A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

Sermon 15 February 2009
2Kings 5:1-14, 1 Cor 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities, and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.”

Today’s readings very definitely want us to think about leprosy. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, even for those of us who have never to their knowledge seen a leper and are in no danger of catching the disease themselves. But given the fact that we are so used to the Cross that it leaves most of us unmoved, it is no bad thing to think about something which is still painful to us, in connection with the Lord. But leprosy? In connection with the Christ? Why not? The idea dates back to the Isaiah passage I have just quoted, although most versions – the Douay version is an exception – do not use the word itself. The Douay has “We have thought him as it were a leper” for “We considered him stricken by God”; and the phrase “One from whom men hide their faces” is simply a euphemism for a leper.

I don’t suppose many people now remember the novel “Christ Recrucified”, but it was much read and discussed some forty years ago. I must have been thirteen at the most when I read it, and I remember very little about it, except that the hero Manolios (Emmanuel), the “Christ” of the title, was suffering from a mysterious disfiguring disease – not leprosy, but something very like it – and this was one of the reasons why he was persecuted. Indeed, the only reason I now remember. That idea, and its connection with Christ himself, has remained with me ever since.

I’ve often thought, in this connection, of the way in which Jesus dealt with lepers. It is striking that he never touched the possessed – or not until he had cast out the demon – but touching was his normal response to the sick, and his normal way of healing them, including the lepers. He did not hesitate to do what would not only have put him, in the view of the time, at great risk of contracting leprosy himself, but would have also made him ritually unclean. It’s obvious that he didn’t care much about ritual uncleanness, but didn’t he care about the risk of leprosy? I’m not one of those who believe that Jesus, being God, had a perfect knowledge of all arts and sciences, and so would have known, as we do today, that leprosy is in fact not very contagious. He would have had the same belief as everyone else, and no doubt the same instinctive horror of leprosy and lepers. And, I think, more so, because he knew who he was and he knew Isaiah. Just as I’m sure he thought of Nebuchadnezzar and his madness while he was himself in the wilderness with the wild beasts and was wet with the dews of heaven, and may have consciously accepted the possibility that madness, at least temporary madness, might be the will of the Father for him too (and did he not feel that also in Gethsemane?) just so he may have lived consciously with the possibility that Isaiah’s prophecy might be fulfilled literally.

He certainly did nothing to avoid it. That doesn’t just show that he was an extremely courageous and selfless man – though he was – and it has nothing in common with the heroics, admirable though they are, of Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena. It was simply a total openness to the will of the Father. Jesus had a human nature like ours: there were things from which he shrank, and things he preferred to other things. But he never protected himself against any thing unless he knew it to be contrary to the Father’s will for him. He did know it was contrary to the Father’s will for him to be thrown off the cliff at Nazareth or stoned in the Temple. And as his consummation approached, its nature became ever clearer to him until the point at which he saw it as clearly as if it had already taken place, though even at that point his openness to the Father’s will received its final proof. And it was then, in Gethsemane, that he understood Isaiah’s prophecy. Because his treatment of lepers, his willingness to lay himself open to leprosy, even, perhaps, a sense that it might be decreed for him, was in a deep sense an entirely sound instinct: no, he was not to contract physical leprosy, but at the time when he was most the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, he was to experience the most terrible form of leprosy as belonging to him, as forming part of his being.

Because physical leprosy is no more than the shadow of sin, though not in the sense that it follows upon sin, but in the sense that there is a natural connection of thought between them. Leprosy is the epitome of physical loathsomeness and sin is spiritual loathsomeness. The real fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy was when the Lord was faced with that loathsomeness not outside him – which was bad enough – but as it were within him, as it were a disease of his own spiritual organism, as if he, like the rest of us, carried within himself the seedbed of sin, the fomes peccati as Thomas Aquinas calls it. He was a horror to himself and must have felt that he was a horror to all the righteous, not to speak of his heavenly Father.

I make no apology for leaving the greater part of the rest of this sermon to John Henry Newman, who not only understood this, but could express it with a force which we of the twenty-first century have lost.

“There, then, in that most awful hour knelt the Saviour of the world, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of his foe – a foe whose breath was a pestilence and whose embrace was an agony. Here He knelt, while the fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind and spread over Him like a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He could never be…He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner…He found His eyes, feet and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One and not of God!...Of the living and the dead, of the yet unborn, of the lost and the saved…all the sins are there…They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to the Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, all but the real sinner.”

The Synoptic Gospels call the wonders that Jesus did “miracles”; St John calls them “signs”, and he is right, for so they were. And I think that one of the most fundamental signs is his healing lepers by laying himself open to contracting the disease – for that, precisely, is what he came to do for our souls.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God

When Soren Kierkegaard was asked, late in his writing career, why he had wasted so much of his time and energies in writing novels and other frivolous works, he had - he always had - an answer ready. Throughout his life as a writer, he claimed, his only intention was to bring people to God. That sounds fairly unlikely. How, people asked, could he claim that he had written a novel about a young man falling in love in order to bring people to God? His answer was this: people live on three different spheres – or stages - of existence: the aesthetic stage (unspiritual and basically shallow) the ethical stage, people who are trying to do the right thing, and the religious or faith stage, those whose whole desire is to give their lives to God. You have to catch people where they are, he said; they won’t respond to something in a different sphere from their own. So he wrote his novels to catch the people in the aesthetic stage; the philosophy to catch them in - or move them on to - the ethical stage, and the religious works to complete the job. Well, maybe. But the idea of catching people where they are is hugely important. It is important because it is what we must do, and more important because it is what God does.

When we read the Old Testament there is always a problem lurking in the background: God's - and Israel's - relationship with the other nations.. and, non-Christians would say, we are as bad. We think we are God's chosen people, we are Right, we have the monopoly of truth.
Why, anyway, should God have to “choose”? Why Abel not Cain, why Shem not Ham or Japheth, why Isaac not Ishmael, why Abraham, why David, why Jacob...why Israel…why Christians?
Er...why anyone?
Why anyone? The astonishing thing, the wonderful thing - and I mean wonder-full - is that God chooses anyone. The more wonder-full thing is that God chooses everyone, every one, each one, all and singular.

You have to take people where they are, and the twin ideas that God chooses each person as if they were the only person in the world and that God does not choose a person because they are righteous but because they are loved, are extremely difficult ones. We find them difficult, and we should be used to them by now. At the beginning of God's dealings with humankind they would have been quite impossible to grasp.

You see that with children; as they discover that either they have the toy or their sister has it, or either they are top of the class or Freddy is. It's him or me. and later this is reinforced over and over again; in school, at university, in the workplace and in social life.
If you are unsuccessful in all this competition, if it's never you who gets the gold star, the bicycle, the first-class degree or the girlfriend, then you are going to conclude that you are a failure, unloved and unlovable, not worthy of being chosen.
But if you are successful you will conclude the opposite. and that is a good start, even if at that point you still assume that your success means another's failure.
In the ordinary life of the world, the usual way to discover your worth is to discover that you have been preferred to another. In God's world it is not like that, but God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It's a wise woman who can experience failure and know that it makes no difference whatsoever to God's love for her, to God's choice of her.

So I come back to my original point: catching people where they are. Perhaps, in order to get across to humankind that they are a beloved and chosen race without doing violence to their free will, God had to - shall we say - rather do violence to his own nature as Love; First he had to get into their heads the idea that there should be anyone who is chosen and beloved by God. First an individual. Then a tribe. Then twelve tribes and then all who adhered to the faith of Israel.

Slowly, slowly, a small part of humankind began to understand just how great was God's love. “You are my people, I am your God.” Had he said straight off “I am everyone's God” it would have sounded like indifference rather than the universal love that it in fact is. It was not until Israel had really got it firmly into their head that they were first in God's heart that God could take the next step; he sent his son. The one who really was first in the Father's heart. To show us all, not just Israel, that incredibly - incredibly - in some way God is not enough to fill God's heart. To show us that in the infinite God an all-consuming love for one does not mean a lesser love for another.

You know, we still haven't grasped it, and the way non-Christians react to us shows that with horrible clarity. How many times will we have to be told that God hates nothing that he has made and does not wish the loss of any person? How many times will we have to be told that God does not choose anyone because they are already somehow worthy of his love? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. “I did not choose you because you were the greatest nation but because you were the smallest”. “You are the smallest of all the towns of Israel, Bethlehem Ephrata…” “When we were yet without strength…Christ died for the ungodly…God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
As Kierkegaard suggests, God takes us where we are. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us; he came not for the righteous but for sinners; he died for the ungodly. He did not say: “First become righteous and then I will do my stuff”.

and now we need to do what God does. Maybe Christianity has taken a step further than Israel. Maybe we do accept that anyone can find salvation. We are right to refer to ourselves as the Catholic church; Christianity should be truly catholic. But we are still in the business of exclusion, and people undoubtedly feel excluded by us. We all have people or classes of people we exclude, even if it's only “people who are still in the aesthetic stage”. But that won't do. If they are “without God in the world” that is not because God has rejected them; but simply because they do not see the world as charged with his grandeur. We may find them unlovely, but God does not. Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
So let's get this straight. We are indeed God's chosen people. We do indeed have the gift of knowing his only-begotten Son. But that's not because we've Got It Right, or are particularly lovable or particularly clever. We have been given a gift: we know ourselves to be fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, and the correct response to that gift is twofold: wonder, and the desire to share it. With everyone, every one, each one, all and singular. and we must take them where they are, not demanding more of them than God demanded of us. He died for us while we were yet sinners. can anything we do compare with that? and so let us pray:

Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son...to whom, with the Father, in the Spirit, be honour and glory in time and eternity. Amen.

Inconnu excepte de Dieu (sorry, can't do accents!)

1 February 2009 - Candlemas
1Sam 1:20-28, Lk 2:22-40

In my old parish church in Kent, there is a painting behind the altar depicting the Presentation of Mary in the Temple (a purely legendary event, but one to which there is considerable devotion among Roman Catholics). The striking thing about that painting, and the reason why I mention it today, is the way in which the child Mary is welcomed: by the High Priest, formally, and as someone already singled out as special.

You couldn’t imagine the Mother of God being received into the temple by the under-doorkeeper, could you? This is legend, and legends always conform to the laws of imagination. Special arrangements must always have been made for her. She must have been raised in the Temple, and she must have been received there in a special way. There have been attempts to create legends around Jesus, too, of course: the first ones were the apocryphal gospels, and the genre continues to this day. But these legends are powerless, because we have the gospels, and we know that Jesus was not received as someone special, that he was not even noticed until he began his public life. We find this difficult, but it is indisputably true.

I was talking recently to a man whose ideas are, shall we say, a little unusual. For example, he believes that we were created 300,000 years ago by aliens from outer space. I was finding it a bit difficult to feign interest, but I was suddenly jerked out of my glazed non-listening when he began on the subject of Joseph, Jesus’ foster father. “Of course,” said Hamish, “we have got it quite wrong. Joseph wasn’t a carpenter at all”. “Yes he was,” I protested, “the Greek has tektwn, the Latin faber. A joiner and builder. A jack of all trades. A brickie.” “Oh no” said Hamish. “that’s not what the original word meant. He wasn’t a craftsman, he was a ‘man of the craft’. The craft of the kings, the secret craft passed down from King David to his kingly descendants. What we are being told is that Joseph knew the craft of the kings”. I rolled my eyes. It’s not surprising that this idea appealed to Hamish, what with Rosslyn chapel and the Da Vinci Code and all. It is of course nonsense; by the time of Joseph there were innumerable descendants of David, and there is no reason to suppose that Joseph was in direct line to the throne. He knew he was of David’s line because the Hebrews, like the Scots, had a very strong sense of tribe and clan. I have at least two friends in Edinburgh who can tell me exactly which thrones they are heir to and why. The English are not at all like this, but most Scots can at least tell you their clan, especially if they are Highlanders. Freddy, who “should be” the present king of Scotland (and possibly England and France as well) is a businessman like any other; he has no arcane kingly knowledge. Things do not work that way, except in the fevered brain of the Hamishes of this world. But he is not totally wrong. We instinctively feel that someone who is significant in the supernatural sphere must also be so in the natural sphere. Something in us rebels against God incarnate being an insignificant, unnoticed brickie, son of the same. I remember how shocked we were as children when our scripture teacher suggested that Mary might have been a bad seamstress (going by the parable of the patches which came undone). How much more shocking would it be if I suggested that Jesus Christ might have been a relatively unskilled brickie; reliable and honest, of course, but not top-class otherwise. But after all, it’s no big deal whether God incarnate could build a wall straight or cut an accurate tenon joint. It doesn’t matter whether Jesus was a dicky brickie or a master carpenter. What is interesting to me on this feast of his presentation in the temple is that it is so different from that painting in Kent. The presentation of Jesus that we are given in the gospel is not a parallel to the legendary and much-embellished presentation of his mother.

There was no priest there to greet the Lord when he suddenly came to his temple. Someone handed over the two turtle-doves for the sacrifice, and someone took them back; but no-one even glanced at the little bundle in Mary’s arms. Until, on their way out, they met Simeon, and later Anna, the only two people who realised what was going on. Now, Simeon and Anna were not “personalities”. They were not a prophetic double-act. They may never have met before. They were, so far as anyone knew, in the temple by chance. They weren’t the dignified, almost Moses-like types we imagine, generally recognised as saints by the inhabitants of Jerusalem. We haven’t even any evidence that Simeon was old and venerable. He may well have been a nondescript middle-aged man whom no-one had ever noticed. God had noticed him; he was of great significance and importance to God. He was given the grace not only to sum up in a few words the mission of Christ and his Mother, but also explained exactly how it affects and changes our lives. As for Anna, she was the first person known to have brought the Good News to the Chosen People. But how would her words have been received? We know how the apostles received the women’s announcement of the resurrection, despite knowing, surely, that they were serious and respected people: “their words seemed to them to be idle tales; and they did not believe them”. And would Anna have been believed, Anna, one of the countless babushkas around in the temple, the equivalent of the little old ladies who irritate us by muttering their devotions and knocking over their walking sticks?

This was not because the Lord could not have arranged for a priestly or angelic reception-committee, he who could ask his Father and he would send more than twelve legions of angels. If the first Candlemas was very different from today’s, there was a reason.

Because this baby grew into the man who said: Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.

It is so difficult to do this. Not necessarily because we want praise, but because, somehow, unless someone notices what we do, we don’t entirely feel that we have done it. We have a need to be official, to be seen, almost to have our very existence affirmed. The extreme version of that is the culture of celebrity. It takes serious faith to need no other witness but God.

This feast, paradoxically, is a feast for the little people, the unseen people. Most of us, most of the time. Just like Jesus, most of the time.

People sometimes complain that it’s ridiculous to expect us to “imitate Christ”. How can we imitate God incarnate? But yet again, as always, all we have to do is look. Of course Jesus loved preaching and teaching and healing. But I rather think that he was happiest, most himself, when he was alone with his father, silent, unnoticed. And it’s the best place for us to be if we want to be like him, and the safest: hidden with Christ in God.

Jonah Man Jazz

Nineveh City was a city of sin,
The jazzin’ and the jivin’ made a terrible din;
The beat groups playin’ the rock an’ roll:
And the Lord he said: Well bless my soul!
The people wouldn’t listen, danced night and day,
No time to work, no time to pray:
The beat groups playin’ both day and night:
And the Lord he said: Well, this ain’t right!

It’s a pity that when we hear of Jonah, the first thing we think of is the whale. You might argue that that is partly Jesus’ fault: when he refers to Jonah it is to use his stay in the whale as a symbol of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. To be frank, I don’t think Jesus meant us to take this reference quite as seriously or as literally as we seem to have done. It was surely not a serious parallel, as if Jonah had been swallowed “in order to foretell” – or even foreshadow – the Son of Man’s sojourn in the heart of the earth. And it makes me tired when scholars argue at length about the “problem” of the “three days and three nights”. All Jesus meant, I suspect, was that for God nothing is impossible. Jonah, once swallowed by the whale, was a s good as dead – indeed, under normal circumstances would have been dead – and yet emerged miraculously unscathed, through the power of God, to go and fulfil his task. Jonah does not foreshadow Jesus; he is certainly not a type of Jesus except in the very loosest sense. He is a cross between Jeremiah at his most recalcitrant and the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Though I suppose that if Jesus could compare the Father with an unjust judge, he wouldn’t have had any problem with being himself compared with the elder brother. As I’ve suggested before, the phrase used by the father in the parable “You are always with me, and all I have is yours” is highly significant in that regard.

The point about the Book of Jonah – and that’s why it doesn’t matter in the least whether or not it “really happened” as told – of course it didn’t – is repentance. And sin. The sin, I think, not so much of the Ninevites, who did not know their right hand from their left, as of Jonah. If anyone is a sinner in this book, it is its “hero”. The Ninevites, in the Book of Jonah, far from being an example of sin, are an example of conversion, of faith, of obedience to God. When we say “Nineveh”, we should feel not as if we had said a slightly less shocking version of “Sodom and Gomorrah”, but as if we had said “Jerusalem” or “Rome”. When we say “Jerusalem” we do not think of the Jerusalem that persecuted and crucified the Lord, and when we say “Rome” we do not think of the corrupt centre of a corrupt Empire, or of the immorality and corruption which have existed in it since, and not only in its secular part. We think of the Jerusalem which foreshadows the Kingdom of God, and we think of Rome, which was, and to some extent still is, the heart of the Church. Nineveh’s sin, like the sin of Jerusalem and Rome, like all repented sin, has been wiped out by the glory of its conversion. We know that all the righteous who died before the coming of Christ are, all the same, redeemed by his blood. And so Nineveh, like the church which is symbolised by Jerusalem and Rome, has, in her conversion, been sanctified by Christ, who loved her and delivered himself up for her, that he might present her to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. The idea that God was primarily angry with Nineveh – as the king of Nineveh believed – has no basis in the text of the book. Its wickedness “was come up before him”, but he shows clearly at the end of the book that his motive was quite different. I suppose that, had Nineveh not repented, God would have carried out his threat to destroy it, just as he did – finally – to Sodom and Gomorrah, but his desire is that all should be saved; he is not only slow to anger and rich in mercy, he is love itself. And love is what he feels for Nineveh. Incidentally, you will search in vain for any suggestion that he was “angry” with Sodom and Gomorrah, except in the words of Abraham as he sought to persuade God not to destroy the innocent with the guilty.

If God threatens retribution for sin, it is not because he is angry. Or rather, he is angry, in the way one might be angry with a small child who is poking a metal skewer into an electric socket. God threatens when the love he has shown has not had the desired effect in leading his beloved back to him – or back to whatever, in their knowledge of the natural law, they understand of him. Jonah would have rather liked to see Nineveh destroyed – what a demonstration of the power of the God of the Hebrews! He was, he felt, a righteous man – though, as we know, God’s choice does not always, or even usually, fall upon the righteous – and therefore he should be the only one to receive God’s favour. More: he was a Jew, a member of the chosen people, and the Ninevites were Gentiles. I nearly said “goyim”. That is certainly how Jonah regards them. however, unfortunately God does not, and Jonah does not approve of Him. Why exactly did he refuse to go to Nineveh in the first place? Could he have been afraid of the king of Nineveh and how he would respond? He does not seem a very terrifying character. No; I think that from the first Jonah was so disgusted at the thought of God taking any notice of these sinners – other than to send down fire from heaven upon them – that he flounced off to Tharsis in a sulk. It did not occur to him. I suggest, that God would disagree with him or rebuke him, let alone punish him. He was, after all, a privileged person…And despite his superb canticle, and despite his very effective preaching, he did not emulate the Ninevites’ conversion. It did not occur to him that he needed to be converted; even when he had been punished for his disobedience, he believed that all God wanted was that his command should be obeyed. Jonah did not know that – as St Benedict says – if we murmur, not only in words but even in our heart, our work will not be pleasing to God, who sees that our heart is murmuring.

Yes, God was pleased at the obedience without delay of the Ninevites. But he was not pleased with Jonah, although he had been the material cause of that conversion. There are in God’s eyes two capital sins: idolatry, and lack of love. Or perhaps I should say there is one; what is idolatry but lack of love towards the God who made us? And here was Jonah committing both: lack of love towards his brothers the Ninevites, and idolatry in placing himself before God. The Douay version, in its heading to Chapter 4, gives: “Jonas, repining that that his prophecy is not fulfilled”. What mattered to Jonah was the fulfilment of his own prophecy, not the fulfilment of God’s loving mercy. It is perhaps worth noting that it was Jonah’s own fault if his prophecy was not fulfilled; had he preached what, by his own admission, he knew to be true, namely that the city would be destroyed IF its inhabitants did not repent, his prophecy would indeed have been fulfilled.

God’s final attempt to convert Jonah can be interpreted in may ways; but one thing it certainly is is an attempt to teach him about love. God's method is to keep giving, whether we respond or not; it did not seem to penetrate Jonah’s thick skull – or heart – that he in no way deserved this special treatment, or did he have any justification for complaint when God’s free gift was withdrawn. He was not “grieved” for the ivy, but for himself. I doubt whether he would have been capable of grieving for anyone, or anything, else. God’s suggestion that he might be was a final attempt, by irony, to get him to see the true situation. And there follows what is, to me, one of the most precious verses in the Bible, surpassed only by that same God’s cry on Calvary: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. God says to Jonah: “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” Ignorance may not be a defence in human law, but it is with God, who will go to almost any lengths to exonerate his children.

But it is “almost”. A cut-off point does exist, and then as the tree falls, so shall it lie. We do not know what happened to Jonah, and it is none of our business. What is our business is to look to ourselves and apply the lesson. While we shouldn’t be tax-collectors, sinners or idolaters, while we should learn to tell our right hand form our left, it is better to be all these things and repent, than to be the “righteous” person who believes he has no need to repent, and that he has no responsibility for seeing that others repent. Had God destroyed Nineveh, he might well have had the same message for Jonah as he later had for his descendants: “Do you think that they were sinners above all men because they suffered these things? No, I tell you; but unless you do penance, you shall likewise perish.” It is not only in connection with “outsiders” that God says, again in the words of “Jonah Man Jazz”

Take my warning
early in the morning,
as early as you feel inclined:
Shout to the people,
Shout from every steeple,
tell them the judgement bell has chimed;
And I will smite ‘em
Ad infinitum
If they do not turn to Me once more!

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be

18 January 2009
is 62:1-5, 1 Cor 6 11-20

What are we intended to learn from these readings? The answer is not as obvious as it might appear. Yes, the obvious subject of the reading from Paul is sexual immorality, and you could certainly leave it at that. His advice is perfectly good, if not exclusively Christian except in its manner of expression, and we would all do well to follow it.

However, there are a few hints in that passage as to what the two readings, taken together, are really about, and the passage from Isaiah clinches it. As always, the meaning is love, God’s love for us and the love that that should elicit from us.

Undoubtedly it is faith that saves us, and not good works, but of the three dispositions that Paul lists as necessary later in this epistle, the greatest is love, and love in us human beings is a response and necessarily shows itself in action. In God, of course, love is not a response; it is part of his nature. God does not love us because we are lovable; we are lovable because he loves us into being and loves us into lovableness.

The phrase I used then: “God loves us into being” is a clue to why these two readings go together so well. In the Old Testament the relationship between God and humankind is seen as analogous to that between a husband and wife; and that is what Paul has in mind when he writes to the Corinthians. The classic text here is Ezekiel 16:
“This is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. Then I passed by and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, "Live!" I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels. Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign LORD, and you became mine. You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen. And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendour I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign Lord. But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute.”

This is a recurring theme in the prophets, if not usually expressed with quite such forcefulness (and what I have given you is an expurgated version). We would not now look on the relationship of marriage as being so unequal, but if we can see it in the context of the time we will understand why it is such a good analogy for God’s relationship with us. In Biblical times it was difficult for a woman to manage unless she was under the care of either a father, a brother or a husband. The father would in the normal way of things die before her; the brother might have more than enough to cope with with his own family; the husband therefore was in a way the woman’s saviour, and she owed him gratitude for making her life possible. He was not, of course, her creator, but without him she might well be destitute, and destitute in a world without health service and benefits; he had not brought her into life, but he certainly preserved her in life. That, I believe, is the background to the double standard that still exists today regarding adultery or sexual misconduct. A promiscuous man is seen as “sowing wild oats”; a promiscuous woman is seen as “no better than she should be”. It is not so long since having a child out of wedlock was enough to ruin a woman’s whole life. Similarly, a man having an affair is seen as “having a bit on the side” while a woman is seen as a home-wrecker. In the west in the 21st century this is ridiculous. In biblical Israel it wasn’t. In the west in the 21st century describing the church (or the individual Christian soul) as the bride of Christ is misleading and confusing. In biblical Israel describing Israel as the bride of YHWH was an extremely clear and hard-hitting metaphor.

It’s because of this huge change in culture that it is even necessary to explain what these readings are about. And what they are not primarily about is sexual immorality. They are about faithfulness and gratitude. And, of course, about God’s love.

When King David repented of his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, he said “I have sinned against the Lord”. He did not say he had sinned against Bathsheba or Uriah, although he most certainly had done. Because all our sins are ultimately sins against God, and that is why they matter even if no other human being is hurt by them. What is the reason Paul gives when he adjures us to “flee from sexual immorality”? It is that our bodies are members of Christ himself and we are not to take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute; and that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in us, and whom we have received from God. We are not our own; we were bought at a price.

It is impossible adequately to grasp what we owe to God. Our creation, our preservation in being, our salvation. Everything. The biblical writers all struggled, using metaphor and allegory and analogy, all of which finally date and become incomprehensible or at least liable to be misunderstood. There is only one Word that does not date or change, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, Christ yesterday and today and the same for all eternity. We cannot live up to his fidelity, but that is the example we have been set.

Of course we must be faithful to our earthly partners. But fidelity to God comes first, because it is from our relationship with God that everything else flows. And it is not as if we had to do it all ourselves. As Paul said in his second letter to the Corinthians, our sufficiency, our capacity, is of God. You’ll find it summed up in Lamentations Chapter 3:

Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion therefore I will wait for him."
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

Glorious now behold him arise; King and God and Sacrifice

The Baptism of the Lord

Until very recently there was no feast of the Baptism of the Lord; Epiphany was the end of Christmastide and commemorated three very disparate events: the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of the Lord and the Marriage at Cana. So far we haven’t been given a separate feast for the Marriage at Cana, but I live in hope.

It is a good thing that our attention is now properly focussed on the Baptism; only liturgical geeks like me knew that it was one of the vents celebrated on 6 January; most people never thought about it at all, although it is one of the most important events in Jesus’ life, and is the source of arguably the most important event in our lives, our own baptism. This event was not only important to Jesus as an experience, as confirmation – if he needed it, and I suspect that it was at least welcome, if not necessary – that he was who he believed himself to be, but it was an event which actually made a difference to his status, and certainly marked the official opening of his mission as Messiah. It would be wrong, in fact it would be heretical, to suggest that it had an ontological erect on his person: he did not begin to be the Servant of God at his baptism, and he certainly did not become Son of God at his baptism. But I think there is a sense in which he did begin to be the Messiah, King, Priest and Sacrifice at his baptism. A parallel might be like this: the infant son of a king, when his father dies, does become king in fact – ontologically, one might say. But the exercise of his kingship does not take effect from the moment of his father’s death. A regent will rule on his behalf until such time as he is declared capable of ruling and – this is the point – anointed, or crowned, or whatever the ritual is. There was never a time when he was not king; but his reign was, all the same inaugurated at his coronation. It’s an imperfect parallel, but you see what I mean. That is why St Peter could say that “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ”. Jesus is the Son of God incarnate. There was no time when he was not Lord and Christ. But it was from his baptism that this actually took effect. “Christ”, like “Messiah”, means the anointed one, and this was his official anointing, the official anointing as King, Priest and Sacrifice of him who had always been so. It is clear from the sequel that it made a difference: Luke says “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert”. He had always been full of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But he was now full of the Holy Spirit to a purpose: for his mission, for his messiahship. Something new had begun.

So it was central to Jesus as a person. It was also central to us. Just as I said at Christmas that when Jesus entered into his inheritance, it was not he but the inheritance that came of age, just so when he was baptised, it was not he but baptism that was regenerated, and ourselves with it. Although the baptism Jesus received was John’s, he was himself instituting a new baptism, the sacrament of Christian baptism. God has always been our Father. But at this moment that fatherhood came into effect in its completeness. No, Jesus didn’t “become God’s Son” at his baptism. But I think we did; and our own baptism, the baptism of each one of us individually, is simply an individual application of what took place at the Jordan. It was the inauguration of Jesus’ mission; it was also the beginning of what he referred to as “his baptism”, for whose accomplishment or completion he longed.

It is interesting that the feast of the Baptism holds the same place in relation to Christmas as the feast of the Trinity does to Paschaltide. The feasts conclude the seasons, and herald the return of Ordinary Time the following day. They also do not seem to have much to do with the seasons to which they act as finale. Our own baptism day may be closely associated with our birth day, but Jesus’ wasn’t; it took place, Luke tells us, thirty years later; and I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The point is, I think, in both cases, to remind us that God is the Trinity. In Paschaltide we have been attending largely to the risen Christ, with a nod to the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; although Christ is glorified, we do still run the risk of forgetting, so to speak. “the rest of God”, especially since we’d previously spent six-odd weeks fighting our way through Lent in company of a very human Jesus. The risk is still greater during Advent and Christmastide, when we are looking at a human family with a baby – and babies bring out the human and sentimental in all of us. There are miracles, yes; there are the magi; and there are frequent reminders that this baby is more than he seems. But it isn’t enough. Whatever our intellects do, our devotion remains by the crib. It needs something to shake it back to the whole picture, not for the sake of cold realism – there is nothing cold about the Trinity, as St Augustine could tell you – but in order that we should not forget why we are celebrating at all. The Baptism of Jesus is the only clear manifestation of the Trinity. If the Transfiguration or possibly the Sermon on the Mount is the new Testament Sinai, then the Old Testament foreshadowing of the baptism is not Ezekiel and the waters flowing from the Temple or any such thing, but Abraham’s hospitality to the three mysterious beings at the vale of Mambre.

Whether it was a manifestation that all or some could see and hear, or whether it was for Jesus alone, is not clear in Luke’s version. But both Matthew and Mark say he saw the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descending. It isn’t very important. I once heard a sermon on this depicting the event as a wet young man standing in the river surrounded by a flock of doves, one of which settled on his shoulder. All right; maybe it did look like no more than that to bystanders, but it was more than that, and Jesus made sure his disciples – and we – knew it. I say “Jesus made sure”. Because if no one else saw what really happened, then this event joins those texts of the Gospel which one considers either most suspect or – as I do – most privileged, because they can come only from Jesus himself. It joins those precious moments of the Temptations and the Agony in the Garden. That is most suitable, because it shares another vital characteristic with them.

If the Baptism of the Lord is a clear manifestation of the Trinity, it is also a clear statement of the two natures in Christ, as are those two other occasions witnessed and transmitted by him alone. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil…For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted…For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.” However, if he had not been God, he would not have been able to redeem us – the devil knew that, which is why he was so keen to find out whether or not he was the Son of God. In Gethsemane the same applies. His weakness – his agony indeed – highlights his true humanity; his total obedience shows his unique sonship; and again, the magnitude of his suffering. paradoxically also show his Godhead. However, the Baptism is perhaps the clearest manifestation: he is the Son, the Second Person of the manifested Trinity; but he is also human, as he shows by submitting to the baptism of John. He does not suggest thereby that he has sins to repent of: as John says, he is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. He takes away the sins, yes, but takes upon himself, too; that is what Gethsemane is. No man, therefore could have suffered as he did. And that was what the Temptations were: in him the devil was tempting the whole human race. All this began at the Baptism.

He regenerated the baptismal waters and the human race: may God fulfil the grace of our own baptism and conform us perfectly to the image of his beloved Son.

Quis enim mihi est in caelo? Et a te quid volui super terram?

What can I give Him
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part;
But what I can I give Him:
Give my heart.