CHRISTMAS

Christmas Night -- Paul Gauguin

There are often multiple services at Christmas, so the Revised Common Lectionary provides three sets of 'propers'. These readings are used in every year of the 3-year cycle.

• 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

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.

 

D G Rossetti - A Christmas Carol

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 despite 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. 

 

“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,it was only thirty years later, after his death and Resurrection, that the birth of Jesus could be recognized, dimly, for what it was. Its full significance, Christians subsequently came to see, lay within the immensely vaster time scale of God’s redeeming history.

Nativity - Hornhurst

 

The key spiritual task at Christmas is twofold. We have to find a way of acknowledging the fact that in Jesus, God came to an earthly home, while at the same time avoiding any tendency to domesticate  Him. The perfect innocence of Jesus makes our redemption possible, but it is not the innocence 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, reduce God to ours.

ADVENT III 2017

Icon of John the Baptist -- Rublev

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

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.

 

Leonardo d Vinci - John the Baptist

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 2017

St Mark the Evangelist (1424)

• 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. It is easy to see that human pride, cruelty and self-centredness erect barriers between human beings. But they erect no less a barrier between humanity and divinity. The central message of the Gospel – as of many religions – is that despite appearances, this barrier is surmountable. We have not shut ourselves off from God for ever.

 

John the Baptist -- Ivanov

Surmounting the barrier of sin, though, is a two sided affair. God’s love offers us forgiveness, however vile or despicable we may have been. In this sense divine love, unlike human love, is unconditional. But God's forgiveness is not. It has a precondition -- sincere repentance. Without honest acknowledgement and true remorse for the many ways in which we have fallen short of our God-given potential, we remain 'tied and bound by the chain of our sins', as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

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, however, also brings into play a deeper dimension. It is key to lifting us beyond the level of material beings created and nurtured out of love – which is what plants and other animals are. It draws us up into the realm of beings who have the potential to participate in divine life.

ADVENT I 2017

Salvador Dali -- Horsemen of the Apocalypse

• 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?

Angel of Revelation -- William Blake

It is perhaps best to start with this thought. Any attempt to think about time and eternity simply has to invoke imaginative rather than literal language. That is because 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.

Contrary to the opinion of some admirers as well as detractors, the Bible is not a scientific text. It is a collection -- books of history, prophecy, poetry, story. Taken together they offer us something that even the most impressive scientific investigation 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 in another compelling image. This means that both the number of our own days, and of the whole cosmos is determined in God’s good time, not in ours. Prediction is pointless, since no one – not even God the Son, today's Gospel tells us -- 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. This is the message of St Paul 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 2017

El Greco's Christ

• 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?

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 when it comes to redemption and saving us from sin and death. Their worldly power is real enough, but also importantly hollow. This is an assessment that applies to modern democratic states with Parliaments and Presidents no less than to ancient ones. As the Psalmist says using the horse as an analogy for military might -- 'for all its strength it cannot save'

Christ Pantocrator

To hail Christ as king, therefore, does not mean claiming supreme power for an alternative political candidate. Rather it means 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 the Gospel parable – to make sure that they see and honor Christ’s kingship among the poorest places and the humblest people.

PENTECOST XXIV 2017 (Proper 28)

Annette Gandy Fortt -- Parable of the Talents

• 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.

Vilmos Aba-Novak The Light (1926)

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 can waste -- to our eternal cost.

The message seems plain. 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. And so we run no ultimate risk if we use whatever gifts we have to the best of our abilities.