingdom, to which the Magnificat is a paean and which the Beatitudes map out, would be irresistible.
In the 50 years since, however, human society has opted not for the Kingdom of God but the market. Now instead of the “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”, all our transactions and relations are determined, not so much by our own selfish preferences, by the demands of the market to capture them. Matthew Tan even says that everything is now relative to it and human society has converted itself into a place, where every idea, value or principle has to pitch for custom and reduced to a matter of ever poorer choices, or what we are prepared to afford for them. He is astonished by how quickly the Christians have bought into this thinking, almost without hope, accepting it as “realism”. So we have the garrulous old Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who bears the distinction of interfering in the affairs of not just one successor but two) calling for the legalisation of euthanasia on the ground of supposed mercy - such a short step from expediency - without any regard in his argument for the absolute binding nature of the revealed truth of God that life is sacred and may not be harmed. I was also surprised to hear Archbishop Justin reported as saying he sometimes doubts the existence of God. Doubtless what he was saying was that he has complete faith in Jesus Christ and it was all taken out of context; but the incident illustrates how we have got ourselves into a position where we have to imagine meeting the thinking of people in the world in terms of packaging a commodity that they will be prepared to buy because it suits their tastes, assumptions and interests on this day if not on that.
Matthew Tan calls time on this: we are not competitors in a market. If the world has taken its freedom from the Kingdom of God and chosen instead the market as the milieu for human society and relations, so be it. But it is a disaster for the world and for humanity: time now to set ourselves up as a completely different way of being human; time now to declare the Church to be an alternative society. Instead of vying in competition, hoping that people will buy our idea in a multitudinous world of options where we are just one of the choices on offer, it is time to say that we alone represent the universe as it is, the created order built on loving relationships, unreserved mutual self-giving, of complete and unreserved sacrifice that alone leads to resurrection and renewal, through the radical power of forgiveness, service and worship. For the created order is not its own end – it is Christ who is its Lord and all else follows from that and falls in place behind it. His existence does not depend on my decision to believe he exists or not, though to hear most people think you would think English people imagine him to be Peter Pan’s tutelary spirit, depending on audience applause for survival.
If we think of Christ and His Mother as kindly European-style monarchs benevolently overseeing everything, hoping it will all turn out nicely in the end, and not getting too much involved, then nothing will change, and there is no point in our being Christian or worshipping in church; that would be just to meet our own emotional needs and calling the spiritual because they looked religious. Instead, we bear in mind centrally what St Paul told us in his letter to the Ephesians, that Christ fills the universe, and he intends us all to come to the full knowledge of faith in him, to reach such a true maturity in him that we reach his own stature.
So I cannot see why we say to people that we have doubts about whether God and his vision of heaven for us really exists. The question that faces us is this: “Do you believe that Christ is Lord of the universe, of everything that there is, or do you not?” If you do, then there are consequences and it truly does mean a transformation of our proclamation of what the Church is, why we have been made to belong to it – to reach our true human maturity – and how it is to be the true pattern for civil society founded on the sacrificial love of Christ, and the very endless living of the Trinity of three persons in one God.
It is in this universe that Our Lady of the Salve Regina stands as the Queen who is in power. She is no constitutional monarch, acting on the advice of ministers, merely benign towards our pleas and prayers, influential upon us and others only in so far as we can press her to be reactive to our interests, thus ever being conformed by us to our world. Instead, the hearer of prayers is effectual, the worker of change in individuals, and whole movements in society’s truest manifestation – the People of God – in a universe of which Christ rules, the Lord who is to be heard and obeyed, and whom our states, our civil societies and our market must likewise in the end come to obey.
This may be a “vale of tears” and “exile” for humanity according to this understanding, but it is not exile from God or his Kingdom; nor is it beyond the reach of his sovereign work. The Salve Regina declares our faith that a Queen has been appointed the advocate of this humanity as it is truly intended to be - an advocate who will turn the attention of all on the Lord of that Kingdom. Pope Benedict told us prophetically that our society is well placed to have the conversation in which faith illuminates our world, so that its kingdoms will be the Kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. If all of us in the Church who are the People of God were to reject the falsely “realistic” barking at us in the market and to exist in and for the “Kingdom not of this world”, the “most gracious advocate” sustains our attention on what people are truly for and why nothing other than Christ is all that is to be said of the entirety of humanity and human living.
In early twenty-first century England we think of the Queen as a person of immense public and international esteem, a lifelong servant of the people, a model and guardian of constitutional democracy, and the embodiment of the rule of law. We are proud that in this kingdom, we are the last on earth to anoint our sovereign, not just crowning her head for the supreme office of just government, but consecrating it, body, mind and soul, to the obedience of Christ and his Kingdom.
When Pope Benedict made his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, in the Palace Yard at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, he paid tribute to our Christian constitution, personified in England and Scotland by Christian monarchs, givers of divine law and holy justice, sinners though they be, continuously for fourteen hundred years. Uniquely among other nations, in Britain the Christian Church has both an official standing and is entwined with the active role and symbolic purpose of the reigning monarch, giving the spiritual dimension not just the opportunity but the expectation to influence our civic discourse and public decisions. In his remarkable address to Parliament in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict identified the vital importance of the gift we have in our hands in this country. In our common society, the Church people, the people of other religions, politicians and parliament, the worlds of finance and commerce, and the citizens as a whole can rely on the long crafted awareness that each has a rightful part to play and a duty to play its part. He pointed out that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, faith and reason seen by faith’s light, religion and society can be related to each other, in the knowledge that they cannot do without each other and must remain engaged in a constant dialogue - if we are to make the decisions that answer the deepest questions that human beings face, and if we are to address the malaise in contemporary human living that has broken out in a fevered crisis in public and financial morality that still afflicts us.
In other words, the Church, the Lord’s own people, constantly says to the world’s rulers and hidden wielders of power, “Ecce Homo – Behold the Man.” “Who would you rather be released for you, this Man, or Barabbas?” We the Church are for ever asking the world, “Who is your King?” or, as the psalm puts it, “Who is the King of glory?” Many are the kings and leaders, even church leaders, who have been amazed at their own glory, only to see it slip their grasp because they forgot the reminder of the Franciscan friars who used to precede the Roman Pontiff on processions in the days of pomp, burning flax as they declared, “Sic transit Gloria mundi”; “Thus passes the glory of the world.”
The trouble is that the world has rather been allowed to think of our King as yet another leader whose time was up; thus too the influential public organisation that represents him, his Church. Perhaps it is our own fault for relying too heavily on imagery such as monarchy, because now it does not conjure up the distinct conviction of wide sway, commanding prestige and undeniable moral authority. If we were honest, I suspect even we, when we think of Christ the King and Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, picture a dignified and remote public servant, a constitutional monarch with no powers of their own and always acting on the advice of ministers. If we are even more honest with ourselves, we believe those ministers are us and Christ and His Mother are there, largely speaking, to be persuaded of what we tell them to do, however much we call it prayer.
The fresh-thinking young Australian writer, Matthew Tan has written a remarkable book to explain how we have got into this way of thinking and thus disempowered our own Church on earth. It is called Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, and describes how in the 1960s the Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that humanity had so grown up that it could be set free from the claims of the Church, Christ’s kingdom on earth, to rule it. Those who called for this new approach to the world saw it in terms of maturity and freedom, not compulsion, to choose the path of Christ. They assumed that with this spiritual liberty the human choice for God and the blessedness of the Kingdom, to which the Magnificat is a paean and which the Beatitudes map out, would be irresistible.
In the 50 years since, however, human society has opted not for the Kingdom of God but the market. Now instead of the “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”, all our transactions and relations are determined, not so much by our own selfish preferences, by the demands of the market to capture them. Matthew Tan even says that everything is now relative to it and human society has converted itself into a place, where every idea, value or principle has to pitch for custom and reduced to a matter of ever poorer choices, or what we are prepared to afford for them. He is astonished by how quickly the Christians have bought into this thinking, almost without hope, accepting it as “realism”. So we have the garrulous old Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who bears the distinction of interfering in the affairs of not just one successor but two) calling for the legalisation of euthanasia on the ground of supposed mercy - such a short step from expediency - without any regard in his argument for the absolute binding nature of the revealed truth of God that life is sacred and may not be harmed. I was also surprised to hear Archbishop Justin reported as saying he sometimes doubts the existence of God. Doubtless what he was saying was that he has complete faith in Jesus Christ and it was all taken out of context; but the incident illustrates how we have got ourselves into a position where we have to imagine meeting the thinking of people in the world in terms of packaging a commodity that they will be prepared to buy because it suits their tastes, assumptions and interests on this day if not on that.
Matthew Tan calls time on this: we are not competitors in a market. If the world has taken its freedom from the Kingdom of God and chosen instead the market as the milieu for human society and relations, so be it. But it is a disaster for the world and for humanity: time now to set ourselves up as a completely different way of being human; time now to declare the Church to be an alternative society. Instead of vying in competition, hoping that people will buy our idea in a multitudinous world of options where we are just one of the choices on offer, it is time to say that we alone represent the universe as it is, the created order built on loving relationships, unreserved mutual self-giving, of complete and unreserved sacrifice that alone leads to resurrection and renewal, through the radical power of forgiveness, service and worship. For the created order is not its own end – it is Christ who is its Lord and all else follows from that and falls in place behind it. His existence does not depend on my decision to believe he exists or not, though to hear most people think you would think English people imagine him to be Peter Pan’s tutelary spirit, depending on audience applause for survival.
If we think of Christ and His Mother as kindly European-style monarchs benevolently overseeing everything, hoping it will all turn out nicely in the end, and not getting too much involved, then nothing will change, and there is no point in our being Christian or worshipping in church; that would be just to meet our own emotional needs and calling the spiritual because they looked religious. Instead, we bear in mind centrally what St Paul told us in his letter to the Ephesians, that Christ fills the universe, and he intends us all to come to the full knowledge of faith in him, to reach such a true maturity in him that we reach his own stature.
So I cannot see why we say to people that we have doubts about whether God and his vision of heaven for us really exists. The question that faces us is this: “Do you believe that Christ is Lord of the universe, of everything that there is, or do you not?” If you do, then there are consequences and it truly does mean a transformation of our proclamation of what the Church is, why we have been made to belong to it – to reach our true human maturity – and how it is to be the true pattern for civil society founded on the sacrificial love of Christ, and the very endless living of the Trinity of three persons in one God.
It is in this universe that Our Lady of the Salve Regina stands as the Queen who is in power. She is no constitutional monarch, acting on the advice of ministers, merely benign towards our pleas and prayers, influential upon us and others only in so far as we can press her to be reactive to our interests, thus ever being conformed by us to our world. Instead, the hearer of prayers is effectual, the worker of change in individuals, and whole movements in society’s truest manifestation – the People of God – in a universe of which Christ rules, the Lord who is to be heard and obeyed, and whom our states, our civil societies and our market must likewise in the end come to obey.
This may be a “vale of tears” and “exile” for humanity according to this understanding, but it is not exile from God or his Kingdom; nor is it beyond the reach of his sovereign work. The Salve Regina declares our faith that a Queen has been appointed the advocate of this humanity as it is truly intended to be - an advocate who will turn the attention of all on the Lord of that Kingdom. Pope Benedict told us prophetically that our society is well placed to have the conversation in which faith illuminates our world, so that its kingdoms will be the Kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. If all of us in the Church who are the People of God were to reject the falsely “realistic” barking at us in the market and to exist in and for the “Kingdom not of this world”, the “most gracious advocate” sustains our attention on what people are truly for and why nothing other than Christ is all that is to be said of the entirety of humanity and human living.
13 September 2014
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost & Beginning of the Indiction - Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Beginning of the Indiction, Venerable Symeon the Stylite and Martha his Mother
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family of London, 1 September/14 September 2014
1 Corinthians 1.21-2.4 - Matthew 22. 2-14
At the height of the Christian Roman Empire, the great legal reformer Emperor Justinian, issued a decree (that is, an indiction) to ensure that everyone use a common dating system for contracts, official acts and legal documents. This had the remarkable consequence of moving the date of the imperial new year from its date from time immemorial - the Birthday of Augustus, pagan founder of the Empire, on September 23rd - to September 1st.
You will recall that St Luke describes how the Birth of Jesus took place in the context of another administrative decree from that very same Caesar Augustus, at a time which St Paul identified (Galatians 4.4-7) as “the fullness of time”, when there was peace throughout the known world of the Empire. So it is significant that, by the mid sixth century, the prestige of the founding Emperor was no longer common ground for the citizens of the Empire, or part of its identity. Instead, it is Jesus Christ himself. To this day, September 1st is the first day of the monthly Calendar for the Byzantine Churches of the Christian East. It remains programmatic for us all, because September is still the beginning of our academic and school years, and all of us feel the new working year really begins after the summer, with the burden of work to be done with the coming of the season of the harvest. This is reflected in the chants for today, which celebrate the bounty of God’s providence towards the people in the fruits of the creation: “Fashioner of all creation,” we sing in the Troparion for today, “Bless the crown of the year, O Lord, with Your goodness…”. Recently, September 1st has thus become for a large part of the Byzantine tradition a day of celebration and prayer for the environment, its careful stewardship and protection.
But today is also Sunday, a day when we think not only of this world, and its chronology and destiny, but of the Kingdom that is to come. In this Sunday’s Kontakion, in praising Christ our God, we go one further than this creation to the next: “With Yourself … You raised the dead and shattered the sting of death, and delivered Adam from the curse, O Lover of Mankind”. As St Paul reminds us, we set our affection on the things that are above, and not the things of the earth, because likewise we have died and our life is hid with Christ, in God (Colossians 3.2). In other words, we have to be whole people, leading holistic lives. Just as we are not complete persons if we live only with our material preoccupations, ignoring the human dimension that is spiritual, our soul; so we cannot live in the Resurrection of Christ, which became our defining characteristic when we were baptised in him, if we withdraw ourselves from the physical fact of the world and the body, as though they do not exist.
We have a clue to managing this seemingly impossible dual identity of ours - being citizens of the Kingdom of God, at the same time as active participants in the bountiful, beautiful and hopeful world he has created - in the words of today’s other observance, the feast of St Symeon the Stylite, of whom we have sung: “Seeking things above, you joined yourself to those on high; you made your pillar a fiery chariot, through which, O venerable one, you became a companion of the angels. With them, unceasingly implore Christ God on our behalf.” (Kontakion of St Symeon). Living in the company of the beings of heaven, he was also dwelling into advanced old age in the world, facing God at the same time as being seen by people, inspiring them and never forgetting to intercede for them.
We can put it another way. The great country, blues, and Gospel singer Johnny Cash captured an old saying, when he wrote a song about people who let their own light shine, without shining the light for others; who go to stand on the spiritual high ground for themselves, but don’t take the hands of those reaching to be lifted up there too. He sings, “You’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good” (The Rambler, 1977). This is precisely it: Christ wants it that, the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be.
We can put it another way still. In today’s Gospel, we have the extraordinary tale of the guests who are too grand or ignorant to attend the wedding of their king’s son. The doors are thrown open for all to attend, not just the chosen few, even to the extent of gathering in the people who live on the streets. Then the king throws someone out of the banquet for not wearing the appropriate finery. At first sight, it looks unjust that the king rounds up last-minute guests in the middle of what they are doing, and then punishes them for coming unprepared. Many scholars explain this away by saying that St Matthew has just added together two separate stories with a wedding theme; but I think they are missing the point. For Jesus begins by telling a story with a popular theme, familiar to us from the Magnificat: the rich put down and sent empty away, while the humble and poor are exalted in their place – a typical “them-and-us” story. But then he gives it a twist to surprise us all out of our complacency and self-satisfaction, rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike. In the Epistle, St Paul explains what Jesus means: “God establishes you in the Anointed Christ, and anoints you by putting His seal on us, and giving us His Spirit in our hearts as a first instalment.” So there you have it: first, God the Father compels us to come into the wedding feast of His Son and seals our adoption as His own sons and daughters, co-inheritors with Christ of the whole Kingdom itself. Then the Spirit is bestowed in our hearts as the first instalment of our new way of living. But those who misuse or waste this first flow of grace will lose when it comes to the ensuing graces, whoever they are: “Many are called,” Jesus observes, “but few are chosen.”
What in us has become of this first instalment of grace? Has it simply got stuck in our hearts, or does it show in our minds in the way we decide things; does it show on the outside through the way we act? Where is the grace upon grace? Where are the signs of spiritual progress, after receiving not only the King’s invitation, but the honour of a new standing in His Kingdom? Why do we look and behave and think as before? In the case of that unchanged wedding guest, something showed the king that everything he had been given had made no difference, for there was no sign of new growth in grace beyond that “first instalment” from the Holy Spirit. Either he was living in the world, cutting himself off from the heaven that had been planted in his heart; or he was living on a personally fulfilled religious plane, with no sign to show for it in the world and for the world. The guest thrown out was not fit for the Kingdom, not because he had made no effort, but because he was enjoying heaven for himself, and living as though nothing had changed. He was not, as the Lord’s Prayer implores, seek the Kingdom to come “on earth, as it is in heaven”. He was not a whole person, living spiritually and holistically in the world. He was unable to be what the Christian must always be seen to be: a new creation in Christ, a different way of humanity.
So what is this difference to humanity that, for instance, an astonishing saint like St Symeon, or a new Church Year resolves us to seek and emulate? Well, first, St Matthew reports how, even when we fast and lament, we should not put on the act of sorrow and penitence for public consumption, but anoint ourselves with the oil of gladness (Matthew 6.17), just like at a wedding. Joy and confidence in Christ as the centre of all things, then, are the first signs to the world of the presence of God in our midst. Secondly, as we face the prospect of war and the vicious destruction of Christianity in the lands that cradled the Church from its birth, the only point of Christians is that we are people not of revenge and ancient hatreds, of self-pity and recrimination, but of persevering forbearance and inexhaustible forgiveness, people serving reconciliation and bringing healing, people of faith in Christ’s promises, hope in His ever coming Kingdom, and unconditional love for God and neighbour - and enemy.
These are the precepts of heaven for a new Church Year: the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be in serving the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family of London, 1 September/14 September 2014
1 Corinthians 1.21-2.4 - Matthew 22. 2-14
At the height of the Christian Roman Empire, the great legal reformer Emperor Justinian, issued a decree (that is, an indiction) to ensure that everyone use a common dating system for contracts, official acts and legal documents. This had the remarkable consequence of moving the date of the imperial new year from its date from time immemorial - the Birthday of Augustus, pagan founder of the Empire, on September 23rd - to September 1st.
You will recall that St Luke describes how the Birth of Jesus took place in the context of another administrative decree from that very same Caesar Augustus, at a time which St Paul identified (Galatians 4.4-7) as “the fullness of time”, when there was peace throughout the known world of the Empire. So it is significant that, by the mid sixth century, the prestige of the founding Emperor was no longer common ground for the citizens of the Empire, or part of its identity. Instead, it is Jesus Christ himself. To this day, September 1st is the first day of the monthly Calendar for the Byzantine Churches of the Christian East. It remains programmatic for us all, because September is still the beginning of our academic and school years, and all of us feel the new working year really begins after the summer, with the burden of work to be done with the coming of the season of the harvest. This is reflected in the chants for today, which celebrate the bounty of God’s providence towards the people in the fruits of the creation: “Fashioner of all creation,” we sing in the Troparion for today, “Bless the crown of the year, O Lord, with Your goodness…”. Recently, September 1st has thus become for a large part of the Byzantine tradition a day of celebration and prayer for the environment, its careful stewardship and protection.
But today is also Sunday, a day when we think not only of this world, and its chronology and destiny, but of the Kingdom that is to come. In this Sunday’s Kontakion, in praising Christ our God, we go one further than this creation to the next: “With Yourself … You raised the dead and shattered the sting of death, and delivered Adam from the curse, O Lover of Mankind”. As St Paul reminds us, we set our affection on the things that are above, and not the things of the earth, because likewise we have died and our life is hid with Christ, in God (Colossians 3.2). In other words, we have to be whole people, leading holistic lives. Just as we are not complete persons if we live only with our material preoccupations, ignoring the human dimension that is spiritual, our soul; so we cannot live in the Resurrection of Christ, which became our defining characteristic when we were baptised in him, if we withdraw ourselves from the physical fact of the world and the body, as though they do not exist.
We have a clue to managing this seemingly impossible dual identity of ours - being citizens of the Kingdom of God, at the same time as active participants in the bountiful, beautiful and hopeful world he has created - in the words of today’s other observance, the feast of St Symeon the Stylite, of whom we have sung: “Seeking things above, you joined yourself to those on high; you made your pillar a fiery chariot, through which, O venerable one, you became a companion of the angels. With them, unceasingly implore Christ God on our behalf.” (Kontakion of St Symeon). Living in the company of the beings of heaven, he was also dwelling into advanced old age in the world, facing God at the same time as being seen by people, inspiring them and never forgetting to intercede for them.
We can put it another way. The great country, blues, and Gospel singer Johnny Cash captured an old saying, when he wrote a song about people who let their own light shine, without shining the light for others; who go to stand on the spiritual high ground for themselves, but don’t take the hands of those reaching to be lifted up there too. He sings, “You’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good” (The Rambler, 1977). This is precisely it: Christ wants it that, the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be.
We can put it another way still. In today’s Gospel, we have the extraordinary tale of the guests who are too grand or ignorant to attend the wedding of their king’s son. The doors are thrown open for all to attend, not just the chosen few, even to the extent of gathering in the people who live on the streets. Then the king throws someone out of the banquet for not wearing the appropriate finery. At first sight, it looks unjust that the king rounds up last-minute guests in the middle of what they are doing, and then punishes them for coming unprepared. Many scholars explain this away by saying that St Matthew has just added together two separate stories with a wedding theme; but I think they are missing the point. For Jesus begins by telling a story with a popular theme, familiar to us from the Magnificat: the rich put down and sent empty away, while the humble and poor are exalted in their place – a typical “them-and-us” story. But then he gives it a twist to surprise us all out of our complacency and self-satisfaction, rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike. In the Epistle, St Paul explains what Jesus means: “God establishes you in the Anointed Christ, and anoints you by putting His seal on us, and giving us His Spirit in our hearts as a first instalment.” So there you have it: first, God the Father compels us to come into the wedding feast of His Son and seals our adoption as His own sons and daughters, co-inheritors with Christ of the whole Kingdom itself. Then the Spirit is bestowed in our hearts as the first instalment of our new way of living. But those who misuse or waste this first flow of grace will lose when it comes to the ensuing graces, whoever they are: “Many are called,” Jesus observes, “but few are chosen.”
What in us has become of this first instalment of grace? Has it simply got stuck in our hearts, or does it show in our minds in the way we decide things; does it show on the outside through the way we act? Where is the grace upon grace? Where are the signs of spiritual progress, after receiving not only the King’s invitation, but the honour of a new standing in His Kingdom? Why do we look and behave and think as before? In the case of that unchanged wedding guest, something showed the king that everything he had been given had made no difference, for there was no sign of new growth in grace beyond that “first instalment” from the Holy Spirit. Either he was living in the world, cutting himself off from the heaven that had been planted in his heart; or he was living on a personally fulfilled religious plane, with no sign to show for it in the world and for the world. The guest thrown out was not fit for the Kingdom, not because he had made no effort, but because he was enjoying heaven for himself, and living as though nothing had changed. He was not, as the Lord’s Prayer implores, seek the Kingdom to come “on earth, as it is in heaven”. He was not a whole person, living spiritually and holistically in the world. He was unable to be what the Christian must always be seen to be: a new creation in Christ, a different way of humanity.
So what is this difference to humanity that, for instance, an astonishing saint like St Symeon, or a new Church Year resolves us to seek and emulate? Well, first, St Matthew reports how, even when we fast and lament, we should not put on the act of sorrow and penitence for public consumption, but anoint ourselves with the oil of gladness (Matthew 6.17), just like at a wedding. Joy and confidence in Christ as the centre of all things, then, are the first signs to the world of the presence of God in our midst. Secondly, as we face the prospect of war and the vicious destruction of Christianity in the lands that cradled the Church from its birth, the only point of Christians is that we are people not of revenge and ancient hatreds, of self-pity and recrimination, but of persevering forbearance and inexhaustible forgiveness, people serving reconciliation and bringing healing, people of faith in Christ’s promises, hope in His ever coming Kingdom, and unconditional love for God and neighbour - and enemy.
These are the precepts of heaven for a new Church Year: the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be in serving the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
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