Epiphany 2009
Not much attention is paid to Epiphany in the UK, especially now that it simply falls on the second Sunday after Christmas rather than having its own special day on the sixth of January. It is simply Twelfth Night, the day when you are supposed to take down the Christmas decorations, on pain of appalling bad luck in the year to come. In Spain, it is the day when presents are given, the equivalent of Christmas Day in the UK; in Italy it is celebrated as Befana (though what witches have to do with Epiphany I do not know) and in France they eat, with much ritual, the Gateau des Rois – very much nicer than Christmas Pudding – and the person who gets the bean in their portion becomes King or Queen for the day. But I’m not sure that they are more concerned than we are about the significance of the feast, which is a pity. Epiphany is perhaps the richest of all the feasts of the Church’s year. I don’t say it’s the most important; it clearly isn’t that; but first, it is the only feast that celebrates more than one event: the coming of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and the Marriage at Cana; and, second, it is suggestive as no other feast is, overflowing with so many and so varied themes. It has been called the Feast of Light, and seen as a celebration of the stars and of the angels which belong to them. It is the justification of lavishness and riches in the service of God; it is the distant prophecy of the entry of the Gentiles into the Church; it tells of Christ’s triple nature as God, mortal, and universal priest-mediator; it contains both the Blessed Trinity and the Holy Family, it is a celebration of life and joy in the Marriage at Cana – and it is an indisputable expression both of Mary’s care for us and of her power with her divine son.
But you couldn’t exhaust Epiphany with a list, however long. And the wonderful thing about the feasts of the Church, a characteristic they share with the Bible, is that they say different things to you each year. I am no mystic, despite my monastic past. I am never rapt in ecstasy, and I do not have an intense or palpable sense of the presence of God – not most of the time, at any rate. My prayer is mostly just like yours is mostly: as disturbed and dissipated, as seemingly useless, as boring and unsatisfying for the one praying. But one thing I have been given – as can be guessed from the fact that the last verse of the hymn “Adoro te” most fully sums up my spirituality – is a longing, at times an almost unbearable longing, for God. Not even for the “heavenly homeland”; not a nostalgia for a golden age; for God. I suspect that the dismal failure of so many of my hour-long prayer-times is due to the fact that one can’t just sit and long for an hour at a time without becoming both distracted and self-conscious. For what, precisely, do I long? That I can’t tell you. I know that when in the psalms I come across verses such as “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water”, I am saying something profoundly true, not in the abstract, not with an undertone of “wouldn’t it be nice”, but very specifically true for me.
But I can’t tell you what are the characteristics of this Person for whom I long. I have never met him closely enough to know that; I can only tell you what he is not. I lose interest pretty quickly when people list the lovable or adorable characteristics of God. I suppose they are right, though at times I feel like crying (in an echo of my History supervisor at Cambridge) “Evidence! Evidence!”. Those characteristics are just not interesting. They are not gripping. They do not hold my attention. They feel abstract and irrelevant. I know that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. I know that God is Love. I know that Jesus is the Wisdom of God and the Power of God. And I know that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And these are things which he has said about himself and which are, therefore, true: no lack of evidence there: Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true. I have been known to wrestle with these during prayer time, trying to squeeze some spiritual or even emotional response from myself. It cannot be done, except insofar as I succeed in not thinking about the concepts but connect with the One about whom all these words are used. Because spiritual response does not take place in the brain but bypasses it; and the only way words will ever elicit it is if they are allowed to go straight to the soul, where a response undoubtedly takes place, but not one that can be explained, rationalised, or, sometimes, even perceived sufficiently for it to be comprehensible, recognisable, or make any sense at all. The other things, the non-biblical things that people say because they like or approve of a certain characteristic or feel the need of it in their own lives (under this heading come not only personal devotions, some most odd, but also all the groups who have hi-jacked Jesus and him into one of them), all these I can only ignore. They do not speak to me, the more so because, as doctrines and teachings of human beings, they risk misrepresenting the One for whom I long.
I can feel you getting restive. This insight into the spiritual life of the blogger is gripping, I hear you say, but what has it got to do with Epiphany? As Paul would say, much in every way. Let me return to what I said earlier: the feasts say something different every year, and something different to every person. This year, and to me, Epiphany is the feast of longing, the feast of those who consider no effort too much in their search for their heart’s desire. To me there can be no more potent symbol of longing than those Magi, whoever they were, from heaven-knows-where, following a star on the slimmest of evidence to heaven-knows-where, in search of a shadowy king of a mysterious tiny nation whose significance on the world stage was almost nil. Why? They could not have told you why, they could not have told you what they hoped he would do for them, what would happen if they did find him. All they knew was that they were drawn so forcible that they could not resist; and the pull was not on their bodies but on their hearts and souls. They did not know what it was for which they longed. But they longed, unbearably; nothing could compete.
Today or maybe not today
Tonight or not tonight,
All voices that command or pray
Calling me,
Shall kindle in my soul such fire
And in my eyes such light
That I shall see that heart’s desire
I long to see.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Sermon for the Feast of Mary, Mother of God
Germinavit radix Jesse: orta est stella ex Jacob; Virgo peperit Salvatorem: te laudamus. Deus noster.
The root of Jesse has flowered; a star has risen out of Jacob: the Virgin has given birth to the Saviour: we praise thee, our God.
Whose fest is this? Is it Our Lord’s; are we celebrating his circumcision” Is it Our Lady’s; are we celebrating her motherhood It’s both; but this year, perhaps because the earthly Israel is involved in such terrible bloodshed, it seems to me that we are celebrating something which is at the root of both, and which. as the world calculates time, goes back far beyond either. We are celebrating the true Israel. The chosen people, God’s election. As Paul insists, the New Covenant has not abolished or deleted that election. Mary is the daughter of Zion, and Jesus is – well, Jesus is both the summation of Israel which was chosen, and the God who chose Israel. As he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfil it, so he did not destroy Israel but fulfil it. his own received him not; but that does not change the ontological effect he had on his own, and also on those sheep who were not of that fold.
From the time of Moses and long before the time of Moses, Israel is a blessed nation, and in its name were all the nations of the world to be blessed.. It might seem hard to understand why God – who is God of the whole earth, should choose one particular nation out of all nations to be his own; why he should, in the early days, choose one man out of all to be the vehicle of his blessing. We can hardly imagine it: Abraham was the only believer in the entire world: he had no support or affirmation from any other human being. That is why he is the father of faith = he’s almost faith personified. The reason, I think, is not that God prefers or chooses any person or nation to the exclusion of any others. He is infinite and therefore capable of preferring, absolutely, each one of us, and does. However, we can’t grasp that; indeed, if God hadn’t begun by choosing Abraham and not Lot, Israel and not Esau, we simply couldn’t have grasped the concept of being “chosen”. And it is only once we have grasped that concept that we can begin to grasp the fact that all creation, and each member of creation, is his chosen – in just that “preferential” sense.
“What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way. First indeed because the words of God were committed to them. For what if some of them have not believed? Shall their unbelief make the faith o God without effect? God forbid. But God is true.” there has grown up – though I think it is less strong now – a form of “replacement theology” in which Christianity is seen as the replacement of Judaism, the Church the replacement of the synagogue. There is a small amount of truth in this, in that present-day Judaism is incomplete; it needs the Christian revelation to complete it. Christianity is not the replacement but the fulfilment of Judaism. Jesus himself said so; and Paul who might be accused of being at the origin of the replacement theology, insisted that there is one God who justifies circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision by faith. “Do we then”, he asks. “destroy the Law through faith? God forbid; but we establish the Law”. A possible analogy, it seems to me, is the relation between an engagement and a marriage. When the couple have married, they could say with equal truth “The engagement is at an end, it is over it is not longer relevant”; and “The engagement has been fulfilled, has come to full flowering, in the marriage.” So too with Judaism and Christianity. The flower that came forth from the root of Jesse is the full flowering of Judaism. Christianity is simply the full faith implicitly contained in Judaism, and is named after its full flowering. Jesus was not a Jew by chance. “For the end – in both senses – of the Law is Christ, unto justice to everyone that believes”.
the motherhood of Mary contains all we need to know about the new dispensation: the Virgin overshadowed by the Holy Spirit gave birth to Jesus Christ, God incarnate, true God and true Man, who was born to save his people from their sins. Yet that same Jesus was circumcised according to the old dispensation, thus sealing his identity as a Jew. The Apostle of the Gentiles used very strong language in order to insist on this, to stress the continuity between the two Testaments. It would certainly never have occurred to him that he had ceased to be a Jew because he accepted Jesus as the Christ. “I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised!” I have no doubt that although Mary suffered greatly at the sufferings of her son, that sword which Simeon predicted would pierce her heart was made up largely of that same great sadness and continual sorrow of which Paul speaks. She too was an Israelite, and could see that blindness in part had happened in Israel. The will of her heart, indeed, and her prayer to God, was for the unto salvation. For she could bear then witness that they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they, not knowing the justice of God, and seeking to establish their own, had not submitted themselves to the justice of God.
Blindness in part. justification by faith and not by law. And yet, it was an Israelite, a daughter of Abraham, whom God chose as his mother. “It is not as though God's word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring.” No, God had not cast away his people. Mary also was an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Judah.
We are told that God is able to bring good out of evil, and there is no doubt that Mary believed this, and so did Jesus – except during those agonising hours in Gethsemane. No, the Israelites have not ceased to be children of God. “As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable.” What has happened is that those who were not Israelites according to the flesh have received the sonship which previously appeared reserved only to Israelites. it is as if the failure of part of Israel had opened a breach in that dividing wall which Jesus cam to destroy, and allowed the Gentiles to enter Somehow, by their offence, salvation is come to the Gentiles; that blindness in part is temporary: it is to last only until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved.
There’s a homily for the feast of St Stephen by Fulgentius of Ruspe which seems to me to express beautifully the end result of all this. “This is the true life, in which Paul is not brought to confusion by the murder of Stephen, but Stephen rejoices at the company of Paul, and charity gives joy to both. Charity in Stephen overcame the ferocity of the Jews; in Paul, charity covered a multitude of sins. Charity has given to both the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Paul, the Jew, and Stephen, the Gentile, will be joyfully united in the Kingdom of Heaven. “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches. If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you…And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?”
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of the children of God.” Children of God, and with the Only-Begotten Son, children of Mary, mother of God, and mother of the Church.
Venerunt nobis vere omnia bona pariter cum illa!
The root of Jesse has flowered; a star has risen out of Jacob: the Virgin has given birth to the Saviour: we praise thee, our God.
Whose fest is this? Is it Our Lord’s; are we celebrating his circumcision” Is it Our Lady’s; are we celebrating her motherhood It’s both; but this year, perhaps because the earthly Israel is involved in such terrible bloodshed, it seems to me that we are celebrating something which is at the root of both, and which. as the world calculates time, goes back far beyond either. We are celebrating the true Israel. The chosen people, God’s election. As Paul insists, the New Covenant has not abolished or deleted that election. Mary is the daughter of Zion, and Jesus is – well, Jesus is both the summation of Israel which was chosen, and the God who chose Israel. As he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfil it, so he did not destroy Israel but fulfil it. his own received him not; but that does not change the ontological effect he had on his own, and also on those sheep who were not of that fold.
From the time of Moses and long before the time of Moses, Israel is a blessed nation, and in its name were all the nations of the world to be blessed.. It might seem hard to understand why God – who is God of the whole earth, should choose one particular nation out of all nations to be his own; why he should, in the early days, choose one man out of all to be the vehicle of his blessing. We can hardly imagine it: Abraham was the only believer in the entire world: he had no support or affirmation from any other human being. That is why he is the father of faith = he’s almost faith personified. The reason, I think, is not that God prefers or chooses any person or nation to the exclusion of any others. He is infinite and therefore capable of preferring, absolutely, each one of us, and does. However, we can’t grasp that; indeed, if God hadn’t begun by choosing Abraham and not Lot, Israel and not Esau, we simply couldn’t have grasped the concept of being “chosen”. And it is only once we have grasped that concept that we can begin to grasp the fact that all creation, and each member of creation, is his chosen – in just that “preferential” sense.
“What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way. First indeed because the words of God were committed to them. For what if some of them have not believed? Shall their unbelief make the faith o God without effect? God forbid. But God is true.” there has grown up – though I think it is less strong now – a form of “replacement theology” in which Christianity is seen as the replacement of Judaism, the Church the replacement of the synagogue. There is a small amount of truth in this, in that present-day Judaism is incomplete; it needs the Christian revelation to complete it. Christianity is not the replacement but the fulfilment of Judaism. Jesus himself said so; and Paul who might be accused of being at the origin of the replacement theology, insisted that there is one God who justifies circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision by faith. “Do we then”, he asks. “destroy the Law through faith? God forbid; but we establish the Law”. A possible analogy, it seems to me, is the relation between an engagement and a marriage. When the couple have married, they could say with equal truth “The engagement is at an end, it is over it is not longer relevant”; and “The engagement has been fulfilled, has come to full flowering, in the marriage.” So too with Judaism and Christianity. The flower that came forth from the root of Jesse is the full flowering of Judaism. Christianity is simply the full faith implicitly contained in Judaism, and is named after its full flowering. Jesus was not a Jew by chance. “For the end – in both senses – of the Law is Christ, unto justice to everyone that believes”.
the motherhood of Mary contains all we need to know about the new dispensation: the Virgin overshadowed by the Holy Spirit gave birth to Jesus Christ, God incarnate, true God and true Man, who was born to save his people from their sins. Yet that same Jesus was circumcised according to the old dispensation, thus sealing his identity as a Jew. The Apostle of the Gentiles used very strong language in order to insist on this, to stress the continuity between the two Testaments. It would certainly never have occurred to him that he had ceased to be a Jew because he accepted Jesus as the Christ. “I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised!” I have no doubt that although Mary suffered greatly at the sufferings of her son, that sword which Simeon predicted would pierce her heart was made up largely of that same great sadness and continual sorrow of which Paul speaks. She too was an Israelite, and could see that blindness in part had happened in Israel. The will of her heart, indeed, and her prayer to God, was for the unto salvation. For she could bear then witness that they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they, not knowing the justice of God, and seeking to establish their own, had not submitted themselves to the justice of God.
Blindness in part. justification by faith and not by law. And yet, it was an Israelite, a daughter of Abraham, whom God chose as his mother. “It is not as though God's word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring.” No, God had not cast away his people. Mary also was an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Judah.
We are told that God is able to bring good out of evil, and there is no doubt that Mary believed this, and so did Jesus – except during those agonising hours in Gethsemane. No, the Israelites have not ceased to be children of God. “As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable.” What has happened is that those who were not Israelites according to the flesh have received the sonship which previously appeared reserved only to Israelites. it is as if the failure of part of Israel had opened a breach in that dividing wall which Jesus cam to destroy, and allowed the Gentiles to enter Somehow, by their offence, salvation is come to the Gentiles; that blindness in part is temporary: it is to last only until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved.
There’s a homily for the feast of St Stephen by Fulgentius of Ruspe which seems to me to express beautifully the end result of all this. “This is the true life, in which Paul is not brought to confusion by the murder of Stephen, but Stephen rejoices at the company of Paul, and charity gives joy to both. Charity in Stephen overcame the ferocity of the Jews; in Paul, charity covered a multitude of sins. Charity has given to both the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Paul, the Jew, and Stephen, the Gentile, will be joyfully united in the Kingdom of Heaven. “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches. If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you…And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?”
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of the children of God.” Children of God, and with the Only-Begotten Son, children of Mary, mother of God, and mother of the Church.
Venerunt nobis vere omnia bona pariter cum illa!
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Iam non sumus hospites et advenae; sed sumus cives sanctorum et domestici Dei
Feast of the Holy Family 2008
Today some parts of the Church are celebrating the feast of the Holy Family. For those of you who are not familiar with this feast, it refers to the family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus. While agreeing that this is indeed a holy family, and one worthy of a feast in its own right, I am going to suggest that we too are the holy family. I would think that that would be quite easy to accept, if we can be the created image of the uncreated God.
I have so often heard sermons which speak about the way in which our own family groups should model themselves on that perfect one – and so they should, while accepting that we know, in fact, very little about it – but on those occasions I have felt that the preacher is barely scratching the surface of what this feast is about. I do have an axe to grind: I have no family and have felt left out and almost cheated; as if the preacher were suggesting that because I am a single person with no family, this feast has nothing to say to me, as if this is not my feast, as if I have no part in it. The essential part of the collect for the feast is the petition to God to “help us to live as a holy family”; a petition which is rightly on the lips of every child of God.
The Holy Family is, of course, a family unit, what they now call a nuclear family. I was never quite sure why that name was used, but it goes some way towards explaining the most important thing about the Holy family. The nuclear family (father, mother and offspring) is quite simply the nucleus, or one of the nuclei, of the family with which this feast is concerned, the family with which God is concerned: the family of humankind. Anyone can proclaim the value of family life. Both the present Government and its predecessor have done so and I cannot seriously describe either of them as Christian governments. The “nuclear family” is good for society; it is one of its most effective building bricks and undoubtedly, if it is happy, does prevent some of the unrest and general moral decline about which we hear so much. But there is nothing specifically Christian about the nuclear family. It has existed since records began, and doubtless long before that. It exists and has existed in various forms, of which the form we have now in the West is only one, and not necessarily the best. And even when lived Christianly it is a human thing baptized, not a divine thing. The divine thing is our universal brotherhood (and I do not use this phrase in a sentimental but a literal sense) stemming from the universal fatherhood of God.
The nuclear family does not have a large place in the teaching of Jesus; that is not, I am sure, because he did not value it, but simply because he saw its value as the very relative thing that it is. It sounds rather extreme to tell us to call no man on earth our father, but when he explains that it is because we have one father who is in heaven and that we are therefore all brothers, it becomes clear that this is like his instruction to hate our parents, our family, and our own life. It is a wild attempt to get into our thick heads what matters and what doesn’t; it is an a fortiori argument, of which he was in general rather fond. We all know how natural it is to love father and mother – and certainly ourselves. Well, compared with the love we are to have for God, that love is more like hatred than love, so much lesser is it. Just so, compared with the family relationship between the children of God, mere blood relationship is hardly a relationship at all. It is an attempt to make us lift our eyes from what is on earth to what is in heaven.
There is a parallel with the Martha/Mary story here. Martha’s vocation – the active one – was not a bad one. It was given by God. The difference is that Mary’s – the contemplative one – does not end with life, but will never be taken away from her. in heaven, Mary will remain a contemplative; but Martha will, in her own way, and while still remaining distinctively Martha, become a contemplative too. the time for action will be over. Blood relationship, the family structure, does not even remain unchanged throughout life; and it ends with death. That does not – emphatically not – mean that in heaven we will cease to love those whom we loved on earth. We will love them still more; because the real relationship, the relationship between members of God’s family, only becomes closer and clearer in the next world; death cannot change it. My other and father were indeed my mother and father; the relationship was a close one. But far more important, more fundamental and more true – an more lasting – is the fact that as children of God they were, and are, my sister and brother.
Family relationships are exclusive, as are friendships and all relationships based on profit or esteem. That is not a bad thing in itself; but by definition it means that they are not relationships that can be universal, common to all human beings; we cannot base on such relationships our status and bond before God. Everyone was born of parents, certainly; but there are many who never knew those parents, and very many who never had family relationships properly so called. Not everyone has friends; not everyone has relationships in which they help or are helped, admire or are admired There is only one universal relationship, only one relationship in which we all find ourselves equally members of God’s holy family; if any one human being is excluded, the we are all excluded, at least in theory. Kierkegaard pointed out that if we deny to any person the status of child of God – and that includes failing to treat them as such – then we are denying ourselves that status: either God is the Father of every member of the human race or else anyone’s status as child of God, including mine, may be called into question. The basis of our behaviour towards other human beings cannot be that of a blood relationship, friendship or any such limited thing.
To be a father or other is a great thing. It is like being an apostle; to them the Father says, as Jesus said to his apostles, “Whoever hears you hears me”. We honour our parents because they hold the place of God the Father in the nuclear family. But since the incarnation it is a great thing to be a son or daughter too; we stand in the place where the Word Incarnate stood. We are all sons and daughters, in the sphere of nature as in the sphere of grace; since the Incarnation there is no-one who does not stand in the place of God. We are not only heirs of God, we are fellow-heirs without Brother Jesus Christ.
And that. to me, is the value and lesson of the Holy Family: it was the place of the Incarnation, the place where our likeness to Jesus was born. It cannot really be called the origin of the nuclear family, though it may very well be taken as a model;; but it is truly the origin of the family of God. Before the Incarnation, Israel was God’s People, and all humankind was his creation; ad the universe was its mysterious setting. But since God became the son of the Virgin and (most truly, if not physically) of Joseph, there has been a dramatic revolution: creation has become a family, and the universe has become its home.
Today some parts of the Church are celebrating the feast of the Holy Family. For those of you who are not familiar with this feast, it refers to the family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus. While agreeing that this is indeed a holy family, and one worthy of a feast in its own right, I am going to suggest that we too are the holy family. I would think that that would be quite easy to accept, if we can be the created image of the uncreated God.
I have so often heard sermons which speak about the way in which our own family groups should model themselves on that perfect one – and so they should, while accepting that we know, in fact, very little about it – but on those occasions I have felt that the preacher is barely scratching the surface of what this feast is about. I do have an axe to grind: I have no family and have felt left out and almost cheated; as if the preacher were suggesting that because I am a single person with no family, this feast has nothing to say to me, as if this is not my feast, as if I have no part in it. The essential part of the collect for the feast is the petition to God to “help us to live as a holy family”; a petition which is rightly on the lips of every child of God.
The Holy Family is, of course, a family unit, what they now call a nuclear family. I was never quite sure why that name was used, but it goes some way towards explaining the most important thing about the Holy family. The nuclear family (father, mother and offspring) is quite simply the nucleus, or one of the nuclei, of the family with which this feast is concerned, the family with which God is concerned: the family of humankind. Anyone can proclaim the value of family life. Both the present Government and its predecessor have done so and I cannot seriously describe either of them as Christian governments. The “nuclear family” is good for society; it is one of its most effective building bricks and undoubtedly, if it is happy, does prevent some of the unrest and general moral decline about which we hear so much. But there is nothing specifically Christian about the nuclear family. It has existed since records began, and doubtless long before that. It exists and has existed in various forms, of which the form we have now in the West is only one, and not necessarily the best. And even when lived Christianly it is a human thing baptized, not a divine thing. The divine thing is our universal brotherhood (and I do not use this phrase in a sentimental but a literal sense) stemming from the universal fatherhood of God.
The nuclear family does not have a large place in the teaching of Jesus; that is not, I am sure, because he did not value it, but simply because he saw its value as the very relative thing that it is. It sounds rather extreme to tell us to call no man on earth our father, but when he explains that it is because we have one father who is in heaven and that we are therefore all brothers, it becomes clear that this is like his instruction to hate our parents, our family, and our own life. It is a wild attempt to get into our thick heads what matters and what doesn’t; it is an a fortiori argument, of which he was in general rather fond. We all know how natural it is to love father and mother – and certainly ourselves. Well, compared with the love we are to have for God, that love is more like hatred than love, so much lesser is it. Just so, compared with the family relationship between the children of God, mere blood relationship is hardly a relationship at all. It is an attempt to make us lift our eyes from what is on earth to what is in heaven.
There is a parallel with the Martha/Mary story here. Martha’s vocation – the active one – was not a bad one. It was given by God. The difference is that Mary’s – the contemplative one – does not end with life, but will never be taken away from her. in heaven, Mary will remain a contemplative; but Martha will, in her own way, and while still remaining distinctively Martha, become a contemplative too. the time for action will be over. Blood relationship, the family structure, does not even remain unchanged throughout life; and it ends with death. That does not – emphatically not – mean that in heaven we will cease to love those whom we loved on earth. We will love them still more; because the real relationship, the relationship between members of God’s family, only becomes closer and clearer in the next world; death cannot change it. My other and father were indeed my mother and father; the relationship was a close one. But far more important, more fundamental and more true – an more lasting – is the fact that as children of God they were, and are, my sister and brother.
Family relationships are exclusive, as are friendships and all relationships based on profit or esteem. That is not a bad thing in itself; but by definition it means that they are not relationships that can be universal, common to all human beings; we cannot base on such relationships our status and bond before God. Everyone was born of parents, certainly; but there are many who never knew those parents, and very many who never had family relationships properly so called. Not everyone has friends; not everyone has relationships in which they help or are helped, admire or are admired There is only one universal relationship, only one relationship in which we all find ourselves equally members of God’s holy family; if any one human being is excluded, the we are all excluded, at least in theory. Kierkegaard pointed out that if we deny to any person the status of child of God – and that includes failing to treat them as such – then we are denying ourselves that status: either God is the Father of every member of the human race or else anyone’s status as child of God, including mine, may be called into question. The basis of our behaviour towards other human beings cannot be that of a blood relationship, friendship or any such limited thing.
To be a father or other is a great thing. It is like being an apostle; to them the Father says, as Jesus said to his apostles, “Whoever hears you hears me”. We honour our parents because they hold the place of God the Father in the nuclear family. But since the incarnation it is a great thing to be a son or daughter too; we stand in the place where the Word Incarnate stood. We are all sons and daughters, in the sphere of nature as in the sphere of grace; since the Incarnation there is no-one who does not stand in the place of God. We are not only heirs of God, we are fellow-heirs without Brother Jesus Christ.
And that. to me, is the value and lesson of the Holy Family: it was the place of the Incarnation, the place where our likeness to Jesus was born. It cannot really be called the origin of the nuclear family, though it may very well be taken as a model;; but it is truly the origin of the family of God. Before the Incarnation, Israel was God’s People, and all humankind was his creation; ad the universe was its mysterious setting. But since God became the son of the Virgin and (most truly, if not physically) of Joseph, there has been a dramatic revolution: creation has become a family, and the universe has become its home.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Sermon for Christmas
Christmas 2008
“In these days God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world”.
We are the inheritance of Christ; as he suffered to enter into his glory, so he became incarnate to enter into his inheritance. It’s a poor inheritance, for him who is the brightness of God’s glory and the reflection of his substance, and upholds all things by the word of his power. It is small consolation if all the angels of God adore him; the fact remains that he has inherited clay, and clay made unusable by sin; he came unto his own, and his own received him not. As the clay, we rejoice; but for him we can only feel sorrow.
The Christmas story, the whole story of Christ’s life on earth, is the story of what happened when the Son of God entered into his inheritance. It is perhaps revealing that he only told one parable about an heir, and that was the parable which most nearly approximates to an autobiography. The importance of that parable was realised: all the Synoptics related it. The details vary, but the versions come together at the sharp point: “The lord of the vineyard said: What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be, when they see him the will reverence him Whom when the husbandmen saw, they thought within themselves, saying: This is the heir, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours. So casting him out of the vineyard, they killed him.” The servants who had been sent before him were not asking what was theirs by right of the husbandmen; they were, shall we say, prophets, speaking on behalf of another. But he came unto his own, came to his own inheritance, to that which was his own as much as it was his Father’s; that which was planted by him; far from failing to know him (St John is too kind here) the husbandmen destroyed him precisely because they did know him. This is the heir.
These don’t seem very seasonal thoughts. But it is to this kind of thought that I always find myself turning during Mass on Christmas night; sometimes when I enter the church and see the crucifix, but very often, with a shock, at the eucharist. On the night he was betrayed he took bread…this is my Body which will be given up for you. This is my Blood of the new and everlasting covenant; it will be shed for you. Betrayal? Giving up of his Body, shedding of his Blood? But we’re talking about a baby! We are talking about a baby, yes, because Christ was true Man; but really, we are talking about the Incarnation, the clothing of God in our garment, the entering of the Son of God into his inheritance at the time appointed by the Father for him to become the heir of all creation.
Most rights involve responsibilities and duties. Christ knew what he was saying when he told us that more is demanded of him to whom more is given. Like us, the Son of God receives his being from the Father, but in his case it is the very Godhead he receives, and the task that that entails. To God, no task is a burden, but from the moment of the Incarnation it was a man who had to complete that task and near that burden. Receiving the universe as inheritance means the task of redeeming the universe, transforming it so that it is a worthy kingdom to be delivered up to God the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality, and power, and virtue; for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
Christ faced this immense talk not only with courage but with alacrity. Isaiah was speaking from our point of view when he said “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings” and the Song of Songs is speaking of the same thing but from another point of view, the point of view of Christ’s eagerness: “Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills”. It is always a joyful thong to enter into an inheritance, especially if it does not involve the death of one’s father, and so it was for Christ; not as if he loved himself and wanted to receive a benefit – but because he loved the inheritance and wanted to bestow a benefit.
Indeed, all this talk about Christ's inheritance sounds rather strange. If it isn’t the sort of inheritance which requires the death of a father, then it must be the sort which requires a coming of age. But are we to think that somehow Christ came of age at the Incarnation, as if he gained something thereby? “As long as the heir is a child, he differs in nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all, but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father.” Are we to say that of Christ” No; but in this case the usual circumstances are strangely reversed: it is, rather, the inheritance which comes of age. “For we also, when we were children were serving under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made of a woman…that we might receive the adoption of children…therefore now we are not servants but children; and if children, heirs also through God”.
This was Christ’s task, and he knew very well what it was to mean for him, from the self-emptying with which it began until the death with which it ended. And in an odd way, it was his own death that completed his entering into his inheritance; because it completed the task of conforming us to him; the task of leading not just the Head, but also the body, into the inheritance. Strange sort of inheritance, indeed, for which the death, not of the testator but of the heir, is required!
The conclusion I find myself coming to is that what Christ inherited was the capacity to make us inherit: that his entering into his inheritance was ours; that as he inherited clay, so we inherited glory. O admirabile commercium! O wonderful exchange! As so often, my confession that I don’t understand is not so much a reflection on my incapacity and littleness as on God’s power and infinity. Somehow, by the Incarnation, I have inherited God.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
“In these days God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world”.
We are the inheritance of Christ; as he suffered to enter into his glory, so he became incarnate to enter into his inheritance. It’s a poor inheritance, for him who is the brightness of God’s glory and the reflection of his substance, and upholds all things by the word of his power. It is small consolation if all the angels of God adore him; the fact remains that he has inherited clay, and clay made unusable by sin; he came unto his own, and his own received him not. As the clay, we rejoice; but for him we can only feel sorrow.
The Christmas story, the whole story of Christ’s life on earth, is the story of what happened when the Son of God entered into his inheritance. It is perhaps revealing that he only told one parable about an heir, and that was the parable which most nearly approximates to an autobiography. The importance of that parable was realised: all the Synoptics related it. The details vary, but the versions come together at the sharp point: “The lord of the vineyard said: What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be, when they see him the will reverence him Whom when the husbandmen saw, they thought within themselves, saying: This is the heir, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours. So casting him out of the vineyard, they killed him.” The servants who had been sent before him were not asking what was theirs by right of the husbandmen; they were, shall we say, prophets, speaking on behalf of another. But he came unto his own, came to his own inheritance, to that which was his own as much as it was his Father’s; that which was planted by him; far from failing to know him (St John is too kind here) the husbandmen destroyed him precisely because they did know him. This is the heir.
These don’t seem very seasonal thoughts. But it is to this kind of thought that I always find myself turning during Mass on Christmas night; sometimes when I enter the church and see the crucifix, but very often, with a shock, at the eucharist. On the night he was betrayed he took bread…this is my Body which will be given up for you. This is my Blood of the new and everlasting covenant; it will be shed for you. Betrayal? Giving up of his Body, shedding of his Blood? But we’re talking about a baby! We are talking about a baby, yes, because Christ was true Man; but really, we are talking about the Incarnation, the clothing of God in our garment, the entering of the Son of God into his inheritance at the time appointed by the Father for him to become the heir of all creation.
Most rights involve responsibilities and duties. Christ knew what he was saying when he told us that more is demanded of him to whom more is given. Like us, the Son of God receives his being from the Father, but in his case it is the very Godhead he receives, and the task that that entails. To God, no task is a burden, but from the moment of the Incarnation it was a man who had to complete that task and near that burden. Receiving the universe as inheritance means the task of redeeming the universe, transforming it so that it is a worthy kingdom to be delivered up to God the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality, and power, and virtue; for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
Christ faced this immense talk not only with courage but with alacrity. Isaiah was speaking from our point of view when he said “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings” and the Song of Songs is speaking of the same thing but from another point of view, the point of view of Christ’s eagerness: “Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills”. It is always a joyful thong to enter into an inheritance, especially if it does not involve the death of one’s father, and so it was for Christ; not as if he loved himself and wanted to receive a benefit – but because he loved the inheritance and wanted to bestow a benefit.
Indeed, all this talk about Christ's inheritance sounds rather strange. If it isn’t the sort of inheritance which requires the death of a father, then it must be the sort which requires a coming of age. But are we to think that somehow Christ came of age at the Incarnation, as if he gained something thereby? “As long as the heir is a child, he differs in nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all, but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father.” Are we to say that of Christ” No; but in this case the usual circumstances are strangely reversed: it is, rather, the inheritance which comes of age. “For we also, when we were children were serving under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made of a woman…that we might receive the adoption of children…therefore now we are not servants but children; and if children, heirs also through God”.
This was Christ’s task, and he knew very well what it was to mean for him, from the self-emptying with which it began until the death with which it ended. And in an odd way, it was his own death that completed his entering into his inheritance; because it completed the task of conforming us to him; the task of leading not just the Head, but also the body, into the inheritance. Strange sort of inheritance, indeed, for which the death, not of the testator but of the heir, is required!
The conclusion I find myself coming to is that what Christ inherited was the capacity to make us inherit: that his entering into his inheritance was ours; that as he inherited clay, so we inherited glory. O admirabile commercium! O wonderful exchange! As so often, my confession that I don’t understand is not so much a reflection on my incapacity and littleness as on God’s power and infinity. Somehow, by the Incarnation, I have inherited God.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Cum esset desponsata
“Cum esset desponsata”
It is traditional in monasteries to give a sermon on 20 December, when the Gospel is “The angel of the Lord was sent…” The sermon is called “Sermo super Missus Est”, and you will find examples as far back as St Bernard of Clairvaux. Legend has it that there was once a lay sister who only discovered in her eighties, after fifty-odd years in the monastery, that it was not a sermon “about Mrs S”…when it comes to transparency, monasteries still have a lot to learn.
However, I don’t think it’s fair to expect two sermons in two days, and since today’s Gospel reading is the annunciation not to Mary but to Joseph, I thought I would grab the opportunity to redress the balance a bit for those who feel that my sermons are sometimes a bit sexist. I do often wonder why St Joseph is consistently presented as inferior to, standing in the shadow of, his more prominent wife, not so much as a historical figure, but as a saint.
It is perfectly true that no word of his is recorded and that the total of his appearances is marginally less than hers, but what we do see is certainly not a second-class saint. Indeed, during the time when he was alive (it is clear that he was not alive by the time of the Crucifixion, and unlikely that he was so by the time Jesus’ “mother and brethren” came looking for him) there is only one incident in Mary’s life in which she appears alone, or else which is not paralleled in the life of Joseph, and that is the Visitation. I also wonder why it is that Mary is always portrayed as a silent woman – as an index of her humility – while in fact, though we have evidence of humility, we have none at all of silence. Surely the model of the silent and humble saint is rather Joseph, despite the fact that he was clearly a man of action (as was Mary a woman of action). His silence and his lack of interest in himself come through most clearly in today’s narrative, whose original can only have come from him. When Mary related the story of her Annunciation – Missus Est – she related faithfully all the details, what she said no less than what the Angel said. I suppose the narrative of the Visitation comes from her too, and she has given us not only Elizabeth’s words but her own Magnificat. When Joseph told the story of his Annunciation – Cum Esset Desponsata – and, perhaps, the story of the dream that led to the Flight Into Egypt, he did not think it of any importance what he said or did not say. He had to tell us that he had been considering “putting Mary away quietly” or the rest of the story would not have made sense, but that is the only information he ever gives about himself.
It may well be that he obeyed without a word, and I do not think he did have those doubts about Mary’s virtue that seem to be plaguing him in the icons of the Nativity, although even more faith was required of him than of her. Partly because her holiness must have been so blindingly obvious to a man hardly less holy than she; but also because he would never, being a righteous man, have married her unless the dream had been completely convincing; nor, I think, would he ever have admitted that he had contemplated “putting her away” had be retained any doubts. Mary’s consent was required for the conception of Christ, but Joseph’s was required if his preservation through childhood – and Mary’s preservation too, come to that – was not to demand a flood of complicated miracles and divine dispensations. Mary gave her consent in words, Joseph in actions. One might even say that his obedience was even more unhesitating than hers.
I am not saying – how could I – that Joseph was “a greater saint” than Mary. But I sometimes think it was a close-run thing. And while feminists complain that they suffer and are discriminated against because they are women, I would reply that in the great-saint stakes, Joseph was disadvantaged because he was a man. He did not have the Immaculate Conception because, as the mere foster-father of Christ, unrelated to him by blood, he didn’t need it. There was no reason why he should be completely untouched by original sin. He could not, as a man, conceive Christ in his body. He undoubtedly did conceive him in his heart, which is more important. St Augustine commented that Mary could not have conceived Christ in her body had she not already conceived him in her heart. But that possibility is open to anyone, not just to Joseph; and it can pass completely unnoticed except by God.
From his reticence about himself and the fact that he let Mary take the lead when it was not a matter of life and death, I suspect Joseph was relieved that he was only the foster-father and so need not be subjected to the limelight. Where was he when the Magi visited? Out mending someone’s door-frame? Discreetly in his workshop till they left? Joseph had the gift of being there when he was needed and disappearing when he was not.
I know that all God’s actions are supremely free. But in a way his choice of Joseph – of any man – to assist at this point in the plan of salvation was particularly gratuitous. A woman was strictly necessary and he chose and prepared a perfect one who, all the same, also cooperated perfectly with her gracing. But a man was not strictly necessary. I sometimes like to imagine that God would have been quite happy to preserve his incarnate Son without the help of a human foster-father, but, seeing the magnificent holiness of Joseph (before the world was made), was so captivated that he could not resist giving him to that Son as a birthday present. Joseph was the most perfectly beautiful creature that ever lived and attained to holiness with no special helps. He really was worthy to be the husband of the Queen of Heaven and, as I’ve said before, the understudy of the First Person of the Blessed Trinity. And all this addition to the essential (that a virgin should conceive and bear a son) perhaps provoked simply by one great saint. I m not suggesting that God was persuaded to change his mind, any more than our prayers do that. But the saints, and their prayers and ours, all have an essential place in the unfolding of God’s plan.
Perhaps you were surprised at my claim that more faith was required of Joseph than of Mary. I would go further. Faith has been satirically described as “the capacity to believe that which you know to be untrue”. But, you know, that is very much what seemed to be required of Joseph. I do not think there has ever been a person asked to base his whole life upon something for which he had no evidence and which everyone, including himself, knew to be impossible. Mary was told specifically that nothing is impossible for God’ Joseph just had to know it without being told. Blessed are those who have not been told and yet believe! Mary, in fact, despite the enormity of what she was asked to believe, had solid evidence such as has rarely been vouchsafed to anyone. Every other human being had to believe that she was a mother and a virgin; she alone knew it. But Joseph – well, it is he and not St Rita of Cascia who should be the patron saint of the impossible. Politics may be the art of the possible; St Joseph teaches us, without a word, that sanctity is sometimes the art of the impossible. And he should know; he was married to a living impossibility: a virgin mother.
Which does not mean that sanctity is impossible. I am sure that when Jesus made his celebrated comparison he did not have in his mind’s eye a miserable and hopeless-looking camel, regarding with depression the tiny eye of a minuscule needle. What he saw was that camel squeezing happily through the needle’s eye. losing the odd package, perhaps, but emerging unscathed. It really is true. For God all things are possible.
Joseph fidelissime, ora pro nobis!
It is traditional in monasteries to give a sermon on 20 December, when the Gospel is “The angel of the Lord was sent…” The sermon is called “Sermo super Missus Est”, and you will find examples as far back as St Bernard of Clairvaux. Legend has it that there was once a lay sister who only discovered in her eighties, after fifty-odd years in the monastery, that it was not a sermon “about Mrs S”…when it comes to transparency, monasteries still have a lot to learn.
However, I don’t think it’s fair to expect two sermons in two days, and since today’s Gospel reading is the annunciation not to Mary but to Joseph, I thought I would grab the opportunity to redress the balance a bit for those who feel that my sermons are sometimes a bit sexist. I do often wonder why St Joseph is consistently presented as inferior to, standing in the shadow of, his more prominent wife, not so much as a historical figure, but as a saint.
It is perfectly true that no word of his is recorded and that the total of his appearances is marginally less than hers, but what we do see is certainly not a second-class saint. Indeed, during the time when he was alive (it is clear that he was not alive by the time of the Crucifixion, and unlikely that he was so by the time Jesus’ “mother and brethren” came looking for him) there is only one incident in Mary’s life in which she appears alone, or else which is not paralleled in the life of Joseph, and that is the Visitation. I also wonder why it is that Mary is always portrayed as a silent woman – as an index of her humility – while in fact, though we have evidence of humility, we have none at all of silence. Surely the model of the silent and humble saint is rather Joseph, despite the fact that he was clearly a man of action (as was Mary a woman of action). His silence and his lack of interest in himself come through most clearly in today’s narrative, whose original can only have come from him. When Mary related the story of her Annunciation – Missus Est – she related faithfully all the details, what she said no less than what the Angel said. I suppose the narrative of the Visitation comes from her too, and she has given us not only Elizabeth’s words but her own Magnificat. When Joseph told the story of his Annunciation – Cum Esset Desponsata – and, perhaps, the story of the dream that led to the Flight Into Egypt, he did not think it of any importance what he said or did not say. He had to tell us that he had been considering “putting Mary away quietly” or the rest of the story would not have made sense, but that is the only information he ever gives about himself.
It may well be that he obeyed without a word, and I do not think he did have those doubts about Mary’s virtue that seem to be plaguing him in the icons of the Nativity, although even more faith was required of him than of her. Partly because her holiness must have been so blindingly obvious to a man hardly less holy than she; but also because he would never, being a righteous man, have married her unless the dream had been completely convincing; nor, I think, would he ever have admitted that he had contemplated “putting her away” had be retained any doubts. Mary’s consent was required for the conception of Christ, but Joseph’s was required if his preservation through childhood – and Mary’s preservation too, come to that – was not to demand a flood of complicated miracles and divine dispensations. Mary gave her consent in words, Joseph in actions. One might even say that his obedience was even more unhesitating than hers.
I am not saying – how could I – that Joseph was “a greater saint” than Mary. But I sometimes think it was a close-run thing. And while feminists complain that they suffer and are discriminated against because they are women, I would reply that in the great-saint stakes, Joseph was disadvantaged because he was a man. He did not have the Immaculate Conception because, as the mere foster-father of Christ, unrelated to him by blood, he didn’t need it. There was no reason why he should be completely untouched by original sin. He could not, as a man, conceive Christ in his body. He undoubtedly did conceive him in his heart, which is more important. St Augustine commented that Mary could not have conceived Christ in her body had she not already conceived him in her heart. But that possibility is open to anyone, not just to Joseph; and it can pass completely unnoticed except by God.
From his reticence about himself and the fact that he let Mary take the lead when it was not a matter of life and death, I suspect Joseph was relieved that he was only the foster-father and so need not be subjected to the limelight. Where was he when the Magi visited? Out mending someone’s door-frame? Discreetly in his workshop till they left? Joseph had the gift of being there when he was needed and disappearing when he was not.
I know that all God’s actions are supremely free. But in a way his choice of Joseph – of any man – to assist at this point in the plan of salvation was particularly gratuitous. A woman was strictly necessary and he chose and prepared a perfect one who, all the same, also cooperated perfectly with her gracing. But a man was not strictly necessary. I sometimes like to imagine that God would have been quite happy to preserve his incarnate Son without the help of a human foster-father, but, seeing the magnificent holiness of Joseph (before the world was made), was so captivated that he could not resist giving him to that Son as a birthday present. Joseph was the most perfectly beautiful creature that ever lived and attained to holiness with no special helps. He really was worthy to be the husband of the Queen of Heaven and, as I’ve said before, the understudy of the First Person of the Blessed Trinity. And all this addition to the essential (that a virgin should conceive and bear a son) perhaps provoked simply by one great saint. I m not suggesting that God was persuaded to change his mind, any more than our prayers do that. But the saints, and their prayers and ours, all have an essential place in the unfolding of God’s plan.
Perhaps you were surprised at my claim that more faith was required of Joseph than of Mary. I would go further. Faith has been satirically described as “the capacity to believe that which you know to be untrue”. But, you know, that is very much what seemed to be required of Joseph. I do not think there has ever been a person asked to base his whole life upon something for which he had no evidence and which everyone, including himself, knew to be impossible. Mary was told specifically that nothing is impossible for God’ Joseph just had to know it without being told. Blessed are those who have not been told and yet believe! Mary, in fact, despite the enormity of what she was asked to believe, had solid evidence such as has rarely been vouchsafed to anyone. Every other human being had to believe that she was a mother and a virgin; she alone knew it. But Joseph – well, it is he and not St Rita of Cascia who should be the patron saint of the impossible. Politics may be the art of the possible; St Joseph teaches us, without a word, that sanctity is sometimes the art of the impossible. And he should know; he was married to a living impossibility: a virgin mother.
Which does not mean that sanctity is impossible. I am sure that when Jesus made his celebrated comparison he did not have in his mind’s eye a miserable and hopeless-looking camel, regarding with depression the tiny eye of a minuscule needle. What he saw was that camel squeezing happily through the needle’s eye. losing the odd package, perhaps, but emerging unscathed. It really is true. For God all things are possible.
Joseph fidelissime, ora pro nobis!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Rejoice, again I say rejoice
“I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance”.
Abundant life! I am not sure that that is the definition that many people would give of Christianity.
Philip Yancey, in his book “What’s so amazing about grace?” muses on the ungracefulness, the ungraciousness, the apparent ungracedness, of so much of Christianity, and of so many Christians. Grace – it should be one of our defining characteristics. You know the old acronym definition of grace: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. We should be visibly full of God’s riches, of his abundant life.
Similarly, Gerard Hughes in a recent talk on the subject of the “gap” between our everyday lives and our religious lives, asked us what the word “holy” meant to us. The conclusion was that we thought immediately of someone on their knees; someone with a halo; better still, someone on their knees with a halo. Not very attractive. Would we like to be “holy”, or live with someone “holy”, if that’s the sort of thing it involves? This, as Gerard Hughes pointed out, is pretty silly. Holiness actually involves being like Jesus, because it involves being indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And it therefore involves being filled with the fullness of life. And the fullness of life, life in abundance, involves joy.
This Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, has been known as Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday probably ever since the time of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. In the days when Advent was treated like a sort of mini-Lent it was the “day off”, so to speak, the day when you didn’t fast, the day when instead of black or violet vestments the clergy wore pink. That, incidentally, is the origin of the one pink candle on the Advent wreath. It used to be lit on the third Sunday and to symbolise rejoicing. There’s a similar Sunday in Lent, you may recall – the fifth Sunday, known as “Laetare” or “Be happy” Sunday. These seasons of preparation are seasons when we are, or should be, aware of our sinfulness, our need to repent, and the reason why the Son of God took flesh and died for us. The readings, in general, reinforce that atmosphere. But today – and today’s Lenten equivalent – are quite different. Today we remember not so much our sinfulness as the fact that our sins have been forgiven. Not so much that Christ died as that he rose again and all is well. Not so much that he came in poverty and was exiled, persecuted and judicially murdered as that he came at all. Today we lift up our eyes and look towards the Incarnation. And you know, that’s the reason why I so much hate our “consumer society’s” premature Christmas season. As some of you may know, I was a Benedictine nun for twenty years; and one of the wonderful things about that way of life is that the liturgical calendar, life with God and his saints, becomes much more real than the secular one. As the saying goes, “the veil is very thin”. In some ways, for me, it still is. At a certain point in Advent – more often than not either Gaudete Sunday, the day before, or the day after – everything shifts. When the Christmas season begins in September, or even on St Andrew’s Day, that shift is impossible, and the amazingness of grace – of the Incarnation – never really gets the chance to hit home.
Is it really more difficult to be a Christian in this society than in earlier times? It does seem so, it does feel as if everything conspires to make the veil as thick as possible. And if society militates against Christians, maybe it is time for us to fight back. Not by being argumentative, much less by being violent, but by making sure that our own minds and our own hearts, and if at all possible our own homes, are places where the veil is as thin as possible. The Advent and Christmas season is a perfect opportunity – the church takes us by the hand through them, if we will only go with it.
I don’t know whether any of you has had the same experience as I have recently had when faced with the newspapers, or the news in any form. It is so overwhelmingly bad, and so largely tragic, that it was threatening to become altogether too much. Sometimes it is a stark choice between going under or getting things in perspective – and that has got to be God’s perspective, or as near as we can get to it, as that is the only one that takes in all the data. It’s not easy to do, partly because obviously we haven’t got all the data, and partly because it can feel escapist, or unreal. Pie in the sky, in other words. Quite true, we haven’t. But it is certainly not escapist or unreal. Just as the liturgical calendar is the real one – the Kingdom of Heaven is within us NOW – and the secular calendar is simply the one that we run our day-to-day lives by, so the joy of the Lord is the real one and the struggles of this life are simply the ones that we have to get through somehow, with God’s help and according to God’s perspective, until...until…
I’ve mentioned before that I always read very slowly the texts I am to preach on, listening carefully for the phrase that God will underline in red for me. Today’s was” “At that time”. “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home.” I doubt if anyone else noticed it – we may all read or hear the same Scripture, but God uses it to say a different thing to each of us. The Fathers of the Church have a lot to say about the timing of the Incarnation, and why it was exactly the right time. In fact, whatever God does, he does not only perfectly, but at the right time, and it is wonderful to realise how the liturgy of the church guides us to see it. And that applies not just to the great sweep of history, but to our own lives. I am not pretending that life is one great picnic. For many people it is one long – or short – tragedy. For the majority of the human race it is a ceaseless life-or-death struggle. For us too, sometimes, in our western, middle-class, reasonably prosperous way, it can be a great struggle, sometimes more than we can bear without help. But the help is there, although sometimes we may have to swallow our pride, and find a lot more courage than we ever thought we had, to ask for it and take it. It’s known as grace.
So let me repeat some less well-known words of Julian of Norwich, which have been rather like a life-raft of joy for me for at least thirty years, and will be until that time of gathering and bringing home comes for me. I commend them to you for the same purpose:
He did not say: “Thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be dis-eased”; but he did say: “Thou shalt not be overcome”.
Abundant life! I am not sure that that is the definition that many people would give of Christianity.
Philip Yancey, in his book “What’s so amazing about grace?” muses on the ungracefulness, the ungraciousness, the apparent ungracedness, of so much of Christianity, and of so many Christians. Grace – it should be one of our defining characteristics. You know the old acronym definition of grace: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. We should be visibly full of God’s riches, of his abundant life.
Similarly, Gerard Hughes in a recent talk on the subject of the “gap” between our everyday lives and our religious lives, asked us what the word “holy” meant to us. The conclusion was that we thought immediately of someone on their knees; someone with a halo; better still, someone on their knees with a halo. Not very attractive. Would we like to be “holy”, or live with someone “holy”, if that’s the sort of thing it involves? This, as Gerard Hughes pointed out, is pretty silly. Holiness actually involves being like Jesus, because it involves being indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And it therefore involves being filled with the fullness of life. And the fullness of life, life in abundance, involves joy.
This Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, has been known as Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday probably ever since the time of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. In the days when Advent was treated like a sort of mini-Lent it was the “day off”, so to speak, the day when you didn’t fast, the day when instead of black or violet vestments the clergy wore pink. That, incidentally, is the origin of the one pink candle on the Advent wreath. It used to be lit on the third Sunday and to symbolise rejoicing. There’s a similar Sunday in Lent, you may recall – the fifth Sunday, known as “Laetare” or “Be happy” Sunday. These seasons of preparation are seasons when we are, or should be, aware of our sinfulness, our need to repent, and the reason why the Son of God took flesh and died for us. The readings, in general, reinforce that atmosphere. But today – and today’s Lenten equivalent – are quite different. Today we remember not so much our sinfulness as the fact that our sins have been forgiven. Not so much that Christ died as that he rose again and all is well. Not so much that he came in poverty and was exiled, persecuted and judicially murdered as that he came at all. Today we lift up our eyes and look towards the Incarnation. And you know, that’s the reason why I so much hate our “consumer society’s” premature Christmas season. As some of you may know, I was a Benedictine nun for twenty years; and one of the wonderful things about that way of life is that the liturgical calendar, life with God and his saints, becomes much more real than the secular one. As the saying goes, “the veil is very thin”. In some ways, for me, it still is. At a certain point in Advent – more often than not either Gaudete Sunday, the day before, or the day after – everything shifts. When the Christmas season begins in September, or even on St Andrew’s Day, that shift is impossible, and the amazingness of grace – of the Incarnation – never really gets the chance to hit home.
Is it really more difficult to be a Christian in this society than in earlier times? It does seem so, it does feel as if everything conspires to make the veil as thick as possible. And if society militates against Christians, maybe it is time for us to fight back. Not by being argumentative, much less by being violent, but by making sure that our own minds and our own hearts, and if at all possible our own homes, are places where the veil is as thin as possible. The Advent and Christmas season is a perfect opportunity – the church takes us by the hand through them, if we will only go with it.
I don’t know whether any of you has had the same experience as I have recently had when faced with the newspapers, or the news in any form. It is so overwhelmingly bad, and so largely tragic, that it was threatening to become altogether too much. Sometimes it is a stark choice between going under or getting things in perspective – and that has got to be God’s perspective, or as near as we can get to it, as that is the only one that takes in all the data. It’s not easy to do, partly because obviously we haven’t got all the data, and partly because it can feel escapist, or unreal. Pie in the sky, in other words. Quite true, we haven’t. But it is certainly not escapist or unreal. Just as the liturgical calendar is the real one – the Kingdom of Heaven is within us NOW – and the secular calendar is simply the one that we run our day-to-day lives by, so the joy of the Lord is the real one and the struggles of this life are simply the ones that we have to get through somehow, with God’s help and according to God’s perspective, until...until…
I’ve mentioned before that I always read very slowly the texts I am to preach on, listening carefully for the phrase that God will underline in red for me. Today’s was” “At that time”. “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home.” I doubt if anyone else noticed it – we may all read or hear the same Scripture, but God uses it to say a different thing to each of us. The Fathers of the Church have a lot to say about the timing of the Incarnation, and why it was exactly the right time. In fact, whatever God does, he does not only perfectly, but at the right time, and it is wonderful to realise how the liturgy of the church guides us to see it. And that applies not just to the great sweep of history, but to our own lives. I am not pretending that life is one great picnic. For many people it is one long – or short – tragedy. For the majority of the human race it is a ceaseless life-or-death struggle. For us too, sometimes, in our western, middle-class, reasonably prosperous way, it can be a great struggle, sometimes more than we can bear without help. But the help is there, although sometimes we may have to swallow our pride, and find a lot more courage than we ever thought we had, to ask for it and take it. It’s known as grace.
So let me repeat some less well-known words of Julian of Norwich, which have been rather like a life-raft of joy for me for at least thirty years, and will be until that time of gathering and bringing home comes for me. I commend them to you for the same purpose:
He did not say: “Thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be dis-eased”; but he did say: “Thou shalt not be overcome”.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Candor est lucis aeternae et speculum sine macula
“They flew away like so many sparrows; only there were more of them”. This sentence, from one of my favourite childhood books, still makes me chuckle. And I see no reason why a text for a sermon should not be modelled on a phrase taken from the adventures of Professor Branestawm and his friend Colonel Dedshott; you can find truth anywhere, if you are looking for it.
And today, in Advent, which is the season of the Mother of God, I want to talk about Mary; not because she is something different from us, something halfway between ourselves and God; but because, precisely, she is just like us, only more so.
Today some Christians are celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception. This is not the same as the Virgin Birth – that Jesus was born of Mary through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, not in the normal way, of Mary and Joseph – but the belief that the Mother of God was sinless from the very moment of her conception (that is, she did not inherit original sin as the rest of humankind does). Whether it is true or not (and how can we possibly know?) it is in my opinion a very beautiful belief and one that expresses not only the great power of God and the great holiness of his Christ, but also the value he places on humankind. Eadmer of Canterbury, defending the teaching, said: “It was fitting for the Mother of God to be sinless; God was certainly able to make her so; therefore he did.” Of course, the “therefore he did” is doubtful logic, if it’s logic at all, but I think this little sentence makes it quite clear that if the doctrine honours anyone, it is God, and Mary only by the way. And that should be the case with any teaching about Mary, and any veneration of her.
This belief is rather like the instinct, when a new little person comes into the world, to make things as good for them as possible. We redecorate the spare room to make a nursery, or if that’s beyond our means, we provide a new soft blanket or a furry toy. Maybe a better analogy is the advice given to pregnant women not to smoke or drink – not for the woman’s sake, but to honour this new person by making their first dwelling as worthy as possible.
It wouldn’t have mattered if Mary had had the occasional roll-up or dram. That is not unsuitable for the Mother of God. But for there to be any stain of sin – the theologians’ instinct said: no. And there was something correct about that instinct; because sin alone, and not smoking or drinking, is the ruin of humankind.
I know that many Christians of the reformed traditions are uncomfortable with too much talking about the Mother of God, and given the history of Mariology I do understand why. But, in fact, anyone who considers the birth of Christ to be the central event of history, the moment at which heaven and earth were united in an admirable exchange, should quite naturally want to “visit” her, as you might visit the place where someone you greatly admire was born, or lived. I’d love to see Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born and lived; to walk around the same streets as he walked, and remember the things he said about them. Copenhagen may well be a beautiful city, but that isn’t why I want to go there. If any of you have been to the Holy Land, you may well have been overawed by beauty of the landscape and the buildings, but that’s not why you went.
Don’t be put off or confused by the excesses that do, undoubtedly, take place with regard to Mary. Mary is not a mediator between ourselves and God: there is one mediator, Jesus Christ. Mary has not got special, semi-divine powers; she prays for us as do the other saints, and our dear ones who have gone to God before us. The point of Mary - like the point of everything – is Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing, I believe, that we have been told so little about her. Of course it is a human instinct to embellish and invent – there wouldn’t be any historical novels otherwise – but what we do know about Mary is all we need to know, and inventing other things does little other than diminish her.
So what do we know? What does the canonical scripture tell us about her? That she was married to a man of the house of David; that she conceived her son by miraculous means; that she was pronounced blessed – twice - because of him; that she suffered persecution because of him, and was told there was worse to come; that she did not understand what he said, but accepted it and pondered it; that she was there when he was crucified. And that she was to be found among the faithful after Pentecost.
That is all; and there is nothing there that does not point to her son; she was created by him and for him and nothing extraneous to him has been recorded of her.
If I could choose what people would say of me after my death, I can think of nothing better than that. “Nought be all else to me save that Thou art”. But how far it is from being the truth! And how far I am from even desiring it, if my actions, and even my words, are any witness.
Mary is, as Wordsworth put it, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” not for fanciful or pious reasons about which, in fact, we know nothing at all. She is so because she is what we were created to be: so far as we know, she existed only to build up the Kingdom of God. She was like us; only more so.
Immaculate? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly the greatest of all creatures. Not in her actions, so far as we know. Not in her words, though the Magnificat is one of the most universally recited texts among Christians. But in her transparency, in her refusal to get in the way, her refusal to “be” anything on her own account. Her only purpose on earth was to be the channel of the Incarnation and in that sense – yes – the channel of our salvation.
Mary is a good companion for Advent, a time when we should be trying to focus our lives more sharply on the coming of Christ and his kingdom, at Christmas, at the end of the world, and at the end of our own life. We are preparing to ask Christ to descend to us, cast out our sin, and be born in us. There is no-one who knows more about that than the woman he chose to be his mother.
So let us pray: O God, who didst endue with singular grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Vouchsafe, we beseech thee, to hallow our bodies in purity, and our souls in humility and love; through the same our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
And today, in Advent, which is the season of the Mother of God, I want to talk about Mary; not because she is something different from us, something halfway between ourselves and God; but because, precisely, she is just like us, only more so.
Today some Christians are celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception. This is not the same as the Virgin Birth – that Jesus was born of Mary through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, not in the normal way, of Mary and Joseph – but the belief that the Mother of God was sinless from the very moment of her conception (that is, she did not inherit original sin as the rest of humankind does). Whether it is true or not (and how can we possibly know?) it is in my opinion a very beautiful belief and one that expresses not only the great power of God and the great holiness of his Christ, but also the value he places on humankind. Eadmer of Canterbury, defending the teaching, said: “It was fitting for the Mother of God to be sinless; God was certainly able to make her so; therefore he did.” Of course, the “therefore he did” is doubtful logic, if it’s logic at all, but I think this little sentence makes it quite clear that if the doctrine honours anyone, it is God, and Mary only by the way. And that should be the case with any teaching about Mary, and any veneration of her.
This belief is rather like the instinct, when a new little person comes into the world, to make things as good for them as possible. We redecorate the spare room to make a nursery, or if that’s beyond our means, we provide a new soft blanket or a furry toy. Maybe a better analogy is the advice given to pregnant women not to smoke or drink – not for the woman’s sake, but to honour this new person by making their first dwelling as worthy as possible.
It wouldn’t have mattered if Mary had had the occasional roll-up or dram. That is not unsuitable for the Mother of God. But for there to be any stain of sin – the theologians’ instinct said: no. And there was something correct about that instinct; because sin alone, and not smoking or drinking, is the ruin of humankind.
I know that many Christians of the reformed traditions are uncomfortable with too much talking about the Mother of God, and given the history of Mariology I do understand why. But, in fact, anyone who considers the birth of Christ to be the central event of history, the moment at which heaven and earth were united in an admirable exchange, should quite naturally want to “visit” her, as you might visit the place where someone you greatly admire was born, or lived. I’d love to see Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born and lived; to walk around the same streets as he walked, and remember the things he said about them. Copenhagen may well be a beautiful city, but that isn’t why I want to go there. If any of you have been to the Holy Land, you may well have been overawed by beauty of the landscape and the buildings, but that’s not why you went.
Don’t be put off or confused by the excesses that do, undoubtedly, take place with regard to Mary. Mary is not a mediator between ourselves and God: there is one mediator, Jesus Christ. Mary has not got special, semi-divine powers; she prays for us as do the other saints, and our dear ones who have gone to God before us. The point of Mary - like the point of everything – is Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing, I believe, that we have been told so little about her. Of course it is a human instinct to embellish and invent – there wouldn’t be any historical novels otherwise – but what we do know about Mary is all we need to know, and inventing other things does little other than diminish her.
So what do we know? What does the canonical scripture tell us about her? That she was married to a man of the house of David; that she conceived her son by miraculous means; that she was pronounced blessed – twice - because of him; that she suffered persecution because of him, and was told there was worse to come; that she did not understand what he said, but accepted it and pondered it; that she was there when he was crucified. And that she was to be found among the faithful after Pentecost.
That is all; and there is nothing there that does not point to her son; she was created by him and for him and nothing extraneous to him has been recorded of her.
If I could choose what people would say of me after my death, I can think of nothing better than that. “Nought be all else to me save that Thou art”. But how far it is from being the truth! And how far I am from even desiring it, if my actions, and even my words, are any witness.
Mary is, as Wordsworth put it, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” not for fanciful or pious reasons about which, in fact, we know nothing at all. She is so because she is what we were created to be: so far as we know, she existed only to build up the Kingdom of God. She was like us; only more so.
Immaculate? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly the greatest of all creatures. Not in her actions, so far as we know. Not in her words, though the Magnificat is one of the most universally recited texts among Christians. But in her transparency, in her refusal to get in the way, her refusal to “be” anything on her own account. Her only purpose on earth was to be the channel of the Incarnation and in that sense – yes – the channel of our salvation.
Mary is a good companion for Advent, a time when we should be trying to focus our lives more sharply on the coming of Christ and his kingdom, at Christmas, at the end of the world, and at the end of our own life. We are preparing to ask Christ to descend to us, cast out our sin, and be born in us. There is no-one who knows more about that than the woman he chose to be his mother.
So let us pray: O God, who didst endue with singular grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Vouchsafe, we beseech thee, to hallow our bodies in purity, and our souls in humility and love; through the same our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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