GOOD FRIDAY LITURGY

April 7, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

The cross is the archetypal symbol of Christian faith. Apart from its historical role as the instrument of the Lord’s torture and death, some commentators see its intersection of vertical and horizontal beams as a visual symbol of Incarnation. The vertical beam symbolizes transcendence. It points to heaven above, and to eternity. The horizontal beam symbolizes immanence. It points to the world around us, the here and the now. So, the cross’s intersection of vertical and horizontal beams signifies the union of transcendence and immanence, eternity and time, spirit and matter, divine and human, in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. 

 

At the historical level, moreover, the Lord’s actual death on a wooden cross on the hill of Golgotha also exhibits both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Up the vertical axis, the suffering Jesus is offering to his Father in heaven the one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world; and the Father looking down from heaven is lovingly accepting his Son’s sacrifice. Along the horizontal axis, the dying Lord is stretching out his arms of love to gather in all humanity and all creation; and conversely his life, forgiveness, grace, and strength are flowing from his outstretched arms to the world’s remotest ends.

This ancient Good Friday liturgy exhibits a fourfold structure, which oscillates back and forth between these vertical and horizontal orientations. First, our attention is drawn upwards, vertically, to Jesus lifted high upon the cross. Then, our attention is redirected outwards, horizontally, to the world he died to save. And then the pattern repeats itself.

 

We begin with the Liturgy of the Word, culminating in the Passion according to Saint John. It focuses our attention on Jesus, on what actually happened to him on Good Friday. In some churches, the Passion is read dramatically, with readers taking the various spoken parts. In parishes that have the resources to do so, the Passion is sung to the ancient chants, with the cantors and choir taking the various parts. Either way, the goal is a performative recitation, aiming not merely at remembering something that happened in the past, but making it vivid and real, transporting us back, so that we become virtual eyewitnesses; or, conversely, bringing it forward into the present so that we experience it here and now in all its naked terror and awe. In this way, we’re able to give an affirmative answer question posed in the old spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Yes, we were there. We are there.

Then, following a sermon or homily, which is ideally kept brief, we turn our attention from the cross outwards, towards the world, reciting the ancient prayers known as the Solemn Collects. This movement has a deep inner logic. It’s not simply that since there's really nothing left to say, we may as well say some prayers. No, having just listened to the Passion Gospel, we ask God the Father to apply the benefits of his Son’s death “to all people everywhere, according to their needs.” We make these prayers in the assurance that “God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” The Church’s liturgical response to the proclamation of the Lord’s death is thus to pray for all those for whom he died.

 

Continuing our alternation between the vertical and the horizontal, we turn our attention once again to the cross, this time in loving adoration. A cross is brought in for the congregation’s veneration. The rubrics specify that this cross must be made of wood, like the cross on which Jesus was crucified. This ceremony dates back to the fourth-century Church in Jerusalem, where worshippers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher would line up for hours on Good Friday to kiss a large fragment of the true Cross that would be unveiled and exposed for that purpose.

 

Then comes the fourth part of the liturgy, the Mass of the Presanctified. We retrieve from the Altar of Repose the Blessed Sacrament reserved at last night’s Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In many churches, the Sacrament is reserved one kind only, the sacred hosts but not the wine, to emphasize that today’s liturgy is not another Mass, no fresh offering of the Holy Eucharist, but a Communion from the Reserved Sacrament—an extension of the single extended Triduum liturgy that began last night.

 

The Church’s sacramental theology teaches us that we receive the grace of Holy Communion just as fully in one kind as in both kinds. The Pandemic brought this teaching home to us, I think, when Communion in both kinds was taken away from us under emergency conditions. 

But still, Communion in one kind diminishes the symbolism. The English Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols writes: “

We are invited to come to Communion under the deliberately deficient symbolism of the single species. As orthodox Catholics we know that our Lord is wholly present in his full Godhead and his full manhood under either Eucharistic sign. Yet we also respect the ways in which he allows himself to be given to us ... Today we receive him, quite deliberately, by the symbolism of incompletion … Today we have only a truncated Eucharist … for today Christ our Lord suffered the disintegration of his very being.

Even in one kind, the Holy Communion of Good Friday conveys the Lord’s life, grace, and power to all who receive it. Having venerated Christ on the cross, we receive him into ourselves—not just for our own comfort and consolation, but also for our empowerment as ambassadors of Christ’s forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing. So we have another turn to the horizontal. Just as in the Solemn Collects we prayed for the world that Christ died to save, so now in the Communion of the Presanctified we offer ourselves as living vessels to carry forth Christ’s salvation into that same world. 

 

Then, following Communion, we leave in silence. There’s nothing left to say. For the time being, the Incarnate Word has been silenced. We do well to keep silence too, waiting in hope and expectation for what God will do next. 

 

THE FIRST STATION:

JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

 Noonday Prayer & Stations of the Cross

Good Friday, April 7, 2023 

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury N. J.

 

In a few minutes we shall participate together in the Stations of the Cross, a devotion brought back to the Western Church by pilgrims to Jerusalem who retraced our Lord’s final journey carrying his cross on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Rather than trying to cover the whole waterfront, I’ve discovered over the years that reflecting on just one of the Stations can have the effect of illuminating them all. So, I will here confine myself to the First Station: Jesus is condemned to death. The theme is judgment.

 

What kind of person was the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate? Historians have rendered widely varying assessments. Some have portrayed him as an honest and honorable administrator doing his best under difficult circumstances. According to this version of the story, Pilate knows full well that Jesus is innocent and wants to let him off, but ultimately yields to political pressure from those seeking Jesus’ death.

 

Others dismiss that reading as a whitewash. Pilate, they argue, is a callous and cruel military governor who wouldn’t give a second thought to condemning an accused man – especially when the charge is sedition and treason. Those who take this line argue that when the Gospels were being written, the early Christians wanted to get along in the world of the Roman Empire, so it was in their interests to emphasize the responsibility of the Jewish religious authorities for insisting on Jesus’ death, while minimizing Pilate’s role in imposing the death penalty.

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But in the end, it was still Pilate’s decision. He bears the responsibility and authority of judgment. And all four Gospels are unanimous in suggesting that Pilate made his final decision in the interests not of truth or justice but of political expediency.

 

The deep irony is that in condemning Jesus, Pilate is judging his own Judge. Just as Jesus stands now before Pilate, so in the Last Day the roles will be reversed. Then Pilate will stand before Jesus and render account for the judgment that he rendered.

 

Judgment is an inescapable dimension of human interaction. To have any meaningful relations with other people, we constantly exercise our critical faculties, sizing up those with whom we have to deal, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, their virtues and vices. Our choice is not between judging and not judging, but between judging badly and judging well. One of the key ingredients of good judgment is the humility borne of the recognitions of how often we ourselves fall short by the very same standards we use to judge others.

 

What I like to call “the paradox of judgment” is that every time we render judgment we simultaneously subject ourselves to judgment. The story is told of a brash young American tourist visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. After taking half an hour to breeze through the dozens and dozens of rooms that often occupied other visitors for days on end, he announced to the guard at the entrance: “Well I certainly don’t think much of your old masters.” Unfazed, the guard replied, “Yes sir, and they don’t think much of you either. Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not the old masters who are on trial here.”

 

The Dean of my seminary had a stock speech he used to give about student evaluations. Every year, a faculty committee would convene to evaluate the progress of each seminarian. They would then write a report to be sent to the seminarian’s bishop. In the third and final year, the evaluation would include the faculty’s recommendation for or against ordination.

 

Now, the Dean would say every year, this process might seem unfair and, well, judgmental. Who were the faculty to judge the seminarians in this way? Only God knew what was in their hearts. But notice, said the Dean, that we all evaluate one another all the time. “From the moment you entered this seminary,” he continued, “you’ve all been evaluating me. And while your judgment of me may not have the immediate effect on my future that the faculty evaluations will have on yours, nonetheless, I know that if over time enough of you form negative judgments of my performance as Dean, then I will have to face the consequences.”

 

We were all impressed by his honesty and humility. Here was a senior academic and ecclesiastical administrator presiding over a process that systematically evaluated people’s fitness for ordained ministry. Yet at the same time he acknowledged that in the very act of rendering judgment he was rendering himself liable to judgment by the very people it was his responsibility to judge, not to mention their bishops, the seminary trustees, and so on.

 

But whatever judgements we render or receive in this life, we need to remember that ultimately God is our judge. C. S. Lewis remarked in his essay “God in the Dock” that by the middle of the twentieth century, human beings had adopted an entirely new posture towards God. Ancient men and women, he wrote, approached the divine as accused criminals approach their judge: confessing their sins and begging for mercy. For modern men and women, however, the positions are reversed. We have put themselves on the judge’s bench and God in the prisoner’s dock. We fancy ourselves quite kindly judges, Lewis continued, and if God has a reasonable explanation for being the sort of God who permits war, poverty, disease, and famine, we’re prepared to give him a fair hearing. But, Lewis concluded, the important point is that we’ve made ourselves the judges and God the defendant.

 

That is the very scene anticipated two thousand years ago at the judgment seat in the place called Gabbatha, the pavement, where Jesus stands before Pilate. And we put ourselves in Pilate’s place when we presume to judge God. But judgment has this odd boomerang effect. As we evaluate God, so God evaluates us. If we question Christianity and find it wanting, so Christianity questions us and finds us wanting. If we reject the Church as unworthy of our membership, so the Church rejects us as unworthy of its membership. Our Lord himself said as much in the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure that you get.” 

 

This picture may seem terrifying, and so it is. But God has the last word; and in the Cross of Christ God’s word is not condemnation and death, but forgiveness and life – made possible by precisely the judgment that Jesus underwent for our sakes. In the first Station, Jesus stands before Pilate and accepts the condemnation of death. In so doing, however, he makes it possible for us to stand before him as our Judge. He calls us to repent of our sins and place our faith and trust in him. Then, having done so, at the last Judgment we shall receive the verdict of forgiveness, acquittal, and life—on account of the very death to which he was unjustly condemned for us and for our salvation.

 

MAUNDY THURSDAY

April 3, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 12:1-14a

I Corinthians 11:23-26

 

The events we commemorate on Maundy Thursday, and indeed throughout the coming three days, all take place within the context of the Jewish celebration of Passover. Our Old Testament reading from Exodus recounts the institution of the Passover meal, known in Judaism as the Seder. 

 

According to three of the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the Last Supper was a Passover Meal. Jesus sends his disciples to the upper room in Jerusalem to prepare the Passover, and they gather that evening after sundown for the meal itself. 

 

The Gospel of John, by contrast, describes the Last Supper as taking place a day earlier. John, it seems, wants to emphasize that Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross occur on the same day that the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the nearby Temple precincts.

 

Scholars have debated which of the two accounts is accurate. Either way, the Last Supper takes place when Jesus and his disciples have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to keep the feast. Passover is in the air. And for all four Gospel writers, Passover supplies the wider field of meaning illuminating not only the Last Supper but also the unfolding drama of the Lord’s betrayal, arrest, trial, suffering, and death.

 

Our reading from Exodus recounts God’s instructions to the Israelites for the first Passover. Despite a series of nine terrible plagues, the Egyptian Pharaoh has persisted in refusing Moses’ repeated demands to let the people go. Before sending the tenth and most terrible plague of all, the death of all the firstborn sons throughout the land, God instructs that the head of each Hebrew household slaughter a lamb and smear some of its blood on the house’s doorposts. The lamb is to be roasted and eaten that night, with nothing left over. Then, when the angel of death traverses the land and sees the blood on the doorposts, he will pass over that house, sparing its firstborn.

 

This last dreadful plague finally persuades Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. For the Israelites, then, the Passover lamb becomes the sign of deliverance and salvation. However, the Passover meal is not left as a one-off event. The Israelites continued to keep Passover, year by year, as the annual commemoration of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. 

 

Some Old Testament scholars have suggested that down through the centuries this annual celebration was not merely an occasion of piously recalling events from the distant past, but rather a means of dynamically re-appropriating and re-experiencing those events in the present. Subsequent generations of Jews may not have lived through the Exodus themselves, but by re-enacting those events liturgically they became one with their ancestors, and so were reconstituted as God’s people Israel in the present. This mysterious quality of the Passover commemoration is conveyed in the Seder’s opening words, spoken by the youngest child present: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The child represents, of course, all the future generations who are to be incorporated into God’s chosen people by their liturgical participation in the long-ago events of their deliverance from Egypt.

 

The Greek word for this transformation of time is anamnesis, the making-present of past events, which translates rather lamely into English as “remembrance.” Saint Paul uses precisely this same word in rendering the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In Greek: do this for my anamnesis. A better translation might be: Do this to make me present; Do this to recall me into your midst.

 

Earlier in the same letter, Paul has explicitly likened Jesus to the Passover lamb in words that we adapt at the Breaking of the Bread at every Eucharist: “Christ, our Paschal lamb has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (Paul’s reference there to “unleavened bread” explicitly invokes the matzo bread used in the Passover meal.)

 

At the Last Supper, moreover, Jesus takes up and transforms powerful religious symbols inherited from the past. Until now, the Passover lamb has functioned as a sign of God’s deliverance of his people from bondage in Egypt. (And so it continues in Judaism, for God’s covenant with Israel is irrevocable and remains in force until the end of time.) But in the Christian dispensation, Jesus himself becomes the new Passover Lamb, the sacrificial victim whose death delivers all people everywhere from the power of sin and death for all time and beyond.

 

During the meal, Jesus adds new words to the familiar blessings said over the bread and the wine, investing them with new meaning: This is my body; this is my blood. In the context of the Last Supper, these mysterious words have a double significance. 

First, they predict what’s going to happen the next day. The Lord’s body will be nailed to the cross and his blood will be poured out. Obscure as these words may be when Jesus speaks them, his disciples will later remember and understand: Yes, it’s what he said at the supper the night before about his body and his blood! His words not only predict but they also interpret his death—not an ignominious and meaningless defeat, but the inauguration of a new covenant in his blood.

 

Second, his words prescribe the pattern that his disciples are to follow henceforth until the end of time: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup,” writes Paul, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” From now on, this pattern will define the Church’s life: meeting together weekly and even daily to break the bread and share the cup, thus perpetually setting forth the Lord’s sacrificial death for our salvation.

 

On Maundy Thursday, then, we give thanks for our Lord’s gift of himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We remember with gratitude the Eucharist’s origins in the Passover meal, which Jesus celebrated faithfully throughout his life. We pray with gratitude and love for the Jewish people, our “elder brothers and sisters in the faith” as Pope John Paul II so memorably called them, who celebrated their Passover Seder yesterday. And we rejoice that Jesus is our Passover lamb, who feeds us with his own Body and Blood every time we gather to break the bread and share the cup in his Name.

PALM SUNDAY

April 2, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Matthew 21:1-11

Matthew 26:36-27:66

 

An iconic moment in the concluding stages of the Second World War was the Liberation of Paris on August 26, 1944. One commentator remarks that it was neither the most dramatic nor the most decisive event in the war, but certainly one of the most romantic. The day after the commander of German forces in the city surrendered, General Charles de Gaulle led a victory parade down the Champs Elysee from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, where he addressed the wildly cheering crowds. He then went to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was packed for a Solemn High Mass offered in thanksgiving for the city’s liberation.

 

Consciously or not, de Gaulle was re-enacting the ancient ceremony known as the Royal Entry. In the time of Jesus, the ceremony was known as the Adventus or “arrival” of the King or Emperor. 

 

Whenever such a ruler would arrive in one of the cities or towns in his realm, a delegation would go out to welcome him and escort him in through the city gates to the acclamation of the crowds lining the road. Then, in the town square, arena, stadium, or some other public place, the ruler would address the citizens, exchange gifts with local officials, and bestow public favors or privileges on the town or city itself.

 

A well-known variant of this ceremony was the Roman Triumph. After a great wartime victory or successful campaign of military conquest, the conquering emperor or general would return to Rome and stage a festive procession into the city, featuring exotic animals, like elephants and camels from far-away, captives in chains, and wagons loaded with the spoils of war – some of which would pay for the ensuing public entertainments. This procession always included two spotless white oxen; the conquering hero’s first stop was always the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, where the oxen were sacrificed in thanksgiving for victory and military supremacy.

 

This background illuminates Our Lord’s Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. All four Gospel writers want us to understand that the King is arriving at the gates to take possession of his capital city. He rides on a donkey in fulfillment of Zechariah’s messianic prophecy: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass." 

 

The crowds come out to meet him, spreading in his path their garments and—as Matthew’s Gospel puts it—“branches from the trees.” (John’s Gospel alone specifies that they were palm branches.) Palm leaves were signs of victory and dominion; coins minted in Judea in the early second century show children bearing palms to greet the Emperor Hadrian. 

 

The acclamation hosanna means something like “Lord, save us!”—said not in despair but in joyful anticipation of imminent deliverance. Drawing on verses of Psalm 118, the crowd’s acclamations “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and “Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord” clearly identify Jesus as the Messiah, the Lord’s anointed, the true King of Israel arriving to take possession of his capital city and end its long subjugation under enemy occupation. 

 

Upon entering the Holy City, Jesus goes into the Temple. This, again, follows the standard pattern of the Royal Entry: the first thing the Emperor did in a Roman Triumph was to offer sacrifice in the Temple of Jupiter; the first thing de Gaulle did after his victory parade in Paris in August 1944 was to enter Notre Dame for the celebration of Solemn High Mass.

 

None of the four Gospels tell us, however, that Jesus offered any sacrifice in the Temple. The reason for this omission may well be that Jesus knows that he is himself the sacrifice. Here, then, lies the deepest connection between the two liturgies of Palm Sunday, the Liturgy of the Palms and the Liturgy of the Passion. Unlike the Emperor bringing oxen to be sacrificed in a Roman Triumph, Jesus enters Jerusalem not only as the triumphant King of Israel, but also as the spotless victim who, within the week, will shed his own blood upon the altar of the cross.

 

Every year I like to incorporate the hymn “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” into the Palm Sunday procession. For its lyrics make explicit this deep connection between the Lord’s Triumphal Entry and his coming Passion:

 

         Ride on, ride on in majesty,

         The angel armies of the sky

         Look down with sad and wondering eyes

         To see th’approaching sacrifice.

 

The great irony is that many among the same crowds who shout “Hosanna” to welcome the Lord into the Holy City shall, within the week, also be shouting “Crucify Him.” The same Lord who enters in through the city gates shall, within the week, carry his cross outside another set of gates on the other side of the city to the place of execution. Palm Sunday challenges us to open up the gates of our hearts to him—and, having done so, to remain faithful even at the cost of taking up our cross to follow him on the road to Calvary.

 

Today, then, with joy we commemorate the Lord’s Triumphal Entry within the walls of Jerusalem, and with sorrow his Passion and Death outside those same city walls. Still, as we shall see next week, both events are preludes to a greater victory than anyone present can possibly imagine:

 

         Ride on, ride on in majesty,

         In lowly pomp ride on to die;

         Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,

         Then take, O God, thy power and reign.  

 

 

FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 26, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Romans 6:16-23

John 11:17-24

 

These five Sundays in Lent have presented us with a series of images and contrasts. Four weeks ago, on the First Sunday in Lent, we explored the contrast between Adam’s disobedience and Christ’s obedience in the face of temptation to sin. The following week we looked at faith as the human response to God’s call to set out into the unknown, exemplified by the Patriarch Abraham. On the Third Sunday, we engaged with the image of water, as a sign of God’s loving providence for the Hebrews in the desert and as a symbol of God’s grace in Our Lord’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Then, last week, we considered the contrast between blindness and sight, between light and darkness, in the stories of Samuel anointing David and Our Lord healing a man born blind.

 

Today’s readings culminate the series by bringing us to the most gut-wrenching contrast of all: between life and death. We generally don’t like to talk about death, because deep down we know the ultimate futility of all our efforts to resist it. Death is omnivorous. It gets us in the end. If you find that thought depressing, then today’s readings offer a powerful message of comfort, reassurance, and hope. For they testify to God’s unbounded creative power: a love strong enough to bring forth light out of darkness and life out of death.

 

Both the Old Testament and Gospel begin with scenes of utter hopelessness. The prophet Ezekiel is transported in a vision to a valley littered with dry bones—likely the scene of some great battle where hundreds of corpses have been left with no one to bury them. Over the years these bones have been picked clean by vultures and vermin, washed by the rain, dried by the wind, and bleached by the sun. The question, “Can these bones live?” seems totally rhetorical. Of course, the answer is no.

 

Likewise, when Jesus arrives in Bethany, his friend Lazarus has been in the tomb four days. The dead man’s sisters, Mary and Martha, both believe that had Jesus been there, he could have prevented Lazarus’s death. But now all seems lost. 

 

When Jesus asks that the stone sealing the tomb be rolled away, Martha probably thinks that he merely wants to have one last look, to pay his respects, and say farewell to his friend. So, she protests: “Lord, by this time there will be an odor.” Actually, the King James Version better captures the graphic force of the original Greek: “By this time he stinketh.” We’re way beyond any possibility of resuscitating a still-warm corpse. By now the inevitable processes of physical decay and dissolution have set in. Better to leave the stone in place and remember Lazarus as he was.

 

So, in both the valley of dry bones and at the tomb of Lazarus, it seems that the grip of death has taken its victims long past the point of no return. And yet, in both cases, the creative, life-giving power of God shows itself stronger than death.

 

Ezekiel prophesies to the bones, and a great sound of rattling fills the air as bone joins to bone, sinews and flesh miraculously regenerate, and the breath of life returns to reanimate a host of newly resurrected bodies. Likewise, standing outside the tomb, Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come forth,” and the man four days dead emerges to be unbound and released. Clearly, the power at work in both instances is nothing less than the same power that created the universe and brought forth life in the first place: God himself restoring and renewing his creation.

 

The message here is that if God can do this for the dry bones, and for Lazarus, then he can certainly do it for us. In the Christian tradition of interpretation of this Gospel, the raising of Lazarus has a threefold significance.

 

First, the raising of Lazarus anticipates the resurrection of Jesus. Strictly speaking, what happens to Lazarus is not resurrection, because once raised from his premature death he grows old and dies again. But the raising of Lazarus points beyond itself to something infinitely greater. And when Jesus is raised from the dead, unlike Lazarus, he’s raised to eternal life, never to die again.

 

Second, the raising of Lazarus anticipates our own resurrection. An article of Christian faith is that the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits, the token, the pledge, of what will happen to us on the last day. Just as Jesus has the power and authority to raise Lazarus from the dead, so at the end of time he shall raise us all in what’s known as “the general resurrection.” Just as Jesus calls into the tomb, “Lazarus, come out,” so he tells us earlier in John’s Gospel, “the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” Or, as Saint Paul puts it in today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

And third, the raising of Lazarus points to Our Lord’s power to bestow new life, here and now. For in addition to physical death, there’s such a thing as spiritual death, manifested in a life lived apart from God. Even though we may be physically alive, so often we make our life here on earth a living death, walled up in tombs of our own devising: with walls made not of stone but of self-pity, jealousy, anger, bitterness, and all the other barriers that cut us off from God and one another, and so prevent us from truly enjoying life as God intends.

 

Today’s readings proclaims that God is infinitely stronger than all the forces separating us from him. Just as Jesus called Lazarus by name, so he calls each of us, and bids us come forth from the darkness of our self-made tombs. Still he commands us to be unbound and released from all the sins and vices that cling round us like a death-shroud. Still he invites us into the light and joy of his presence. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon summed it up well in the second century when he wrote: “The life of humanity is the vision of God, and the glory of God is humanity fully alive.”

 

So, we remember that the resurrection to eternal life takes place not just in the past or in the future but also in the present. We begin to share in this resurrection even now when we turn to God in repentance and faith, finding new and eternal life in Christ.

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT, YEAR A

March 19, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

I Samuel 6:1-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9: 1-13, 28-38

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that of our five senses, the two most closely related to understanding are sight and hearing. In the case of hearing, the connection is obvious. If we can’t hear what people are saying, we usually don’t know what they’re trying to tell us. [Although, of course, many deaf people are able to do amazing things with lip reading and sign language.]

 

And without sight, it’s a challenge to situate ourselves in the world around us, as we probably know from our experiences in an unexpectedly darkened room of stumbling over furniture and other obstacles. Along with touch, the gift of sight is our most direct means of contact with our physical environment. Moreover, our ability to see allows us to discern the spatial relationships among the objects in our field of vision—which ones are near, which ones are far away—thus putting them into proper perspective.

 

This visual sense of perspective is analogous to perspective in the more general sense of the word: the ability to distinguish which issues, concerns, problems, tasks, and goals should take precedence in the big picture of our lives, and which should be placed in the background or at the periphery. In this way, seeing becomes a metaphor for understanding. And so we speak of it. When we try to explain something or make a point to someone, we so often conclude by asking, “Do you see?” In other words: “Do you understand?” To which the response is often: “Yes, I see. Yes, I understand.”

 

All three of our scripture readings for today invoke the image of sight as a figure of spiritual understanding. Running through them all is the contrast between blindness and sight, light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, understanding and not understanding.

 

Our Old Testament reading from First Samuel emphasizes the difference between how God sees and how we see. Jesse of Bethlehem brings his oldest son out to the prophet Samuel, who’s come to identify and anoint the new king of Israel. Samuel thinks, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed.” But God tells Samuel, “Don’t be impressed by his appearance or his height … you look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.”  And so Samuel remains in the dark until God enlightens him by revealing his choice of David, Jesse’s youngest son, deemed so insignificant as to be left out in the field tending the sheep.

 

A similar contrast between darkness and light dominates the Gospel reading from Saint John. The man born blind receives his sight in more ways than one. At the natural level, a miraculous healing occurs. One who was physically blind from birth receives the use of his eyes.

 

At the same time, his spiritual eyes are opened as well. The people around him naturally want to know what’s happened. And each time he tries to explain, he displays a steadily growing understanding of who Jesus is. First, when his neighbors ask who healed him, he answers simply “the man called Jesus.” But later, when the Pharisees denounce Jesus as a sinner for healing on the Sabbath, the man born blind comes to his defense: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” For this, they insult him and expel him from the synagogue. Finally, when he meets Jesus again, he exclaims, “Lord, I believe,” and worships him. So, he’s received his sight both physically and spiritually. He’s come out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of faith.

 

The healing itself is shot through with sacramental symbolism. Jesus makes a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam—clearly an allusion to baptism. Not only that, but from the earliest days Christian baptism included an anointing, and this story features an anointing of sorts, albeit with mud rather than the oil of chrism. Symbolically, the story is telling us that Holy Baptism brings us out of darkness into the light of Christ. Indeed, the early Church often referred to baptism as “enlightenment” and to the newly baptized as “enlightened ones.”

 

In today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul clearly has in mind conversion, baptism, and the baptized life when he writes to the members of the Church at Ephesus, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” His message is that those of us who’ve been baptized must continually grow into our new identity in Christ: “Walk as children of light . . . and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

 

In the eighteenth century, the Anglican Evangelical preacher John Newton started out as the captain of a slave ship. But when he encountered Jesus, he knew that his life had to change. Eventually ordained as a priest in the Church of England, he became a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade, and was a spiritual mentor to the Abolitionist politician William Wilberforce. In his well-beloved hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ he could repeat with total conviction the words of the man born blind: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

 

The Evangelical Anglican movement to which Newton belonged offered a salutary alternative to the eighteenth-century philosophical school ironically known as the Enlightenment. Particularly in France, but also in England and indeed in the American colonies, the thinkers and writers of this so-called Enlightenment emphasized the autonomy of human reason at the expense of divine revelation and religious faith. Its perspective was that of a rationalist reductionism that narrowed and constricted the human vision of reality.

 

We should always remember, however, that the term “enlightenment” belonged to the Church first—well before the eighteenth-century philosophes got hold of it. In the Christian tradition enlightenment signifies the opening of our eyes to the vast expanse of a new field of vision, infinitely broader and deeper than any secularist philosophy: a perspective that allows us to see ourselves and our world in light of the great cosmic drama of creation and redemption, of time and eternity, of death and resurrection to eternal life. 

 

We pray, then, that God will continue to enlighten our minds with the truth of his Word. Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, is the light of the world. Above all else, today’s readings invite and exhort us to come to his Light.