CHRISTMAS

Nativity -- Natalia Gonchorova (1910)

• Isaiah 9:2-7 •
• Psalm 96 •
• Titus 2:11-14 •
• Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

• Isaiah 62:6-12 •
• Psalm 97 •
• Titus 3:4-7 •
• Luke 2:(1-7), 8-20

• Isaiah 52:7-10 •
• Psalm 98 •
• Hebrews 1:1-4, (5-12) •
• John 1:1-14

Many churches, perhaps most, have multiple services at Christmas, so the Lectionary provides three sets of 'propers', readings that can be used in every year of the 3-year cycle. 

 

Nativity -- Giotto

It is notable that all three sets forge a connection between the prophet Isaiah and the birth of Jesus. This connection is crucial to understanding the significance of that birth, and the Epistle readings from Hebrews and Titus are chosen to make this clear. Thanks to modern scholarship, however, we now know something that the authors of those epistles did not know. Isaiah is really three books. Moreover, the authors of these three books (Chaps 1-39, 40-55 and 56-66) lived and wrote several hundred years apart – before, during and after the traumatic capture and exile of the Israelites in Babylon.

 

The editing of these materials into “one” book is no accident. Whoever its editors were, they correctly perceived that the same spirit, and in large part the same theme, animates them all – how to have a faith that endures the vicissitudes of time and circumstance. This common theme makes it possible for the Old Testament readings for Christmas to be taken from all three -- a fact that carries an important lesson for us. 

 

When John the Baptist asks Jesus if he is ‘the one who is to come’, he is making reference to a hope and a yearning that has persisted over a very long period of time, and across dramatically changing fortunes. We should take this timescale to heart.

Nativity --  Hornhorst

“A thousand ages in Thy sight, are but an evening gone” Isaac Watts reminds us in his paraphrase of Psalm 90. It is easy for us to confine the advent of the Messiah to the deeply intriguing and appealing, but brief event that is the Nativity. While God’s saving work in his Messiah certainly began at Christmas, only thirty years later, after his death and Resurrection, was the birth of Jesus dimly recognized for what it truly was. And its full significance, Christians came to see, lay within the immensely vaster time scale of God’s redeeming history.

Nativity -- Gauguin

 

The key spiritual task at Christmas is to find a way of acknowledging that in Jesus God came to an earthly home, without at the same domesticating him. The deep innocence of Jesus that makes our redemption possible, is not that of a sweet little baby. “He came and dwelt among us” so that, despite all our follies and weaknesses, we might be raised to God’s level. The danger of too 'nice' a Christmas is that, inadvertently, God might be reduced to ours.

ADVENT IV 2014

Virgin Annunciate Antonello da Messina (1475)

• 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16  • 
• Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26   • 
• Romans 16:25-27   • 
• Luke 1:26-38

Today’s Gospel forms an obvious and natural bridge between the seasons of Advent and Christmas. It tells of the moment when Mary learns she is pregnant -- the Gospel for the Feast of the Annunciation in fact, which, appropriately, takes place on March 25^th, exactly nine months before Christmas. The Gospel is preceded by the Magnificat -- Mary’s wonderful hymn of gracious acceptance – normally replacing the Psalm on this Sunday. For that reason, there is only one Old Testament reading, and rather oddly, it may seem, it is taken from the 2^nd Book of Samuel. What has a passage from 2^nd Samuel to do with Christmas, we might wonder? Actually, despite first impressions, it is a brilliant choice. Taken together these readings capture and express a deep insight into the proper meaning of Christmas.

King David Jean David (1908-93)

David, Israel’s greatest King, wants to repay God for the wealth and power that has been given to him, and he plans to do so by building God a special dwelling place --  a temple to replace the tent that the Israelites have trailed hither and thither through the wilderness. Strangely, God rebukes him for wanting to do this. The prophet Nathan is told to say: “Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in?” And yet, at the same time he sends an assurance “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever”. This will happen, though, in God’s way, not David’s, and at the moment of His own choosing.

  

The Annunciation is that moment. The magnificent dwelling offered by a King is rejected  and the womb of a peasant girl is chosen instead. David’s presumption in trying to tell God where it would be best for Him to dwell, stands in sharp contrast to Mary’s simple acceptance of God’s word. The assurance that David's kingdom 'shall be made sure forever', it turns out, does not mean that David’s family is the first of an unending dynasty, but that his divine appointment is to be perpetuated through  a girl who gives birth to a baby in obscurity and is standing by his side when he is put to death by crucifixion. Never has this message been more effectively driven home: “Your ways are not my ways, says the LORD”.

ADVENT III 2014

• Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11  • 
• Psalm 126 or Luke 1:46b-55  • 
• 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24   • 



The Prophet Isaiah -- Duccio (1513)

• John 1:6-8, 19-28 

John the Baptist features prominently in the Gospel readings for the season of Advent, and is the subject of the third Sunday’s Gospel in all three years of the Lectionary cycle. He then reappears shortly after Christmas on the first Sunday in Epiphany for the celebration of the Baptism of Christ. The Lectionary thus does its utmost to drive home the key role that John the Baptist has to play in understanding the significance of Jesus. He is the link between the promises revealed to Israel by the prophets of the Old Testament, a link underlined by the passages from Isaiah that provide the Old Testament lessons for this week and last. 'The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me', Isaiah says, and John can say exactly the same. There is this crucial difference, though. The message now, which Christ at the end of his ministry commissions his disciples to preach, is that the salvation promised to Israel is for “all the nations”.

John the Baptist -- El Greco

The image of John that the Gospel passages paint is very much in accord with the prophetic tradition from which he springs. Like so many of them, he is an outsider, roughly dressed, existing on a strange and meager diet, and proclaiming his message in ‘the wilderness’, which is to say, on the edge of human settlements, whose inhabitants must go beyond town and village limits to hear him. John the Baptist fits so well the people's preconception of how a prophet should be, it is only natural that they should wonder if he might be the promised Messiah.

In this week’s Gospel they ask him outright if he is – but he denies it, and famously points to ‘one who is coming after me’, the thong of whose sandal, he declares, ‘I am not worthy to untie’. The true Messiah, it turns out, is a very different kind of prophet. The Gospels all depict Jesus in the heart of town life – conversing in busy streets, visiting houses, sitting at dinner tables  -- even to the point of being accused of engaging too easily with the seedier side of urban life. His clothing, too, as the soldiers at his Crucifixion discovered, is fine enough to be wagered for.

In their depictions of John and Jesus, then, the four Gospels all implicitly invite us to engage in a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise. It is one that can prove highly instructive and illuminating, and reveal another dimension of the way in which the 'true' messiah is never 'true to form'.

 

ADVENT II 2014

John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness -- Limbourg Brothers

• Isaiah 40:1-11  • 
• Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13  • 
• 2 Peter 3:8-15a   • 
• Mark 1:1-8

The readings for this Sunday are unusually well integrated. The Gospel passage depicting John the Baptist expressly quotes the Old Testament passage from Isaiah, with its reference to ‘a voice, crying in the wilderness’, while the tone of Psalm 85 and the message of Peter’s second Epistle resonate with a similar theme -- the kind of faithfulness that looks to 'a new earth, where righteousness is at home'. In one way or another, then, all these readings point to two interconnected concepts -- repentance and restoration. 

The interconnection is crucial. Modern Christians widely, easily, and for the most part correctly, proclaim the unconditional love of God. God does not love the things he has made because of their merit, but because they are his. Still, sin is a reality. Human pride, cruelty and self-centredness erect a very great barrier between humanity and divinity. The central message of the Gospel – as of many religions – is that despite appearances this barrier is surmountable.

Marc Chagall The Forgiveness of God in Isaiah

Surmounting it, though, is a two sided affair. God’s love means that he offers us forgiveness, however vile or despicable we may have been. In this sense his love is unconditional. But his forgiveness is not. A precondition of God’s forgiveness is our sincere repentance, which is to say, our honest acknowledgement and true remorse for the many ways in which we have fallen short of our God-given potential. 

Peter’s Epistle expresses just this thought when it declares that God’s love is shown by his patience, ‘not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance’, while Mark's Gospel in a similar spirit offers ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. Repentance is key to lifting us beyond the level of material beings created and nurtured out of love – as other animals are -- and into the realms of beings who can participate in divine life.

ADVENT SUNDAY 2014

Horsemen of the Apocalpse  Salvador Dali

• Isaiah 64:1-9  • 
• Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19  • 
• 1 Corinthians 1:3-9  • 
• Mark 13:24-37

"The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory". Mark’s Gospel for this first Sunday in Advent is undeniably apocalyptic, a feature that makes it problematic for those main-stream Christians who have difficulty in believing in an apocalypse. They are understandably anxious to distance themselves from lurid conceptions of ‘the Rapture’, or some such religious extreme. Warnings that 'the end of the world is nigh' are widely regarded as characteristic of Christianity's lunatic fringe.

Yet, this Gospel passage can hardly be set aside. It is not the wild prediction of some eccentric Nostradamus. These are words of Jesus as recorded in the Christian Bible, and expressly appointed, in a Lectionary that the larger part of the Christian world now acknowledges and uses, to be read in public on this Sunday. So how are we to understand them?

Apocalypse Ion Tucilescu (1910-62)

It is perhaps best to start with this thought. Any attempt to think about time and eternity simply has to invoke imaginative language. We cannot think about the limits of history in historical terms. So, for instance, the Genesis stories are graphic representations of the great truth that God created time and space, a cosmic beginning to all things whose mysterious nature science is just dimly starting to understand. It is not so strange, then, to think that God will also bring this great cosmic experiment to a close with the end of all things. If so, however, we must think about it pictures that are no less graphic.

The Bible is not science. It offers us something that science cannot -- religious and theological insights into human nature and the human condition, insights by which we can live. We are clay, and God is the potter, Isaiah reminds us. This means that both the number of our own days, and of the whole cosmos is determined in God’s good time, not ours. Prediction is pointless, since no one – not even God the Son -- can put a date to its end. What is called for, therefore, is perpetual watchfulness. This is one half of the message of Advent.  The other half tells us that even the end of history can be regarded with hope rather than fear, because, as St Paul says in the Epistle, since the grace of God has already been given to us in Christ Jesus, we need not lack in any spiritual gift in advance of his final return.

CHRIST THE KING 2014

Christ Pantokrator

• Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Psalm 100  • 
• Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Psalm 95:1-7a  • 
• Ephesians 1:15-23  • 
• Matthew 25:31-46

The last Sunday of the Christian year is now quite widely celebrated as the Feast of Christ the King, or The Reign of Christ. This is a relatively new practice, instituted by the Roman Catholic church in 1925, and one that has been followed by other churches for only the last few decades. Although it rounds off the year appropriately with a culminating affirmation of the supremacy and majesty of the risen Jesus, there are at least two reasons to hesitate.

First, the language employs a rather antiquated conception – kingship. The world in which kings and queens, surrounded by immense wealth and splendor, were held in awe because of their absolute power, has long since disappeared. Apart from a few isolated cases, no one attributes such an elevated status to another human being any more, or makes the mistake of treating them like gods. So how can applying ancient royal images to Jesus Christ enrich our understanding or increase our devotion? Second, invoking the image of Christ the King runs the risk of being unattractively triumphalist. Is this not an expression of Christian superiority in a world that rightly emphasizes the need for inter-faith dialogue?

Christ in Silence Odilon Redon (1897)

In this week's Epistle, Paul, even though he is writing for a world in which supreme imperial power was indeed the norm, offers us a way of responding to the first point  . He tells the Ephesians that God --the creator of all that is -- has used his power to raise a criminalized Jew in an obscure part of the empire ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’. That is to say, the truth about Jesus sets the political power of earthly kings in its proper perspective. For all their majesty, such rulers are powerless to save us from sin and death. Their kind of ‘kingship’ is importantly hollow. This is an assessment that applies to modern states and rulers no less than to ancient ones.

To hail Christ as king, therefore, does not mean claiming supreme power for an alternative political candidate, but reversing our whole way of thinking about power.  It is on the Cross, after all, that Jesus receives his Crown of Thorns. It is of course true, as the Gospel parable of the sheep and the goats affirms, that Jesus has been given the final word of judgment over all creation. Still, this does not license Christian triumphalism. On the contrary, it leaves believing Christians with a new and far more demanding responsibility, also reflected in Gospel parable – to make sure that they see and honor Christ’s kingship in the poorest and humblest people and places of the world.

PENTECOST XXIII

Parable of the Three Servants JESUSMAFA (1973)

• Judges 4:1-7 and Psalm 123  • 
• Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 and Psalm 90:1-8, (9-11), 12  • 
• 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11  • 
• Matthew 25:14-30

The Gospel parable for this Sunday has entered our thinking so deeply that it has changed the meaning of a word. In Biblical times ‘talent’ was a monetary unit (distantly connected, in fact, with our word ‘dollar’). Now it means a special gift or aptitude. This change has come about largely because Matthew’s story has consistently been interpreted to refer to the special aptitudes we find in ourselves. Calling them ‘talents’ has lost all its monetary associations.  The term ‘gifts’, too, has largely lost the theological overtones that it had in former times. Yet, it is precisely because we continue to speak, and to want to speak, in this way, that an important question opens up. Gifts imply a giver. Who is the giver of these 'gifts', if not God? The special aptitudes we delight in – a talent for music or mathematics, or just as importantly, a gift for friendship – are not ours by right. Still less are they our personal accomplishments. Our gifts underlie our best efforts; they are not the result of them. 

 

Here is one place where even the most secularized culture has difficulty abandoning a truly religious sensibility. 'Gifted' people are 'blessed'. Both they and we ought to be grateful for such 'blessings', in exactly the way we are grateful for gifts from friends and family. Without these blessings, we could not make our way in the world. Yet they are benefits we have not earned, and to which we have no natural or human right.

 The Seven Virtues, Faith -- Giotto

The parable Jesus tells relies upon this acknowledgement. But it also goes beyond it. Gifts bring responsibilities, notably the responsibility to use them well. And this, the parable reminds us, implies risk. To use your gifts to the maximum, you have to take a chance. The cautious servant who buried the talent  was ‘risk averse’, understandably so, no doubt, given the severity of the master who gave it to him. Still, however understandable his attitude may be, it brought him to judgment. Life is a gift that we waste to our eternal cost.

The message seems clear. Each of us must make an accurate assessment of the gifts we have been given, and launch out on paths that make the most of these. Of course, there is no guarantee that doing so will bring success as the world understands it. For the Christian, though, this does not mean that we are left stumbling in the dark. On the contrary, Paul tells the Thessalonians in this week’s Epistle, ‘You are not in darkness; you are all children of light’. This is not because they know what the future holds, but because by following Christ they have ‘put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation’. It does not require predictive foresight to be guided by faith, love and hope.

PENTECOST XXII 2014

Head of a Prophet Mikhail Vrubel (1905)

• Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 and Psalm 78:1-7  • 
• Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16 or Amos 5:18-24 and Wisdom of Solomon 6:17-20 or Psalm 70  • 
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18  • 
• Matthew 25:1-13

Depending on what choice is made from the unusually wide range of alternative passages set for this week, it is easy to identify some key themes  -- wisdom, final judgment, and the life hereafter. But how are they connected? The different writers seem to say quite different things about them. The prophet Amos is full of foreboding and paints a gloomy picture -- 'Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD! Why do you want the day of the LORD? It is darkness, not light'. The author of the Wisdom of Solomon, on the other hand,  says that everyone who gives heed to wisdom's laws has an 'assurance of immortality, and immortality brings one near to God'. Saint Paul, however, tells the Thessalonian Christians, that it is not wisdom but the faith that 'Jesus died and rose again', which  gives them reason not to  'grieve as others do who have no hope', and brings assurance that 'the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first'. 

Wise and Foolish Virgins William Blake (1822)

So is the prospect of the Last Day a cause for fear or for hope? And from the point of view of this prospect, does it matter or not whether we have lived wisely? The Gospel reading consists in a single parable which throws light on this. Traditionally known as 'the wise and foolish virgins' it recounts the eagerly anticipated climax of a great wedding, the moment when the Bridegroom arrives. Everyone is equally eager for the Bridegroom's arrival. Experience tells us that this crowning moment could be delayed for some reason or other, and it is simple wisdom, not special genius or expertise, that should lead us to prepare for such an eventuality. Yet when the moment comes, it finds some 'foolish' people who lack this modicum of wisdom quite unprepared. And yet their vain attempt to put things right at the last moment reveals the ease with which they realize the importance of the thing they have lost through lack of foresight. Wisdom is not the cause of the bridegroom's arrival, nor lack of it that causes his delay. Wisdom has to do with the guests' preparedness.

The Wise Virgins Paul Delvaux (1965)

The 'faith' of the Thessalonians was that the death and Resurrection of Jesus is the focal point of the meaning and purpose of the whole creation. That is where their hope did, and should, lie. Nevertheless, they still needed wisdom to properly prepare for the implications of this truth, and could, therefore, foolishly fail to do so. With wisdom we can hope, contra Amos, that the 'Day of the Lord' is a day of light. Without it however, along with the 'foolish virgins', we may discover that it is possible to be excluded from this light and left in darkness.

ALL SAINTS 2014

Icon of All Saints

• Revelation 7:9-17 and Psalm 34:1-10, 22  • 
• 1 John 3:1-3  • 
• Matthew 5:1-12

The Gospel for All Saints in this year of the lectionary consists in ‘The Beatitudes’, so called because they comprise a list in which each item begins with the word ‘Blessed’. Jesus tells his disciples that they are ‘blessed’ when they are persecuted, reviled and slandered. This is deeply counter-intuitive. It is also contrary to those Old Testament passages where the same word is usually translated ‘happy’ and refers to the emotional and material benefits that can be expected to flow from following God’s law. Here, it seems, Jesus is warning his followers that, in ordinary human terms at least, discipleship is likely to be bad for them.

So why would anyone go in for it? Sometimes the answer is thought to lie with post-mortem rewards – benefits that we can expect in heaven, if only we persist. But to follow Jesus for the sake of future benefits has the unwelcome implication that there is nothing to be gained from faithful discipleship now. A traditional hymn begins ‘My God I love thee not because I hope for heaven thereby’. That seems right.

Cloud of Witnesses

The short but beautiful Epistle from the first letter of John contains a central Christian affirmation on just this point. The greatest possible blessing in life is ‘that we should be called children of God’ and ‘we are God’s children now’. Speculation about heaven and the hereafter is not really relevant because ‘what we will be has not yet been revealed’.

None of us wants to be persecuted or reviled. Being ‘meek’ or ‘poor in spirit’ is not a goal we are inclined to set our children either. Yet at All Saints we are invited to acknowledge this deep truth.  Though ‘the world did not know it’, the lives of the poor and persecuted who truly lived as ‘children of God’ were as blessed as we can ever hope our own will be.

PENTECOST XXI 2014

Pharisees - Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976)

• Joshua 3:7-17 and Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37  • 
• Micah 3:5-12 and Psalm 43  • 
• 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13  • 
• Matthew 23:1-12

In the Gospel passage for this week Jesus contrasts those who use religion as a means for self-promotion and aggrandisement, with those who find in it a cause for deep humility. Humility of this kind may be said to be the most distinctive of Christian virtues. Love, compassion, hospitality, and a sense of justice, are all virtues in other creeds, both religious and non-religious. But humility stands out as something on which Christians place particular value, an emphasis that served to set their faith far apart from the Roman world in which it first emerged.

It has never been an easy virtue to accept, and may indeed be even harder now than it was then. A sense of self-worth is crucial to psychological well being, and so we rightly lend importance to self-esteem. In the consumerist world of today, however, this sense easily slides into an assertion of individual rights, desire satisfaction and personal accomplishment. Indeed, these are so often taken to be the marks of what self respecting people should strive for, that humility comes to be despised as a kind of self-abasement. Conversely, praising humility is dismissed as a  covert way of undermining the rights of the poor, the abused or the oppressed.

Micah -- James Tissot

There are indeed dangers here. Telling others to be humble is a familiar form of domination. Still, Jesus could hardly be more explicit in his endorsement of humility against the Pharisees’ great failing -- spiritual pride. Their confidence in their own righteousness was so secure, they assumed they could pursue their own interests with impunity. It is precisely the same fault that Micah eloquently condemns in the accompanying Old Testament lesson.

There is, nonetheless, an element of paradox in what Jesus says – ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted’. Does this not imply a kind of ‘mock’ humility – appearing humble, but really harboring a desire to be exalted? Here it is essential to remember that it was on a Cross that Jesus himself was ‘exalted’. The exaltation that true humility seeks is for spiritual heights, not social or material status -- even in the next life. The prayer of the Psalmist expresses it perfectly – “Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling”. The humility that should result from such a prayer is not a sign of timidity. Rather, it will reflect deep confidence born of honesty about who we are and who God is.