First Blessings

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

John 11, Part 1: I Am the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:1-27)

The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Let us pray.

73. A PRAYER OF SELF-DEDICATION (William Temple)

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (BCP 2019, p. 668).

N. T. Wright has a series of commentaries on the New Testament — and John Goldingay has a corresponding series on the Old Testament — which are often called the “For Everyone” commentaries because of their titles: “John For Everyone,” “Isaiah For Everyone” and so on through all the New Testament books and many of the Old Testament ones.

The “For Everyone” in the title is meant to say that the commentaries are not intended primarily for biblical scholars: no pages of footnotes, very little mention of Greek and Hebrew, no specialized knowledge required. These are commentaries for the rest of us, for those who want to understand and stand under Scripture faithfully without seminary training: in other words, these are commentaries “For Everyone.”

But, I think there is another meaning to “For Everyone” that perhaps the authors didn’t consciously intend. Take the Gospel of John, for example. It is written for everyone. The good news of Jesus it proclaims is for everyone. The Word has become flesh for everyone. For God so loved everyone that he gave his only begotten Son so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life. And that means that everyone of us must see himself/herself in the text. This gospel is written to, for, and about us, everyone. We don’t — we can’t — distance ourselves from it; we can’t hold it at arm’s length and make it merely a matter of objective study. It is for us; it is for everyone.

So, when we come to John 11, the account of the death and raising of Lazarus, we must take a For Everyone approach. Notice how the chapter opens: 1 Now a certain man was ill (John 11:1a). We know that the certain man was Lazarus; the rest of the verse tells us as much. But, if the Gospel is for everyone, then I am that certain man, too, as are you, regardless of gender. The story is for everyone, and everyone of us at the beginning of our stories is ill in body, mind, and spirit. Our bodies are subject to corruption and death. Our minds have been darkened and enthralled to the fallen powers. Our spirits are turned inward toward self and outward toward sin. We are, everyone of us, ill, and this story is our story; it is for everyone. As we pray in the Morning and Evening offices:

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires
of our own hearts.
We have offended against your holy laws.
We have left undone those things with we ought to have done,
and we have left undone those things which we out not
to have done;
and apart from your grace, there is no health in us (BCP 2019, p. 42, emphasis added).

That is Lazarus at the beginning of this chapter and everyone of us at the beginning of our stories: ill — apart from your grace, there is no health in us.

John then identifies Lazarus by his relationship with two women, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and then John further identifies Mary — there were lots of Marys in Israel at the time — as the one “who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair” (John 11:2), though that hadn’t happened yet in the chronology of the John’s Gospel. We actually get that account in the next chapter. And that little detail is interesting to me; John’s sequencing of the text and his language presume that his readers already know the story about Mary; they have heard it as part of the Gospel story. That is in beautiful fulfillment of what Jesus said on the night of the anointing: “Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her” (Matt 26:13). Now, again in the For Everyone mode of thinking, that means that no act of love and devotion accorded Jesus — nothing we do for love of him no matter how small — will go unnoticed by him, will be forgotten by him. No one else may notice, and those who do might misunderstand, but the Lord knows. Our good works, our acts of devotion, cannot put God in our debt, but neither does God ignore them. They are pleasing to him.

Lazarus’s illness must have been more than the ordinary cold or stomach upset, because the sisters send word to Jesus surely with the expectation that Jesus will intervene, most likely by coming to them to heal Lazarus. I have mentioned this before, so I won’t belabor it here, but the sisters’ message to Jesus is my paradigm for intercessory prayer for healing: “Lord, he whom you love is ill” (John 11:3b). Nothing more needed to be said. They made Jesus aware of the need — very simply and directly — and left the matter with him. That is prayer enough.

Jesus responds, presumably to the one who brought the sisters’ message and to the disciples within earshot, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). Let’s take the last part of Jesus’ statement first. It is reminiscent of what Jesus said earlier about the man born blind, in response to the disciples’ question:

9:1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him (John 9:1-3).

Why was the man born blind? That the works of God might be displayed in him. Why the whole painful sequence of events with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha? For the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. This might all sound a bit callous, as if the Creator manipulated his creatures just to somehow bring glory to his name. It might sound much like the behavior of the Greek and Roman gods who looked at humans as pawns, play things, and servants. And, it might well be that if we didn’t know the character of God, the cruciform character of Jesus who died for love of his creatures. It is the cross that allows us to accept these statements about God acting for his glory and the glory of his Son without false accusations of God being self-interested and self-absorbed. And it is also the reality that God’s glory and our good and not mutually exclusive options. The collect that we prayed to open this lesson — a prayer by William Temple — gets this right.

73. A PRAYER OF SELF-DEDICATION (William Temple)

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (BCP 2019, p. 668).

Being used, as God wills, redounds to his glory and to the welfare of his people, including us. There is no false dichotomy there; it is not either/or but both/and. Just think what everyone — Lazarus, Mary, Martha, the disciples, all the followers of Jesus since that moment — would have lost had Jesus prematurely healed Lazarus. That we may not understand what God is up to at the moment, does not mean that it is not for our good, and for God’s glory.

Here is a story from Saint Paisios of blessed memory.

“I met a wise, elderly woman who said to me: ‘My child, when I was still young, I prayed persistently to God for a certain thing. I prayer for it for twelve whole years! Yes, twelve years! He He knew that it was not for my own good. And so, He did not grant my request! It was only after twelve years that I understood why.’ Have you ever considered this? It took twelve whole years for her to realize this — twelve years of fervent, daily prayer from the depths of her heart; it seems almost unbelievable! The elderly woman continued: ‘Let us strive for God’s will and plan to be fulfilled in our lives. I no longer ask for specific things; instead, I pray only that He may accomplish His will, and grant me the strength to endure it. That is the safest path, my child. For I know…I know that He loves me.’

The first part of Jesus’ statement seems, on the surface, to be either false or misleading. “This illness does not lead to death.” We do not know when Mary and Martha received this word from Jesus: sometime before Jesus arrived in Bethany, and probably after Lazarus’s death. How might Jesus’ words have been received? In the mix of emotions, there must certainly have been confusion and misunderstanding. Unless Jesus, their friend and rabbi, was just plainly wrong, what did he really mean? We know more than the sisters did, so we know that the story of Lazarus’s illness and death does not end in death. Death doesn’t have the final word in the story. Yes, Lazarus will fall asleep; he’ll die. But that’s not the end: after death comes life — a temporary raising from the dead to point toward the final resurrection. Back to our For Everyone reading of the text. This is true for everyone. If the Lord tarries, our bodies will die. But, after that comes the resurrection. All of this with Lazarus is a sign — the last and climactic of the seven signs in John’s Gospel — a sign pointing toward Jesus’ own death, resurrection, and victory over all the powers of death and hell. And what is true for Lazarus — because of Jesus — is true for everyone. As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Cor 15:22).

Occasionally, I teach English in an ACT prep course, to help students improve their scores on the college entrance exam. One of the minor subtopics concerns transition words, words that logically and grammatically link statements. There are three basic type of transition words: (1) addition words like “and” and its synonyms, (2) contradiction words like “but” and its synonyms, and (3) cause and effect words like “so” and its synonyms. Part of the test concerns the proper choice of transition word. So, for example, suppose we have two statement.

Bob wanted to increase his strength and stamina, [transition word] he joined a gym.

What is the best transition word to link the two statements? We might use “and.” We wouldn’t use but; it makes nonsense of the the two statements. Probably the best choice is “so.” The two statements are cause and effect. Bob wanted to increase his strength and stamina, so he joined a gym.

Pardon the flashback to English class, but there is a purpose here. Consider these two statements and assume that you are not familiar with the story of Lazarus.

5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 [Transition word], when he heard Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was (John 11:5-6).

What is the most logical transition word: and, but, or so? Well, I might argue for “and” but I could make a better case for “but.” We would expect that Jesus’ love for the family would compel him to leave quickly to go to them and to heal Lazarus. That he doesn’t contradicts our expectations. So, we would expect to read, “But, when he heard Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

But, as you know, the text doesn’t treat the transition as a contradiction, but as cause and effect.

5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

This is part of the confounding logic of this story. Precisely because Jesus loved these three friends so deeply, he stayed where he was long enough for Lazarus to die and be entombed for four days before Jesus arrived. Think of the anguish; think of the disappointment, hurt, confusion, and possible anger the sisters must have felt when Jesus didn’t show up and their brother died after Jesus promised that “this illness does not lead to death.” And yet the text insists that all of this — Lazarus’s death and the sisters’ reaction — all of this was prompted by Jesus’ love for them. They faced their own questions. Here’s the question for us. Can we believe that? And, if we can believe it for them, can we believe it for everyone including for us? When the hard times come and we are confused and disappointed and hurt and perhaps even angry at God, can we believe that we are nonetheless caught up into the love of God in ways beyond our understanding, that God really is love and always acts toward his people in love? That’s the question the text poses us through that little transition word “so.” When we don’t understand what God is doing, when what God is doing is hard, what can we do? We can remember the character of God as revealed in his Son, whose glory was the cross and whose final word was not death by life. When I can no longer trust my own understanding, I must trust in the character of God.

Having waited long enough for Lazarus to die, Jesus then tells his disciples it’s time to go to Judea, to Bethany. Now, keep in mind that Bethany is just about two miles from Jerusalem. That’s not lost on the disciples; they see the implications and dangers of that.

8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?” 9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. 10 But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:8-10).

We know why the Jews are seeking to stone Jesus: the Sabbath healing of the man born blind and Jesus’ explicit statement, “I and the Father are one.” Had Jesus not escaped from them — it was not yet his time — the authorities would have arrested him, tried him, and tried to execute him. That will come soon enough, but not now. The disciples see the danger of Jesus’ return to Bethany. Jesus reassures them with what may have been a well-known colloquialism or perhaps one of his own making. It seems to mean something like this: “The night may seem to be closing in on us, but it’s still light; as long as I’m here it’s light. And, we still have work to do in this light. We won’t stumble. This will be fine.”

Then comes a little back and forth between Jesus and the disciples with the disciples, as often, misunderstanding Jesus until he plainly says:

“Lazarus has died, 15 and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him” (John 11:15).

There is that notion of all this playing out not just for the glory of God, but the sake of all involved.

Thomas often gets a bad rap: “Doubting Thomas.” Imagine being known forever for the very worst thing you ever did. But Thomas shines here, and we see his loyalty to Jesus, a loyalty willing to risk death:

16 So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16).

So, again, the text poses a question for everyone: Are you willing to take up your cross to follow Jesus, to risk everything to be faithful to him, to die for him if necessary? Perhaps we can only know the answer to those questions in the moment of decision. Peter was certain he would die for Jesus, and then denied him in the moment. What would I do? What I do now is pray for grace to be faithful should that moment come, and trust that the grace I need will be provided.

So the group travels to Bethany, a couple of days journey. The sisters’ house is crowded with mourners, many Jews among them, some perhaps skeptical of Jesus if not downright hostile toward him. Word comes to the sisters that Jesus is coming and is still a little ways off. And now the story hints at some interesting emotional dynamics, I think, though I wouldn’t want to make too much of this.

How would you describe Mary and Martha: their personalities, their relationship with Jesus? Based on what we know, which sister would you think would stay to care for the guests in the home and which might you suppose would go out to meet Jesus? This is another part of the story that confounds my expectations, just like with Jesus initially staying put and with Thomas being brave and faithful. Martha leaves her house and her hosting duties to go meet Jesus. Mary stays home. There is something of a role reversal here and I don’t know exactly how to read it. Perhaps Martha is just being Martha: the right thing to do, the culturally acceptable thing to do, is to go out to meet an honored guest, and so she does it. Perhaps Mary, who seems to be a bit more sensitive and less pragmatic than Martha, is so deeply hurt that she just doesn’t want to see Jesus right now. Of course, I may be reading too much into this. Maybe Martha got the news of Jesus’ arrival and Mary didn’t. Though that seems unlikely to me, it would explain everything. But, asking these questions is a way of once again reading the text for everyone. Read this way the text asks us some questions. How do you respond when you are in desolation, when you are disappointed with or angry with God? Do you run out to meet him like Martha, or do you befriend the desolation and sit in your familiar surroundings at some distance from God like Mary? That is a question for everyone, and I think it’s worth pondering. The right choice is always to run out to meet God.

Now comes the encounter between Martha and Jesus.

21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (John 11:21-22).

Let’s take Martha’s first statement: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” How do you read that — with what tone of voice? Is it accusation/recrimination: “Where were you, why didn’t you come?” Is it a simple statement of fact? “I know you could have done something had you been here.” Is it sorrowful resignation? “I know you did the best you could.” Is it something else? Probably all of these are questions for everyone. “Lord, we prayed. The whole church prayed. And you didn’t show up. You could have, but you didn’t.” I think most of us have had a conversation with the Lord like that, haven’t we? Certainly, the Psalmists did, and if we pray their prayers honestly, from the heart, we will have those conversations with the Lord, too.

Martha’s second statement is a bit more confusing in light of her later objection when Jesus commands the stone to be removed from the tomb: “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” What does Martha ask Jesus to do? She doesn’t ask for anything, doesn’t ask Jesus to do anything specific. Hers is an expression of faith, not an intercession, at least not explicitly. She probably knows that Jesus has raised others from the dead: the widow’s son at Nain and Jairus’s daughter. But, those cases were different. They were newly dead or recently dead — just “mostly dead” in the words of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. But Lazarus? He’s really dead, four days dead, dead and buried dead, decomposing dead. Does she think Jesus has that kind of power? Or is she just giving a general statement of faithfulness? “I still trust in you. My faith hasn’t weakened.” Listen to what St. Augustine has to say about this:

She [Martha] does not say to him, “Bring my brother to life again.” For how could she know that it would be good for him to come to life again? She says, I know that you can do so, if you want to, but what you will do is for your judgment, not for my presumption, to determine (Tractates on the Gospel of John 49.13).

That is a powerful word for everyone. I trust that you can do anything, but what you should do is for your judgment and not for my presumption. I can tell you what I desire, but I must follow that with “nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” In the final analysis, in the deepest part of me, I do want God’s will to be done, because I know that is best. I suspect that most of us struggle more with understanding and with the pain of being human than we do with faithfulness. It is hard to relinquish our own desires even when we know God loves us, isn’t it? The rich young ruler couldn’t do it. Jesus did, but only with bloody sweat, tears, and cries of anguish in the Garden.

We have all been to funerals and heard unhelpful — though often true — platitudes, and we’ve probably offered some ourselves: “Well, he’s in a better place now; at least she’s not suffering anymore; you’ll see him again one day” and such like.

I wonder if that’s how Jesus’ words sounded to Martha?

23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23).

The way Martha responds to this is incredibly significant, not just for this text, but for our understanding of the New Testament and its claim of the resurrection of Jesus. You know that the Sadducees did not believe in a final resurrection. The Pharisees did. The notion of resurrection, while present in the Hebrew Scriptures, developed and spread during the Babylonian exile and the intertestamental period. By the time of the second temple, many Jews, like Martha, affirmed the coming kingdom of God and the resurrection of the righteous dead to share in that kingdom. Now, here are the key notions: resurrection would mark the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and would usher in the last days when all God’s covenant promises were fulfilled. What no one expected was resurrection of one or a few individuals in advance of this, resurrection in the “middle of time” and not at the end. And that is exactly what Martha’s response reflects.

24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).

That means that Jesus’ coming resurrection was not on anyone’s radar. It simply was not part of the second temple thought world. No one — certainly not the Apostles — would think to make it up, would even consider making the resurrection of one man in the middle of the story a basis of the Messiah’s bona fides. The only reason for it being a fundamental part of the proclamation of the Gospel is that it happened, much to the surprise of everyone involved. But here, in John 11, Jesus gently nudges Martha toward an expanded view of the resurrection, prepares her for what is to come in just moments, and prepares her for what is to come just a bit later when he rises.

25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this” (John 11:25-26)?

The resurrection is not just an event in the far distant future. Resurrection is the quality of life that Jesus possesses, the life that he shares with those who believe in him.

Jesus’ actual statements to Martha are paradoxical. We know what they mean — almost certainly more than Martha did — but it’s not easy to order them like a logical, geometrical proof.

“Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live,” simply points to the general resurrection and fits easily with Martha’s worldview. Who will be resurrected to the life of the age to come and be part of God’s kingdom on the last day? Those who believe in Jesus. That is straightforward enough. It’s the next statement that is more difficult.

“Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” Clearly, Jesus cannot mean that those who believe in him will never experience physical death. But “death” is far more than a mere falling asleep. From Genesis on, death meant exile, separation from God. Adam is told that in the day he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he will die. And what happened on that day? He and Eve were exiled from the Garden away from the presence of God and banned from the tree of life. Adam died on that day. But, those who believe in Jesus will never die in that way. They will never be exiled, banished from God’s presence, banned from the tree of life. This is, I think, something along the lines of what Jesus’ statements to Martha meant.

And then he asked her the crucial question: “Do you believe this?” Not, “Do you fully understand this?” but “Do you believe this?” Again, that is the for everyone question that the text poses us: “Do we believe this?” Here we let Martha answer for us:

27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (John 11:27).

There is much her for us — for everyone — to ponder, and we still have much of the story left to go. But that must wait until next week.

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Just As He Was: Lectio Divina on Mark 4:35-41
(Isaiah 3, Psalm 106:1-12, Mark 4:35-5:20)

Collect
Set us free, loving Father, from the bondage of our sins, and in your goodness and mercy give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was (Mark 4:35-36).

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lectio Divina, sacred reading, is a means of engaging a holy text not for study or analysis, but for encountering the Lord in and through the written word. Both ways of reading are essential: study keeps lectio divina from going off the rails into fantasy and delusion, and lectio divina keeps the text from becoming irrelevant or dead.

Lectio divina has been a Christian practice likely from the first Christian engagement with the Scriptures. Origen practiced it in the second century. Saint Ambrose taught it to St. Augustine in the fourth century. Saint Benedict made it, along with the chanting of the Psalms, a cornerstone of his monastic rule. But, it was Guigo II, a Carthusian monk in the twelfth century who standardized the practice into four movements which he described as four rungs on the ladder leading from earth to heaven: lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio or reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.

In the first movement, lectio/reading, you simply read the text slowly, preferably aloud, and repeatedly, perhaps three times, listening for a word or phrase or image to emerge from the text as God’s particular word for you on this day, in this particular reading of the Scripture.

In the next movement, meditatio/meditation, you ruminate, you mull over the given word, not so much analyzing it but turning it over, looking at it from different angles, pondering it, savoring it, letting its meanings and implications wash over you.

Meditatio leads into oratio/prayer in which you engage with God based upon the text and your meditations on it. Perhaps you are led into a prayer of repentance or intercession or thanksgiving or praise; prayer takes many forms. But, just as God communicates with you through the Scripture, you respond to God through the same text.

The final movement or rung on the ladder is contemplatio, contemplation, which is a deep participation, a union with God. Strictly speaking, contemplation is not a thing we do or can do; if it comes, it is entirely a gift from God. At best, we can ready ourselves for it through the previous movements, and by sitting silently and receptively before the Lord during this final movement.

The Gospels provide abundant source material for lectio divina; the text from Mark today is a case in point. As I read it several times in preparation for this homily — in other words, as I stepped onto the first rung of lectio — a particular phrase kept forcing its way through to my attention. Here are the first two verses of the account:

35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” 36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was (Mark 4:35-36).

They took him with them in the boat, just as he was. That’s the phrase: just as he was. I have no idea why that phrase seemed important; at first glance it seems just like filler, like a toss away line. I’ve read it many times before and paid it no mind. Just as he was: somehow, though, it seemed important this time.

So, I began to mull it over: meditatio. Let’s hear it again in context.

35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” 36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was (Mark 4:35-36).

They took him with them just as he was on that day, when evening had come. Evening — the end of the day. What had he been doing all day that led up to this? Earlier in the chapter — earlier in the day — we find Jesus teaching the crowds. When I was young my Dad gave me a sound piece of advice: “Son, you need to get a good education because you’re too lazy to work a real job.” As a boy he had worked a farm. As a young man he had poured molten steel at the Knoxville Iron Company — hard, hot, dangerous work. He knew what it was like to be tired at the end of the day. In my second career, I taught high school. I don’t know if he would have counted that as a “real job,” but I know that I was often exhausted at the end of the day, too, both mentally from making a thousand decisions in real time and physically from standing on my feet all day. My shoulder hurt from writing on the board all day, and I was often hoarse from talking. Ask any good teacher: teaching can wear you out.

So, Jesus had been teaching all day. Though the text doesn’t mention it specifically, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been healing, too. Was he tired? Well, it was his idea to cross to the other side of the Sea of Galilee just to get away from the crowds. And, when he got into the boat, he fellasleep so soundly that even a violent storm didn’t wake him. So, yes; he was exhausted.

They took him with them in the boat, just as he was: worn out, wanting to get away from the crowds for awhile, spent and needing to recharge. What picture does this paint of Jesus? Here’s a man with the same human limitations that all of us face: fatigue, hunger, disappointment, fear. Just as he was meant, to some extent, just as they were, and just as we are. This points toward another scene of Jesus worn out, utterly spent, asleep — Jesus being lowered from the cross and laid in a tomb. There is just a hint of Good Friday in this story. And that might suggest that we are in for a resurrection of sorts, too. And, we are.

When I hear the words just as he was, I think of the words as-is. Those words generally come as something of a warning. When you purchase an item as-is, it generally means the sale is final, the product comes with no warranty, and if there are hidden flaws, well, you bought it and its your problem. As-is is the equivalent of the Latin phrase caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. You generally only buy something as-is if it’s the last one available or if it is heavily discounted. The disciples took Jesus into the boat just as he was, as-is, we might say. For better or for worse, with apparent limitations, and with much of the truth about him hidden from their eyes, they took him just as he was. Was he their last hope available? Peter says as much in John 6 when other disciples are leaving Jesus. Peter says essentially, “We have nowhere else to go.” Did the disciples get a good deal? Well, Jesus certainly wasn’t heavily discounted; they paid dearly to be his disciples. But, the rest of the story shows that they did, indeed, get far more than they thought. As-is turned out quite alright.

So here Jesus is, just as he was, passed out from exhaustion in the stern of the boat when a violent storm breaks on them, violent enough that seasoned fishermen, some of whom were very familiar with this body of water, fear they are perishing. They wake Jesus, probably with some pretty forceful shaking and loud shouting: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And here is another word that emerges from the text: teacher. Not Lord. Not even rabbi, master. Just Διδάσκαλε, teacher. That is how they thought of Jesus at this point in his ministry, at this moment in the boat: teacher — the task he had most recently been doing. As-is, remember, just as he was. But that is about to change.

I don’t know how you paint the mental picture of what happens next. The text simply says this:

39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm (Mark 4:39).

Was the scene dramatic? Did Jesus stand up erect in the heaving boat with legs spread widely to keep his balance, stretch out his hands toward the waves, look upward to heaven and shout over the wind, “Peace! Be still!” Or, did he just speak a quiet word without flair and without even getting up from his pallet? It doesn’t really matter or Mark would have told us. But, the event itself matters immensely, because it is a signpost pointing toward the resurrection.

The Jews were not seafarers. While they might venture out on the lake — from the sheer necessity of making a living from it — they did so tentatively, knowing that death might catch them unawares at any moment. They avoided the true sea, the Mediterranean, whenever they could. In their symbolic worldview, the sea was the enemy. It was the haunt of the fallen, evil powers who sought only to destroy. The sea was chaos itself. And that was more than merely symbolic; the depths were the domain of dark, chaotic, hostile spiritual powers who were just waiting an opportune time to unleash their fury. There is a hint of that in the creation account in Genesis 1:

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters (Gen 1:1-2).

The earth is tohu wa bohu in Hebrew, formless and void, covered with water and darkness. But, the Spirit of God is moving over the waters, exercising dominion over the waters, and bringing light to bear, order from chaos, and life. Only God has power over the dark forces present in the waters.

So, when we read this story of the storm through the eyes of the disciples — and through Mark’s eyes — we see the storm as the unleashing of chaos against Jesus and his disciples. We see in the storm and the sea the evil powers conspiring to destroy Jesus and the disciples before he completes his work on Calvary. We see death and hell stalking him and unleashing their fury against him. And we see Jesus, with just a word, bring them all to heel as he would one day in the not so distant future, when by his death and resurrection, he trampled down death by death and said, “Peace! Be still.” over the whole of creation. This story of the quieting of the storm is a resurrection story, a story of the defeat of the dark powers by God himself. The whole world was perishing in the furious onslaught of the fallen powers just as the disciples were perishing in the storm. Jesus was utterly spent and sleeping in the tomb just as he slept in the stern of the boat. But, when Jesus woke — there’s the resurrection! — he rebuked the fallen powers and spoke a word of peace. And just like God in creation, he brought order and life out of the chaos and death of the waters.

This is not just a nature miracle, Jesus exercising a bit of power over some aspect of creation. It is a clash of powers, with Jesus demonstrating sovereignty over all creation and over the dark forces that have usurped it and who seek to undo and destroy it. This is a signpost pointing toward the resurrection and even beyond it when Jesus says to his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18). How much of this the disciples in the boat with Jesus that evening understood is an open question. But, they had seen the sign and it made them wonder. Listen to how Mark closes this particular story:

41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him” (Mark 4:41).

The way Mark tells this story is a beautiful bit of literary theology. Notice how he “bookends” the tale. It starts here: “They took him with them in the boat, just as he was.” It ends in a very different place: “Who is this, then, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” They took someone familiar to them into the boat, someone they understood and were comfortable with: a teacher, worn out from a day with the crowds, wanting to get away for awhile and rest. They took him just as he was only to learn that he was much more than what they thought, that he was sovereign over nature and the dark powers lurking behind it, sovereign in a way that only God is sovereign.

This transformation of Jesus in their eyes reminds me of the Paschal (Easter) Homily of St. John Chrysostom:

Hell took a body, and discovered God.

It took earth, and encountered Heaven.

It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

These same words, with just a bit of editing, could be said about the disciples.

They took a worn out, exhausted body, and discovered the sovereign God.

They took to the sea, and encountered hell and Heaven.

They took him just as he was, and were overcome by what they saw him to be.

The disciples took Jesus into the boat just as he was at the end of this long, tiring day only to be overcome by what he was from before the foundations of the world and will be now and unto the ages of ages.

And then, brilliantly, Mark throws the disciples’ question right back to us, and we have to answer it for ourselves: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” That is Mark’s literary and theological genius. Now that we have done the work of lectio and meditatio together, this question beckons us to climb the third rung, oratio, to go in prayer to the one who is sovereign over wind and wave and death and chaos and hell and all things, to whom be the glory now and for ever. Amen.

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Larger On the Inside: Jesus’ Parable of the Wedding Feast
(Isa 25:1-9, Ps 23, Phil 4:4-13, Matt 22:1-14)

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Turn to page 55 in the ACNA Catechism To Be A Christian (The Anglican Church in North America, Crossways (2020)), to the section “Concerning Sacraments,” and you find this question and answer:

121. What is a sacrament?

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. God gives us the sign as a means by which we receive that grace and as a tangible assurance that we do in fact receive it. (Genesis 17:1-21; John 6:53-58; I Corinthians 10:16, 1662 Cathechism)

The Catechism goes on to define the two Sacraments of the Gospel that all Anglicans accept — Baptism and Holy Communion — and five others that are commonly accorded sacramental status and are often called Sacraments of the Church: confirmation, ordination, marriage, absolution, and anointing of the sick (ibid, p. 56).

All of these sacraments have a common characteristic, essential to the nature of a sacrament, and I would humbly suggest almost definitive of a sacrament:

A sacrament is something that, spiritually speaking, is larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Something that is ordinary, mundane, and small on the outside opens up to reveal the vastness of God on the inside: that is sacramental. The most iconic example of this, perhaps, is the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, called the Theotokos (the God Bearer). As an ancient hymn proclaims:

From you, our God who is before eternity, became a child!

He has made your womb His throne, making it more spacious than the heavens.

In you, O woman full of grace, all creation exults!

A Jewish woman, herself appearing ordinary, mundane, small on the outside carries within her the Son of God incarnate, the one by whom, through whom, and for whom all things in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen, were made, her womb His throne, making it more spacious than the heavens.

A sacrament is something that, spiritually speaking, is larger on the inside than it is on the outside because it opens up onto God.

Whether there are two sacraments or seven or seventy times seven is not a thing I care to debate. For the one with eyes to see and ears to hear, the world is awash with sacraments. The flowers on our altar each week are sacramental: small things of earth that — with eyes to see — open up to reveal the God of beauty who delights in diversity and complexity and color and aroma, and who delights to delight us in these things. The music of hymn and chant and chorus and praise is sacramental: small, just twelve notes on five lines and four spaces — sometimes a bit above and below — lifting our voices and hearts and eyes and ears to heaven where we see God enthroned high and holy and hear the seraphim call one to another “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa 6:3)! A Bible is sacramental: apparently nothing but a small volume of ancient religious texts like many others the world over, but for us, the very Word of God, “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).

A sacrament is something that, spiritually speaking, is larger on the inside than it is on the outside because it opens up onto God.

Let those with eyes see and those with ears hear.

Our texts today point toward another common feature of our lives — often ordinary, mundane, small — that can be, and should be, sacramental, that really is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, that opens up onto God: a feast, a banquet, a meal.

With the first hint of fall in the air, I allow myself to listen to the 1998 Windham Hill compilation album Thanksgiving; it will be my musical companion from now until the holiday itself. I sat in the park recently thinking of Thanksgivings past, particularly those of my childhood. Extended family gathered at my grandparents’ home next door, far too many people in far too little space. The dining room table itself, with leaves, filled the room and forced a certain familial intimacy. The table was always set with the silver used only twice a year and with the multi-colored, radioactive Fiestaware. Look it up if you’re under sixty. Food was abundant and rich and, well, everything Southern and bad for you and delicious. But this feast was more than a meal; it was larger on the inside than it was on the outside. It opened onto this great expanse of love. It opened onto God and his love for us, his bountiful care for us. It was sacramental, though I didn’t know the word or its meaning then.

I cherish those memories, even though they are also bittersweet. Most all of the people gathered at those feasts are gone now. I pray they are all with the Lord Jesus. The few that remain have scattered with time and distance. Though we don’t always realize it or acknowledge it if we do, there is a pall cast over every such feast, a veil, a covering spread there by the unwelcome, though not uninvited guest of death. You don’t think of this as a kid — deviled eggs and pie are on your mind — but the reality dawns as you get older.

But, if this feast is indeed sacramental, if it is indeed larger on the inside than it is on the outside, if it does open up onto God, then death cannot have the final word. Death may lurk in the corner of the dining room, but there is no place setting for death at the table. The prophet Isaiah saw a sacramental feast to come for Israel and for the world, saw it from the inside. He saw the glorious end, the telos, toward which this feast and every feast is meant to point. He wrote:

6 On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

7 And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.

8 He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.

9 It will be said on that day,
“Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.
This is the Lord; we have waited for him;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isa 25:6-9).

The time is coming, Isaiah says, the time is coming, St. Paul says, the time is breaking in even now, the cross and empty tomb say, when the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, and when Death is swallowed up in victory (see 1 Cor 15:53-54). As we proclaim at the Eucharist, that Great Feast that lies at the intersection of heaven and earth, that heavenly feast that every holy human feast points toward sacramentally: By his resurrection he broke the bonds of death, trampling Hell and Satan under his feet (BCP 2019, p. 133). And, as we sing in the Pascha Nostrum:

Alleluia. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us;
therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia (BCP 2019, p. 16).

Therefore, let us keep the feast, the feast that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, the feast that opens up onto God.

It wasn’t Isaiah only: David, the great king and sweet psalmist of Israel, also envisioned a sacramental feast. It is there in his best known and most loved psalm, Psalm 23. This psalm mixes metaphors and images. It starts as a pastorale, with sheep and shepherd and with the provision that the LORD, as shepherd, makes for his flock Israel: green pastures, still waters. But, then midway through the Psalm, we find ourselves walking in a dark, shadowy valley, stalked by death itself. Who are we at this point in the psalm? Are we still sheep? It is not perfectly clear, for the next image is that of a feast with us as honored guests. When sheep attend feasts it is typically on a serving platter and not seated as guests, so clearly a change of identity has taken place in the psalm.

“Thou preparest a table before me,” David writes, and the only “Thou” in the psalm is the LORD; we are the honored guests at the table of the Lord, a table He has prepared for us. But there is someone else in the room, too, lurking in the corner, not reclining at table: our enemies. Since the only enemy identified in this psalm is death, I must assume that death has somehow made it into the feast, not as guest but as interloper and that he has brought with him some of his compatriots, perhaps sin, perhaps hell. They crouch watching, waiting. And what do they see? They see us — you and me — seated at a place of honor and anointed with oil. And who in Israel were the anointed ones? Priests, prophets, and kings. With death looking on, the Lord — in the midst of the feast — catches us up into this great sacramental reality consecrating us as his priests, prophets, and kings, declaring that death no longer has dominion over us so that we can face death unafraid and proclaim:

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever (BCP 2019, p. 295).

This feast, too, is larger on the inside than it is on the outside because it opens up onto the Lord, and because it open up onto our consecration as his priests, prophets, and kings.

All of this — the sacramental nature of feasts, the vision of Isaiah of the removal of the pall of death, the psalm of David with the consecration of God’s people in the very presence of death and to the shame of death — all of this is in the background of Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast.

No feast is more sacramental than a wedding feast. Jesus makes that clear in his parable. While it is — on the outside — about a splendid table and an important festal gathering, on the inside it is about the kingdom of heaven. The wedding feast in the parable is larger on the inside than it is on the outside because it opens up onto God and his kingdom that is dawning in the person, in the life and ministry of Jesus.

You know the contours of the parable. A king gives a wedding feast for his son. Invitations were sent long ago, so the feast comes as no surprise to those who had been invited. And yet, when the king’s servants come to announce that the table is set and the festivities are about to begin, those invited refuse to come. Surely, there is some misunderstanding. The king sends other servants with a clear message: “See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast” (Matt 22:4). Some still ignore the invitation and go about their routine. Others, for reasons not explained in the parable, seize the servants, abuse them, kill them.

Let’s pause the parable here briefly to consider the setting in which Jesus told it. We are in Holy Week and Jesus is in the temple having recently cleansed it of the money changers and merchants. He is likely teaching and healing when the chief priests and the elders of the people accost him: “With what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority” (Matt 21:23)? Rather than answering their question directly, Jesus gives them instead three related parables: the parable of the two sons, the parable of the tenants, and this culminating parable of the wedding feast. These parables have less to do with Jesus’ authority to act and more to do with the leaders’ and people’s response to his actions. In each parable, those expected to respond favorably — to recognize the in-breaking of the kingdom of heaven — do not, and those expected to continue about their business blind and deaf to what God is doing actually see and hear and embrace the good news.

Clearly, Jesus is telling the parables about those leaders who questioned his authority. Scripture says as much: When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet (Matt 21:45-46).

So, what is Jesus saying to the chief priests and the Pharisees that incites them against him? He is reminding them that the prophets — David and Isaiah and many others — have foretold the great sacramental banquet of God, prepared for all people, the banquet that swallows up death, the feast of their anointing as priests and prophets and kings in the very presence of death and to death’s undying shame. And he is reminding them that their ancestors ignored the prophets, refused to come to the feast, abused and even killed the messengers that God had sent with his invitation. And now, Jesus warns, these very leaders that question Jesus’ authority are repeating the sins of the fathers, ignoring God’s wedding feast invitation and preparing to seize and kill the one who is not only the messenger sent with the invitation, but the very son of the king who has issued it. And what will come of their rejection of the invitation? Back to the parable now: The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city (Matt 22:7). Historically, that is precisely what happened when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple just forty years after Jesus spoke these parables.

But, the story continues. The king sends still other servants out to the main roads to invite all and sundry to the feast, both good and bad. That is you and me, by the way, and all those Jews and gentiles who will, throughout history, hear the Gospel and respond to it. So the wedding hall is filled with guests (Matt 22:10). You see, this feast is sacramental: it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside because it opens up onto God. The Jewish leaders were certain that the banquet hall was small and that the guest list was limited to them and to those like them. When they began to catch a glimpse of the vast extent of the king’s generosity, when they began to suspect the sacramental nature of the wedding feast, they refused the invitation and chose death’s banquet instead. And so death cast his pall over them. Death stalked them through the valley of the shadows and took them unawares. Their city was destroyed and they died in it.

That was and is a tragedy because it is still going on. The invitations are still going out. Some who should know better, who have every reason to know better, are ignoring them and abusing the servants who deliver the invitations. But there are also those with unlikely backgrounds in unlikely circumstances and places who make their way to the wedding feast. And, since it is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, there is always room for more.

I would like to stop here, and it would be safer to do so. But Jesus doesn’t and so I can’t with any integrity. When all the unlikely guests are gathered in to the feast, the king himself comes in:

11…and he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. 12 And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen (Matt 22:11b-14).

No wedding garment. Cast into outer darkness. Many called but few chosen. What are we to make of this? St. Gregory the Great offers this insight:

But since you have already come into the house of the marriage feast, our holy church, as a result of God’s generosity, be careful, my friends, lest when the King enters he find fault with some aspect of your heart’s clothing. We must consider what comes next with great fear in our hearts. But the king came in to look at the guests and saw there a person not clothed in a wedding garment.

What do we think is meant by the wedding garment, dearly beloved? For if we say it is baptism or faith, is there anyone who has entered this marriage feast without them? A person is outside because he has not yet come to believe. What then must we understand by the wedding garment but love? That person enters the marriage feast, but without wearing a wedding garment, who is present in the holy church. He may have faith, but he does not have love. We are correct when we say that love is the wedding garment because this is what our Creator himself possessed when he came to the marriage feast to join the church to himself. Only God’s love brought it about that his only begotten Son united the hearts of his chosen to himself. John says that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son for us (Forty Gospel Homilies 38.9).

We have been invited to this great, sacramental wedding feast of the kingdom of heaven where death is swallowed up in victory, where death is shamed through our anointing as priests, prophets and kings. We have been invited to this great, sacramental wedding feast of the kingdom of heaven through no merit of our own, but through the grace, mercy, and love of the king. We dare not presume upon that grace, mercy, and love. We must clothe our hearts in the love that reflects the love he has for us. And so we pray:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.

And so, clothed in the wedding garment of love, let us come to the feast. Amen.

“Bring back the electric chair.” This was Senator — and gubernatorial candidate — Marsha Blackburn’s response to the Tennessee Department of Correction’s failed attempt to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike by lethal injection earlier this week. The response was quick; it evidenced no thoughtful moral deliberation in real time. Perhaps Senator Blackburn had grappled with the moral implications of the judicial taking of a human life in the past and had reached an accord with capital punishment. Perhaps it was an unreflective reaction. Perhaps the senator is simply more interested in “how” the deed might be done effectively than in whether the deed should be done at all. I make no judgment because I do not know Senator Blackburn’s heart.

But, I do know her public position on a related issue, and that makes her “electric chair solution” all the more confusing. Senator Blackburn is adamantly anti-abortion. In fairness to her, she would — and does — describe her position as pro-life. In fairness to logic and semantics, I cannot describe it that way. A consistent pro-life ethic defends the sanctity to life — all life — from conception to natural death, and that precludes capital punishment.

I wonder if Senator Blackburn has pushed her positions to the limit, which is where all positions are tested and often come undone. Toward this end, I propose a thought experiment. Suppose it had been humanly possible to know — from the moment of Christa Pike’s conception — that she would murder Coleen Slemmer eighteen years later. Would Senator Blackburn advocate, or approve, a preemptive abortion or would she let nature take its course? Clearly, the Senator has no qualms in punishing murder by state sanctioned execution of the offender. But, would she murder preemptively to prevent the murder — again, if it were humanly possible to know, with certainty, that such murder would ensue? That is a moral quandary, isn’t it? What does pro-life mean in such a situation?

Of course, this scenario is entirely hypothetical. Except, it is not. Christians — all but a relatively small contingent of open theists — assert that God knew the trajectory of Christa Pike’s life from before the foundations of the world. Her murder of Coleen Slemmer did not take God by surprise. And yet, God allowed for Pike’s conception and birth. God did not preemptively abort her, not even to prevent Coleen Slemmer’s murder. Multiply this one murder by six million, change the name from Pike to Hitler, and the same ethical dilemma applies; only the magnitude differs.

All this is a mystery beyond my understanding. And that suggests — I would say it demands — a certain humility, the humility of recognizing that the giving and taking of human life — both in abortion and in capital punishment — belongs solely to God and neither to the individual nor to the state. The preeminent Christian symbol — the cross — was Rome’s version of lethal injection or electric chair, of the power of the state to mete out the death penalty. It was used against the earliest Christians, not by them. Christians today should not blithely accept the use of its modern equivalents in the name of justice.

Eat My Flesh, Drink My Blood

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

The Gospel According to St. John: Chapter 6, Part 2 (John 6:41-71)
Eat My Flesh, Drink My Blood

The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Let us pray.

O God, you make us glad with the weekly remembrance of the glorious resurrection of your Son our Lord: Give us this day such blessing through our worship of you, that the week to come may be spent in your favor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (BCP 2019, p. 676).

The book caught my eye on my recent visit to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia: Searching for and Maintaining Peace — A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart. Its author Fr. Jacques Philippe is a Roman Catholic Priest, spiritual director, and retreat director, and the author of several other books, one of which we have recommended and used here at Apostles, Interior Freedom.

In considering the reasons we most often lose our peace of heart Fr. Philippe writes:

The most common reason for which we could lose our sense of peace is a fear caused by certain situations which touch us personally and in which we feel threatened, apprehensions in the face of present or future difficulties, fear of lacking something important, of not succeeding in such and such a project, and so forth. The examples are infinite and touch all sectors of our lives: health, family and professional life, moral life and the spiritual life itself (Fr. Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, St Pauls (2002), p. 23).

He continues to say that what is needed to maintain peace — at least in part — is a firm conviction in and experience of the providence of God: that God is good, that he cares for us, that he is wisely and rightly ordering all things so that we will lack nothing that we truly need to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this life and the life to come — in other words, that God is the Heavenly Father that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount.

But there are obstacles to maintaining that conviction. Again, Fr. Philippe writes:

The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe! Well, we do not see it operating around us in a clear manner. How, then, are we to experience it (ibid, p. 28)?

In other words, it is difficult to maintain the theological conviction of divine providence necessary for peace of heart if we have not concretely experienced divine providence sustaining us. Words and theory simply won’t do. Then, Fr. Philippe gets down to the brass tacks:

This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken a leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God (ibid, pp. 28-28).

Let’s reformulate that statement as a question: Have you ever done something so audacious, so daring, so beyond your own means and capability — in the name of God — that unless God is in it and shows up you will fail spectacularly? Those are the moments in which divine providence can be experienced most concretely.

The Old Testament is replete with examples of people doing that: people stepping so far beyond themselves — because God called them, drew them — that there was no reasonable human hope for success. Divine providence had to make the way.

There is Abram. Leave your home and go where I will lead you. I will give you a good land and fill it with a vast multitude of your offspring. Abram knows, and we know, that none of that will happen by Abram’s power; unless God does it, this covenant will fail utterly.

There is Moses. Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go worship me, and I will deliver them from their slavery with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Well, none of that will happen if Moses is left to his own devices, not even with Aaron’s and Miriam’s help. Divine providence has to make the way.

One of the greatest examples of divine providence in the story of Israel — and the one that is most germane to our text today — is God’s care for the people through the forty years in the wilderness. We see this from the moment the Hebrews leave Egypt until they cross the Jordan into the promised land some four decades later.

This event happened even before the Hebrews first reached Sinai on their way out of Egypt:

1 They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. 2 And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, 3 and the people of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exodus 16:1-3).

Notice that despite everything God had already done for them, the people’s response was to grumble. In spite of that, the provision of manna starts here. Then, just a bit later:

1 All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of Sin by stages, according to the commandment of the Lord, and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst” (Exod 17:1-3)?

Even with all they have seen, empty bellies and parched lips make it hard to trust in divine providence. They lose their peace of heart. They grumble. They quarrel.

John 6:41-51 The End of Exile and the Bread of Life

This is the backdrop for Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand and the conversations and discourse that follow in John 6. Let’s read the first portion of the text, John 6:41-51.

41 So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— 46 not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Notice how our text for the day begins.

41 So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’” (John 6:41-42).

The Jews grumbled. This brings us right back to the Hebrews in the wilderness grumbling against Moses over lack of bread when, ironically, Jesus has just fed over five thousand people with bread and fish. The problem is not with the food itself, but with Jesus’ insistence that he is the true bread that came down from heaven. “We know his people, his mom and dad,” the Jews say. “How can he say he came down from heaven?” They grumble at Jesus over bread.

When the Gospel writers say the Jews did this or the Jews did that, they are often speaking not of the general populace, but rather of the leaders of the people: sometimes the Scribes and Pharisees, sometimes the Sadducees, sometimes the priests. I suspect that is the case here because of what Jesus says next.

43 Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— (John 6:43-45).

The crowds have flocked to Jesus: for healing, for teaching, now for food and perhaps because of what they misconstrue as possible kingly aspirations. That, I suspect, is the basis of the Jewish leaders’ complaint and grumbling. This new rabbi is garnering attention, gathering a following, and making startling claims about himself. In the best case scenario, the Jewish leaders are concerned that Jesus is leading the people astray. In the worst case scenario, they are just jealous of his popularity. Either way, they grumble against God incarnate as the Hebrews in the wilderness had grumbled against the God of the Exodus.

Jesus’ response is interesting. The people come because the Father has drawn them, and that is in accordance with the prophets. The text that Jesus quotes, “And they will all be taught by God,” is from Isaiah 54. Significantly, the whole of that chapter is about the end of exile, how God will one day gather all people to himself — he will be their husband — and will bless and teach them and establish them in righteousness. This is what Jesus says is happening in their presence, in his person. God is calling his people home from exile; those who hear God are coming to Jesus and those who don’t are not. But, to those who come, Jesus offers eternal life. He offers living bread, toward which the manna pointed, that one may eat of it and not die. That is controversial enough, but then Jesus takes a step that is just too far for many, even for devoted disciples. He says, “And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51).

John 6:52-59 Unless You Eat My Flesh and Drink My Blood

Let’s read John 6:52-59, a very challenging text.

52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.

These words of Jesus have divided people from the moment they were first uttered, and they divide people still: Protestant from Protestant, Protestant from Roman Catholic, Roman Catholic from Orthodox. Even Jesus’ disciples said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it” (John 6:60). And they were divided over it. We’ll have more to say about that response later.

We — the Church —understand this saying of Jesus eucharistically, and that is almost certainly how St. John intended it. By the time he wrote his Gospel, the Church had been meeting together on the Lord’s Day for fifty to sixty years precisely, in part, for the breaking of the bread, for the Eucharist which is a partaking in the Body and Blood of Christ. This is what St. Paul taught us:

23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Cor 11:23-26).

Until the Reformation, the Church never shied away from Jesus’ words, never allegorized them or made metaphor of them: This bread is my body; this wine is my blood. The Church always believed that. We Anglicans still do and we speak of the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. In our best moments we do not argue over precisely how Jesus is present in the elements, how the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. We accept it as true because Jesus said it and because we have received that faith from the Church.

The question that I’d like to think about with you this morning is why that matters. Why is it important that the bread is not just bread but the Body of Christ, and the wine not just wine but the Blood of Christ? And, that brings us to another question that divides the Church today: what do we have in our chancel — an altar or a table? Most Protestants, I suspect, will answer a table. Roman Catholics and Orthodox will answer an altar. Anglicans will just argue about it. I will tip my hand up front and say that the question presents a false dichotomy, that the real answer is simply “Yes.” I want to explain that in a way that those who first heard Jesus talk about eating his flesh and drinking his blood could have — and perhaps should have — understood his meaning.

Let’s think about sacrifices under the Old Covenant. What was the purpose — or what were the purposes — of the sacrifices? Of course, we have to speak generally since where several types of sacrifices.

There was a two-fold purpose to the sacrifices: (1) to purify a sinful people so that the holy God might dwell among them without destroying them and (2) to bring man and God into right relationship to one another, a relationship typified by fellowship with one another.

So, the purpose of a sin offering, for example, was purification for the tabernacle and for the people. Spiritually speaking, sin left a residue, a taint, that had to be cleansed if God were to dwell among his people. And, what was the cleansing agent? Blood. With this, the author or Hebrews agrees:

18 Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. 19 For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. 22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins (Heb 9:18-22).

So, the blood purifies people — and things — from sin. The purpose of this is ultimately to obtain peace between God and man. And, here, the peace offering becomes significant. In that offering, part of the sacrificial animal was burned in a offering to God, part was given to the priests for their food, and part was returned to the offerer to be used in a communal meal with family. The flesh was to be eaten in a great act of fellowship that joined into one great community God, the priests, and the people.

Again, generally speaking, the main purposes of the sacrificial system was purification of sinful man — through the blood of the sacrifice — and fellowship (union) between God and purified man through the flesh of the sacrifice. Eat the flesh, sprinkle — or apply — the blood. And that, I suggest, is one way in which Jesus’ words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood must be understood. Because he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, his blood purifies all things, as St. John says in his first epistle:

1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:1).

Now, there is a subtlety here, that we need to explore for a bit. For Jews, the idea of blood sprinkled or applied was perfectly acceptable, but not blood consumed. That was forbidden by God. So, Jesus’ words that they, and we, must drink his blood were scandalous. With that in mind, listen to the writer of Hebrews:

11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God (Heb 9:11-14).

Notice the distinction the author makes. The blood of bulls and goats was for the purification of the flesh, an exterior matter. But, the blood of Christ is for the purification of the conscience — or we might say the purification of the heart. And that is an interior matter. If we intend to purify the exterior, sprinkling will do. But, if we want to purify the heart, we must take the blood inside us by drinking it.

So, do we have an altar or a table? Yes. In our churches we have an altar where Christ’s blood purifies us: not that we sacrifice Christ again on that altar — his sacrifice was offered once for all (see Heb 10) — but rather that we participate in the one, finished sacrifice of Christ with each Eucharist.

Then, having been purified by his blood, we can have fellowship with God and with one another, just as in the peace offering; for Christ himself is our peace (see Eph 2). We share the fellowship meal of his body just as Israel shared the fellowship meal of the peace offering: God and man eating together, men who were once alienated from one another eating together. The altar has become a table.

Since purification and fellowship are prerequisites for life, for the abundant life that Christ offers us, we now understand what he means when he says,

53 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:53-54).

Just as St. John’s readers would have understood Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus in John 3 as pertaining to baptism, his readers would understand Jesus’ words here as pertaining to the Eucharist. The Church from the beginning to the Reformation, maintained that both baptism and the Eucharist are generally necessary for salvation: one gives new life and one sustains and nurtures that new life. That is still the doctrine of the Anglican Church.

John 6:60-71 Grumbling and Peace of Heart

How did the people respond to Jesus’ words? Let’s read John 6:60-65 to see.

60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him (John 6:60-66).

There is that word again, the one we started with today: his disciples were grumbling. They have become the Hebrews in the wilderness. And just like those grumblers in the wilderness would have left Moses and returned to Egypt and slavery had it been possible, so these disciples of Jesus turned back into slavery. There is an implicit warning here for us about the dangers of unbelief, hardness of heart, and grumbling. The warning is made explicit in Hebrews.

7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,

8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,

9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.

10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’

11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’ ”

12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said,

“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Heb 3:7-15).

Now, we will end where we started: with the notion of peace of heart and how having peace of heart depends on the experience of casting yourself into the void trusting solely in the providence of God.

As many of his disciples are abandoning him because of this difficult Eucharistic teaching, Jesus turns to the Twelve and very poignantly asks what they plan to do.

67 So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” 70 Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him (John 6:67-71).

How might we paraphrase Peter’s answer? Lord, we have cast our lot with you; we have left everything to follow you. There’s no going back for us. And, we’ve seen too much, we’ve come to know too much, we’ve come to trust you too much to back out now.

This is exactly what Fr. Jacques Philippe was writing about. These men — eleven of them, at least — have cast out into the void with Jesus and they have found him worthy of their trust. Listen to Fr. Jacques’ words again:

This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken a leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God (ibid, pp. 28-28).

Do the Apostles understand Jesus’ difficult words any better than the masses who are turning away? Probably not. But, they don’t need to: they no longer need to calculate everything, anticipate everything, seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves. They have learned to count on Jesus, and they have learned that by experience.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What words of Jesus do you find particularly confusing and disturbing? What keeps you holding fast to Jesus even in the face of these difficult words? How might you learn to trust them?

2. Can you think of a time when you stepped out into the void to follow Jesus? What happened? What did you learn?

3. What effect, if any, does what you’ve heard in this lesson have on your view of the Eucharist?

4. How do our Anglican Eucharistic liturgies reflect Jesus’ teaching in John 6?

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Worthy of the Gospel of Christ
(Jonah 3:10-4:11, Ps 145:14-21, Phil 1:21-27, Matt 20:1-16)

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ (Phil 1:27a).

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Introduction

I think it was the writer Robert Fulghum who told of his recurring nightmare. In it, he is standing in line for the final judgment, making his way slowly, person by person, to the pearly gates and to St. Peter for a verdict on his eternal destiny. Directly in front of Fulghum in the line is a tiny, stooped, old woman dressed in blue and white. When she finally makes it to the front of the line with Fulghum next up behind her, St. Peter looks down at her, shakes his head sadly and says, “I’m sorry, Mother Teresa, but you just should have done more. Next.”

Perhaps I should have continued our focus on St. Matthew’s Gospel this morning, but St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians kept attracting my attention. It was just one verse — one part of one verse, actually.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ (Phil 1:27a).

I know this much about lectio divina, about sacred reading. When a word speaks to you, you do well to pay attention.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ (Phil 1:27a).

For some reason, I thought about Fulghum’s dream when I read these words of St. Paul, his imperative to his brothers and sisters in Philippi to let their manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. The linguistic image that St. Paul paints is that of a citizen living in such a way as to bring honor and glory to his people and nation. We Americans do not have the best reputation abroad; the description “Ugly Americans” was coined to describe the arrogance and thoughtlessness of many American tourists. We too often fail to live up to the highest ideals of our national creeds. St. Paul says, “Don’t be Ugly Christians. Don’t give Christ a bad name in the culture. Live up to the faith you profess.”

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ (Phil 1:27a).

What does it look like, what does it entail, this manner of life worthy of the gospel of Christ? There are many valid ways to answer that question. But, since it is St. Paul writing, it seems reasonable to take his own life as an answer. There are three characteristics in St. Paul’s manner of life — Well, there are more than three, but sermons are only allowed to have three points; more than that and people get fidgety. So, I have reduced it to three. — there are three characteristics, three commitments in St. Paul’s life that are central to a manner of life worthy of the gospel of Christ: conversion, vocation, and suffering.

Conversion

The conversion of Saul the Pharisee to St. Paul the Apostle, beginning on the road to Damascus, is to many people the archetype for all conversions: a great moment of in-breaking truth, a brilliant light illuminating the spiritual darkness, a radical disconnect between one manner of life and another. John Newton, slave trader turned Anglican priest, expressed it this way:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see (John Newton, Amazing Grace, Public Domain).

Do you see the radical nature of Newton’s conversion: wretch to saved, lost to found; blind to seeing?

Was this also the nature of Saul’s conversion — a radical disconnect from all that went before, a repudiation of one life and the embrace of another? Well, yes…and no. Saul was a good Jew before his conversion, and Paul was a good Jew after. Saul was zealous before his conversion, and Paul was just as zealous — less the violent aspect of zeal — after. Saul was a man with a mission before his conversion, and Paul was a man with a mission after. Post-conversion Paul bore a great resemblance to pre-conversion Saul. So, what did change? Just this: Saul had no place in his life for Jesus; Paul had no life in himself apart from Jesus. Saul’s great conversion was to Jesus as Lord. And that is a profound disconnect. The central conviction of Saul’s life, his core belief, was the great creed of Israel, the Shema:

4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut 6:4).

And Saul the Pharisee could see no place for Jesus in this confession. But, after his conversion, after encountering the resurrected Jesus in his vision on the way to Damascus, Paul the Apostle saw Jesus right at the heart of that confession. Listen to how he reinterprets the Shema in his letter to the Corinthians:

5 For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (1 Cor 8:5-6).

And that is the nature of Saul’s conversion: to see Jesus at the center of all things, to see Jesus as the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. That means conversion. That means placing Jesus at the center of all things. That may mean parting with all lesser pearls for the sake of one pearl of great price. Again, St. Paul, this time in writing to the Philippians:

4 If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Phil 5:4b-9).

That is conversion: the complete reorientation of oneself toward Jesus. My experience — the experience of the Church — is that such conversion is not one-and-done, not accomplished in an instant — but rather is a lifelong process. It is, as the Benedictine vow expresses it, a conversatio morum, a conversion of life to the end of one’s days.

Put a weight on a string and spin it overhead in a circle. At each point in its path the weight seeks to fly off in a straight line tangent to the circle and away from the circle’s center. It is only the constant tug of the string that keeps the weight in its proper orbit. That is a picture of conversion: Christ at the center, man circling but always seeking to fly off tangentially, and the tug of the “string” always pulling man back toward the center. What is the string? The Holy Spirit? Yes, certainly. Faith? Yes. The Church which offers the Word of God and the Sacraments? Yes. The spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting and almsgiving? Yes. The cultivation of the virtues, especially the virtues of faith, hope and love? Yes. Repentance and confession? Yes. The string of conversion is rope of many cords.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. This is a call to conversion.

Vocation

A man goes to the doctor to receive some potentially serious test results. The doctor enters the exam room, double checks the chart, smiles and says, “No need to worry. Everything came back normal. It seems you have many good years ahead of you.”

The man looks pensive, shakes his head slowly and says, “Well, don’t worry about it Doc; it’s not your fault. You’ve done your best.”

The doctor, now a bit flustered, says, “I don’t think you understand. You’re fine — perfectly healthy.”

“No, I get it,” the man says. “I was just sort of hoping that this was my time. I’m ready to go be with the Lord. That’s far better than living a long life here. But, if that’s not God’s will, I’ll accept it and get back to work. There is much to be done for the kingdom, you know.”

Can you imagine a conversation like that? St. Paul did not have to imagine it, nor do we. He was writing to the Philippians from prison, awaiting a verdict that might well mean his execution. He says:

19 for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, 20 as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. 21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. 22 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. 23 I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. 24 But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. 25 Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, 26 so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again (Phil 1:19-26).

St. Paul tells the Philippians that they have just prayed too well for his deliverance and that the Lord has granted it. And, while he would rather depart to be with the Lord, Paul accepts that it is not yet his time, that, instead, he has fruitful labor yet to do for the sake of the kingdom and its people.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. For St. Paul, that means vocation. It means going out into the world to do the work he had been given to do, to love and serve the Lord with thankful heart, not only with his lips but in his life.

“Well, that’s alright for St. Paul; he was an Apostle. But, I don’t have a vocation,” you may be thinking. “I’m just a [fill in the blank].” Not so. Every person baptized into Christ Jesus — no exceptions — has a vocation by virtue of baptism. While there are many ways to describe that vocation, here at Apostles you will often hear this: every baptized believer has the threefold vocation of priest, prophet, and king.

As priests, you are to bless, to sanctify, to make holy every hard moment, every dark place into which the Spirit leads you: by your presence, by your prayers, by your sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, by your entering into the pain of the world with lament and hope and a cry for godly justice.

As prophets, you are to capture and cultivate God’s vision for God’s world and then to proclaim it in word and deed in every way possible. You are to be a living answer to the question: What would it look like if God were in charge here and now? You may be called to speak God’s truth — Jesus is Lord! — to the dark powers who still think and act as if they run this world, as if it is theirs. You may be called to show love to those whom this dark world has cast aside: the poor, the widows, the orphans, the refugees, the prisoners, the powerless, the mocked, the lonely, the forgotten, the dregs of society disdained by the rich, the powerful, the prideful.

As kings, you are to bring order and justice to those shadowy places where chaos and injustice abound. But not as the rulers of this world do: through intimidation and violence, through power and privilege, through ill-gotten money and the influence it purchases. No. Your model is the King who welcomed tax collectors and sinners, who knelt to wash feet, who reigned from a cross, who said to his disciples:

25 “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 26 It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, 28 even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:25b-28).

You have this vocation by virtue of your baptism: priest, prophet, king. And you also have lives: family, school, job, retirement. So, the question becomes: How do I exercise my baptismal vocation as priest, prophet, and king in my life as mother or teacher or scientist or plumber or manager or artist or administrator or retiree or caregiver or [fill in the blank of your own circumstances]? Only be certain of this: that you can and that it is God’s will that you do. There is no state of life in which you cannot offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. There is no circumstance in which you cannot promote order and champion justice. There is no place where you cannot serve.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. This is a call to vocation.

Suffering

St. Paul specifically mentions one other characteristic of the manner of life worthy of the gospel of Christ. These are his words.

27 Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, 28 and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. 29 For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, 30 engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have (Phil 1:27-30).

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. This is a call to suffering.

It is true to say that Christ died for us: true, provided we understand that “for” does not mean “instead of.” If Christ tarries, I will experience bodily death, as he did, as you will. To say that Christ died for us means that we now die in him, that our death is now united to his death, so that his victory over death becomes our victory over death. We will all die, but it has been granted to us to die in Christ.

It is true to say that Christ suffered for us: true, provided we understand that “for” does not mean “instead of.” To live at all is to suffer. The Buddhists are wrong about this: suffering is not illusion. It is real and we all must experience it sooner or later. But we — those who are in Christ Jesus — have been uniquely given the grace of suffering for him, with him, and in him. And that makes all the difference.

There is great mystery here; we are at the limits of understanding and language. But of this I am certain, though I have no good words to explain it or to persuade you. Just as Jesus’ own suffering was redemptive — brought life and reconciliation to the world — so our suffering for his sake, our suffering united with his, our suffering offered up to him, partakes of that redemption, becomes part of his redemptive work for the world. Surely, St. Paul had something like this in mind when he wrote this to the Colossians:

24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church (Col 1:24).

When Christ cried out on the cross, “It is finished!” he meant that his work was finished, not that the kingdom work was complete, not that there was nothing left to do. Just fifty days later, he poured out his Spirit upon his people at Pentecost to empower them for the gospel work left to do, for the gospel work he left them — and us — to do. And St. Paul insists that part of that gospel work is suffering for the sake of Christ, and that we should count that suffering as gift. Suffering, when united to Christ’s suffering, is purifying and perfecting; even Christ himself was made perfect through suffering (see Heb 2:10).

St. Paul does not call us to be masochists, to seek out unnecessary suffering. But, he does call us not to fear it. He calls us see it for what it is, to accept it for what it is or what it can be: an expression of God’s great love for us and for the world, a means of purification and witness, a gift that unites us to Christ.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. This is a call to suffering.

Conclusion

I don’t think the final judgment will look much like Fulghum’s nightmare. But, if it does, I hope I am behind him in line and not behind Mother Teresa. A bit of buffer would be nice. Until that time comes though, we know our calling; St. Paul has made it clear.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. That is a call to conversion, to vocation, to suffering. Amen.

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

Holy Cross Day (14 September)
(Is 45:21-25 / Ps 98 / Phil 2:5-11 / John 12:31-36a)

Collect
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have grace to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Both here and in all your churches throughout the world,
we adore you, O Christ, and we bless you.
Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The siege began on 14 April, in the year 70 AD. Four years earlier the Jews had rebelled against Rome, and Rome had finally had enough of that irritation. From that moment, Jerusalem was doomed. The siege lasted only four months, four difficult, horrible months for the Jews trapped in the city. The walls were breached in August, and by 8 September the Roman General Titus — soon to be Emperor — had razed the city and the temple. All was ruin and rubble.

Some sixty years later, circa 130, the Emperor Hadrian began to rebuild Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina. This reconstruction altered the landscape of Jerusalem; many holy sites were lost — some covered with fill dirt and rubble, some buried under new construction — Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre among them.

Fast forward to the reign of Constantine (AD 306 – 337) who ended the formal Roman persecution against the Christians in 313 and declared Christianity a tolerated religion. Surely, Constantine had political motives for this, but his own conversion to the faith seems genuine, so that he may rightly be called the first Christian Emperor. He built churches and supported the clergy. He called the Council of Nicaea to deal with heresy and to define and unify the orthodox faith. And he turned his attention toward the holy city of Jerusalem.

The holy places in Jerusalem needed churches to mark them and to serve as sites for pilgrimage, so Constantine thought; he set about the task of locating those sites and building those churches. None were more important than Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, sites lost during the building of Aelia Capitolina. Pious legend tells how Constantine awarded his devout Christian mother Helena the honorable task of locating those sites and directing the building of the churches. The early Church historian Eusebius wrote this about Helena:

Especially abundant were the gifts she bestowed on the naked and unprotected poor. To some she gave money, to others an ample supply of clothing; she liberated some from imprisonment, or from the bitter servitude of the mines; others she delivered from unjust oppression, and others again, she restored from exile. While, however, her character derived luster from such deeds … , she was far from neglecting personal piety toward God. She might be seen continually frequenting His Church, while at the same time she adorned the houses of prayer with splendid offerings, not overlooking the churches of the smallest cities. In short, this admirable woman was to be seen, in simple and modest attire, mingling with the crowd of worshipers, and testifying her devotion to God by a uniform course of pious conduct” (The Life of Constantine, XLIV, XLV).

The stories of how Helena located Calvary and the true cross of Christ are many and varied. I’ll mention just two that I like. While searching for Calvary, Helena noticed a large patch of an aromatic herb unknown to her. She felt compelled to dig in that spot and there she uncovered the wood from three separate crosses, those of the thieves and Jesus. As an aside, that herb is now named basil, from the Greek basileus meaning king. Many churches are decorated with basil plants in observance of Holy Cross Day.

So far, so good; Helena had discovered Calvary and wood from three crosses. But which one was the true cross of Christ? A woman suffering from a terminal illness was brought to the spot and asked to touch the wood from each of the crosses in turn. When she touched the wood of the last one, she was miraculously healed; that must be the true cross of Christ. And so began the veneration of the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus. The church built on that site to house the cross was completed on 13 September 335 and formally dedicated the next day, 14 September, which we now observe as Holy Cross Day.

Holy Cross Day is an occasion to think deeply about the cross, to venerate it: not to worship it but to reverence it, to honor it as the instrument on which and through which the Lord Jesus triumphed over sin and death, trampling hell and Satan under his feet. This is a day perhaps to sit silently before the cross, to gaze at it in wonder, to sing its glory. In the church of my youth we had no custom of venerating the cross, but we did sing this:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross
The emblem of suffering and shame
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down
And I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it some day for a crown (The Old Rugged Cross, The Rev’d George Bernard)

In the Anglican Church, as part of the Good Friday liturgy, we may observe Devotion Before the Cross. A covered wooden cross is brought into the church in the sight of the people. As it is uncovered, this antiphon is said or sung:

Behold the wood of the Cross, on which was hung the world’s Salvation.
O come, let us adore him.

Anthems follow:

We glory in your Cross, O Lord,
and praise and glorify your holy resurrection;
for by virtue of your Cross
joy has come to the whole world (Anthem 1, BCP 2019, p. 574).

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world (BCP 2019, Anthem 2, p. 574).

Those who are not Christians are sometimes puzzled at our devotion to the cross. Why take a murder weapon and make it the symbol of the faith? Why venerate the cross? This is a good day to reflect on those questions.

The Roman Empire was certainly one of the world’s greatest civilizations, but, at its core, it was based upon violence — threatened and real — and upon power, brute force exercised by the government. Its military instilled fear and obedience. Its justice did likewise.

As an expression of its power and with the purpose of instilling fear, Rome devised the most brutal form of execution then known: crucifixion. Its purpose was not merely to physically torture and destroy the victim, but to publicly debase and humiliate the victim as a deterrent against similar crimes. Through the beatings, the forced march through town, the nailing of hands and feet, the stripping naked of the victim, the hours of agony suspended between heaven and earth, the mocking by the gathered crowds, Rome was declaring the victim to be sub-human, vermin, worthy only of being exterminated. All this came to Jesus not for anything he had done, not for any sin he had committed, but for us and for our salvation. He bore our sins on the cross in our stead. So the cross tells the great truth about us. Look at Jesus; this is what sin had done to us, what sin had reduced us to. That was our true state. When Pilate said, “Behold, the man,” he wasn’t just speaking about Jesus beaten, bloody, and shamed. He was speaking about mankind — about all of us and each of us — under the burden of sin. We sometimes wink and smile at sin: white lies, harmless infidelities, petty thefts, small betrayals, momentary anger — little things that everyone does. But the cross will not tolerate that self-deception. Look at Jesus on the cross. That is the result of your white lies, your harmless infidelities, and all the rest. That is what your sin has reduced you to. We venerate the cross because it confronts us with the damnable truth of our sin like nothing else can do.

But the cross also reveals to us the length, the depth, the breadth, and the height of God’s love for us in Christ Jesus, the willingness of God, in Christ, to sacrifice himself for us and for our salvation. The cross declares that those created in the image of God, though beaten, marched through town, stripped naked, nailed to a tree, mocked by evil powers through their own sins, are nevertheless the beloved of God in whose image they may be restored. We venerate the cross because it reveals to us the self-sacrificing, unfathomable love of God for us like nothing else can do.

There is no way to explain this, no words of human wisdom adequate for the mystery of the cross. There is only proclamation, adoration, veneration. As Paul writes:

1 Corinthians 1:18–21 (ESV): For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

1 Corinthians 2:1–2 (ESV): And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

We venerate the cross because we worship Christ Jesus and him crucified.

Holy Cross Day also marks the beginning of the Fall Ember Days, the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following Holy Cross Day. These are days to fast and pray for those called to ordained ministry in the Church.

Almighty God, the giver of all good gifts, in your divine providence you have appointed various orders in your Church: Give your grace, we humbly pray, to all who are [now] called to any office and ministry for your people; and so fill them with the truth of your doctrine and clothe them with holiness of life, that they may faithfully serve before you, to the glory of your great Name and for the benefit of your holy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen (BCP 2019, p. 634).

Even as we pray for those in ordained ministry, we remember that the Church has four orders of ministry: the three ordained orders of bishop, priest, and deacon and the vastly larger and more fundamental order of the laity whose ministry is given in and through baptism. Along with the ordained orders, the laity share in the baptismal vocation of priests, prophets, and kings: priests who exercise a ministry of worship and reconciliation, prophets who have the vision of God’s truth and can say to the world “Thus says the Lord,” and kings who labor to bring God’s righteous rule to bear on earth as it is in heaven.

Why the close connection between Holy Cross Day and the Ember Days? Historically, it may simply be a matter of symmetry: one set of Ember Days in each of the four seasons corresponding to prominent feast days in the Church — Christmas, Lent, Pentecost and, yes, Holy Cross in the autumn. But, theologically? There is an intimate connection between the cross and Christian vocation. Vocation is, after all, nothing more or less than taking up the Cross of Christ and following him, nothing more or less than continuing/implementing the work begun on the Cross.

As another hymn from my childhood asked and answered:

Must Jesus bear the cross alone
And all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for ev’ry one,
And there’s a cross for me (Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?, Thomas Shepherd).

Amen.

The Book of Signs: Chapter 5

Apostles Anglican Church
Fr. John A. Roop

The Gospel of John, Chapter 5: The Healing at Bethesda

The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Let us pray.

Go before us, O Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favor, and further us with your continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your holy Name, and finally, through your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Introduction

I have never been to the town of Lourdes in France. Millions have visited, making pilgrimages there since 1858 when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous and the miraculous healings began. Currently, it is estimated that some six million people descend on Lourdes annually, including sixty thousand sick or disabled persons seeking healing through taking the waters. There is a spring at Lourdes in the Grotto of Massabielle that purportedly has healing powers; in the original apparition the Blessed Virgin Mary instructed people to “drink at the spring and bathe in it.”

Some two hundred million people have visited Lourdes since 1858, many of whom came specifically for healing. Of that total, there have been roughly 7000 reported healings. For lovers of statistics, that is 0.0035 percent. Of those 7000 reported healings only 70 have been verified and certified by the Roman Catholic Church. One hundred seventy years, two hundred million pilgrims, seventy certified healings: not to be crass or irreverent, but your odds of being healed at Lourdes are only marginally better than those of winning the Power Ball Lottery. Still, people play the lottery, and still millions come to the waters at Lourdes, some for devotional intent only, but many with terminal diagnoses and many carried by friends, many praying for healing.

Belief in healing waters is nothing new. In fact, it is the basis for the third of Jesus’s signs recorded by St. John.

The Healing at the Pool on the Sabbath

Let’s read the account of the sign, the healing of a lame man.

1 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” 9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked (John 5:1-9a).

This sounds very Lourdes-like, doesn’t it, people coming to the water that has a reputation for healing powers. Some few manuscripts of St. John’s Gospel — not the oldest or most reliable ones — include an additional verse that explains the source of healing and the source of the particular dilemma faced by this lame man:

4 for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had.

Whether we believe this explanation or not doesn’t matter; people came expecting or at least hoping for healing.

Notice the question Jesus asks: “Do you want to be healed?” What do you think about such a question? Is it rhetorical or actual inquiry? Why might Jesus ask it?

A healing will change this man’s life profoundly in ways that he is perhaps not ready for and maybe won’t like. I have tried to help a few homeless persons get off the street and into stable housing. The efforts have always been unsuccessful. They were either unwilling to take the few steps necessary to start the process — sometimes as simple as a phone call — or else psychologically unable to make themselves do so. It was and is a mystery to me, but change is hard, and I have never been in their state before so I have no cause to judge. Do you want to enter a rehab program? Do you want to get off the streets? Do you want to be healed? These aren’t unreasonable questions. And, the man doesn’t answer directly. He simply explains to Jesus why he is still disabled; he has no one to help him into the water.

It is not, after all, the water that he needs, but rather a word of healing from Jesus.

8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” 9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked (John 5:8-9a).

Now, if we take this healing at face value as one of St. John’s seven signs, what is it a sign pointing to? What more do we know about Jesus or his mission through it? After all, we have seen Jesus heal before: the official’s son in John 4. What does this sign add?

Now, I must confess that I have cheated you a bit in my telling of the story. I have given you only the first part of verse 9 as if that concludes the account.

9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked (John 5:9a).

Stopping here implies that the physical healing is the sign. But, let’s hear the whole verse.

9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath (John 5:9).

Does that detail — that the healing took place on the Sabbath — change things, perhaps even change the nature of the sign? If you read the remainder of the chapter, the fact that the healing took place on the Sabbath is the only thing of importance to the Jewish authorities. They seem to take the actual healing with a grain of salt. But the Sabbath — that’s another matter entirely. So, I might suggest that we consider just the possibility that the timing of the healing, on the Sabbath, was the most important part of the sign. To explain that, I need to backtrack to John 2, to the cleansing of the temple.

What was the significance of the temple to the Jews? It was the focal point in space of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. It was where the glory of God resided or at least used to reside. It was the nexus of forgiveness and worship and prayer. It was the closest thing the Jews had to the kingdom of God in physical space. That is why it was so significant when Jesus cleansed the temple and called it his Father’s house. He was claiming authority over the kingdom of God in space.

What was the significance of the Sabbath? It was the focal point in time of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. It was the intersection of the age to come with this present age, a foretaste of that time when the world will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. What the temple was in space, the Sabbath was in time. Now, keep in mind the earlier cleansing of the temple as you listen to the rest of this healing story play out.

Now that day was the Sabbath. 10 So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” 11 But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’ ” 12 They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” 13 Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. 14 Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. 16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:9b-18).

When he cleansed the temple, Jesus identified it as his Father’s house. Here, when Jesus answers the charges of violating the Sabbath by saying, “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” he identifies the Sabbath as his Father’s time. Put both of these accounts together, and we have Jesus acting as God, laying claim to God’s kingdom in both space and time. Where Jesus is, when he is there, that is the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God. The Jewish authorities knew exactly what he was claiming, and they sought to kill him for his blasphemy. So, I think we need to take our cue from the Jewish authorities as we read this text: the sign is not merely the healing of a disabled man, but the timing of the healing: on the Sabbath.

Discourse: Part 1 — The Father’s Work Given To the Son

Now, following the sign, we have an extended discourse, Jesus speaking directly to the authorities.

Jesus defended his healing on the Sabbath by saying, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” In this discourse he details some of the work of his Father that he is participating in. As we read the text, let’s identify that work, the mission the Father has given the Son.

19 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. 21 For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. 22 For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

25 “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. 28 Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment (John 5:19-29).

What is the work the Father has given the Son?

Giving Life: As the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will (John 5:21). This takes us back to St. John’s Prologue:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5).

This also takes us back to Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus:

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:16-21).

In this passage, Jesus mentions both life and judgment. He came to bring life, not to judge. But, let’s return to our passage in John 5 to see what Jesus says about that.

Bringing Judgment: 22 For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life (John 5:22-24).

Judgment is part of the work the Father has given to the Son. But, it seems to be a rather “passive” sort of judgment. By that I mean that Jesus’ purpose — his mission — is not judgment/condemnation but rather life. He comes offering life for all who will accept it. Those who refuse life, those who will not believe, embrace death instead by their own choice. In doing so, they judge/condemn themselves. Jesus’ very presence engenders differentiation, not so much through Jesus’ judgment of us, but through our own judgement of him. Again, St. John’s Prologue pointed toward this:

9 The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:9-13).

Defeating Death: If we read Genesis 3-11 carefully, we will notice not just one fall of man, but at least three — Adam and Eve, Cain, and the builders of Babel — with distinct consequences: death, bondage to sin, enslavement to the fallen powers. The power of death and corruption has spread to all creation; see Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15. Jesus assures us in this discourse that the last enemy, death, will one day be destroyed; that is part of the work his Father has given him to do.

26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. 28 Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment (John 5:26-29).

Resurrection and life is the telos — the end/goal — of all people, the righteous and the unrighteous alike; not one person will be left in the tombs because Jesus has come to destroy death. His own resurrection is the firstfruits of that victory, a sign pointing toward the complete destruction of death to come.

We have a canticle that we sing at Morning Prayer in Eastertide that captures this victory over death beautifully: the Pascha Nostrum (Christ Our Passover).

Pascha Nostrum (Christ Our Passover)

Alleluia. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; *
therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, *
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia.

Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; *
death no longer has dominion over him.
The death that he died, he died to sin, once for all; *
but the life he lives, he lives to God.
So also consider yourselves dead to sin, *
and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Alleluia.

Christ has been raised from the dead, *
the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For since by a man came death, *
by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, *
so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.

Giving life, bringing judgment, and defeating death: this is the work the Father has given the Son to do, and he is doing that work even on — and perhaps especially on — the Sabbath, the focal point in time of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

Discourse: Part 2 — Witnesses To the Son

When we consider the seven signs in St. John’s Gospel, we generally focus on those things that Jesus did to inaugurate the Kingdom and to establish his identity and authority. But, there are other signs as well; Jesus calls them witnesses that bear testimony to him, reasons that the people and the authorities should believe. Jesus details several of these witnesses in the final part of this discourse. Let’s scan the text to see if we can identify the witnesses.

30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. 31 If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. 32 There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true. 33 You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. 36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. 41 I do not receive glory from people. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words” (John 5:30-47)?

Jesus identifies these witnesses: John the Baptist, the works that Jesus does, the Father, the Scriptures (Moses and his writings).

John the Baptist: Again, we find this in the Prologue and throughout the first chapter of the Gospel.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light (John 1:6-8).

What was John’s testimony to Jesus? “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29)! We know that the people considered John a prophet; the heart of his prophecy was pointing toward Jesus, decreasing himself that Jesus might increase.

The Works: Do you remember what Nicodemus, a teacher of the Jews, first said when he came to see Jesus?

1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him” (John 3:1-2).

If, as Fr. Jack mentioned in his class on John 3, Nicodemus was not coming solely of his own volition, but rather as a representative of the Sanhedrin, then these authorities were acknowledging the works that Jesus was doing, even if grudgingly. So, the works bore witness to Jesus.

The Father
How did the Father bear witness to Jesus? Though it is not found in St. John’s Gospel, we have this from St. Luke, an event that would still be in many people’s memory:

21 Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:21-22).

The Scripture/Moses

39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life (John 5:39-40).

46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words” (John 5:46-47)?

These Scriptures remind me of two others, both from St. Luke’s Gospel, one a parable and one a post-resurrection appearance.

Do you remember Abraham’s response when the rich man begged him to send Lazarus to his brothers so that they might escape his fate?

29 But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ 30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead’ ” (Luke 16:29-31).

Moses, rightly understood and rightly believed was the only witness the Jews needed to Jesus.

And then there is Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27).

It is all there in Moses and in the Scriptures for those who have the eyes and heart and will to see and to believe.

So, there are the signs that Jesus does — the seven that St. John gives us — and then then are the signs, or witnesses, that point toward Jesus: John the Baptist, the works of the Father, the Father himself, and Moses and the Scriptures. These are sufficient for anyone, especially for the Jewish authorities. And yet there is this sad commentary: “yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (see John 5:40). And that, too, is precisely what St. John noted in his Prologue: He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him (John 1:11).

Discussion

I would like us to close our time together with a further consideration of the witnesses to Jesus, the signs that point toward him. In particular, I’d like you to discuss these questionable with your table groups:

What would it look like for the Church to bear credible witness to Jesus today, to be a sign to the world of the Lordship of Jesus and of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God?

What would we have to start doing, or at least start doing better?

What would we have to stop doing?

What tangible steps can we — you, Apostles — make toward that?