Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist Lent 3

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 3rd March 2013

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Deuteronomy 6: 4

John 17: 11

Hear, o Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
Deuteronomy 6: 4

That they may all be one as we are one.
John 17: 11

We have just made two confessions of faith: the first summarises the Ten Commandments and speaks of the unity of God and our unity with each other. The second, sometimes called the high priestly prayer, extends the Lord’s Prayer. Like the Lord’s Prayer it is addressed to the Father but there is a difference, because it goes on to say that the Son is united with the Father and that all those who are united with Christ in the power of his name are consecrated by the truth. The faith of Christianity rests on our verses from Deuteronomy. This is the Shema (literally meaning ‘Hear’) the text at the heart of Jewish liturgy, just as the Lord’s Prayer is at the heart of Christian liturgy. Our Prayer Book service begins with both: ‘Our Father which art in heaven’, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord’.

The high priestly prayer in John 17, immediately preceding the events of the Passion, is a meditation that radically alters our understanding of the unity of God because Christ takes our humanity into God. Christ reveals the ‘express image’ of God in a human face not as an idea but as a word that speaks of a living presence: ‘I am with you’. In the power of the Spirit and through the power of the name of Christ we are reborn as children reunited with the Father. By grace we are included and made ‘very members incorporate’ in the life of God. The name that cannot be spoken in the Shema acquires a local habitation and an ordinary human name. The unnameable can be addressed: ‘in the name, and for the sake, of Jesus Christ our Lord’. The Almighty is revealed in human weakness, and the immortal becomes subject to all the frailties that flesh is heir to: temptation, privation, rejection, false accusation, arrest, pain, desolation, dereliction, death. In the words of Charles Wesley: ‘the immortal dies’.

What’s in a name? Why does the Lord’s Prayer begin with addressing God by name ‘Our Father’ followed by ‘Hallowed be thy name’? Why does the high priestly prayer address God as ‘Holy Father’ and speak of the power of the name? God is the unspeakable name, the ‘I am that I am’ and ‘I will be what I will be’. God does not exist alongside all the other things that exist, an entity like ‘rocks and stones and trees’. You will not find God with a telescope or a microscope, hovering at the edge of the expanding universe or hidden in the smallest recesses of the particle, but in being addressed by name ‘My child’ and responding ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come’, here and now, because the kingdom of heaven is already present in every one of us if we only know how to recognise it. The strange ‘forked animal’ thrust out of the Garden of Eden is invited to a feast already prepared, awaiting only the expected guest. Your place is prepared with your name on it.  

For God to ‘take our nature upon him’ and find a name was dangerous. There were no foreordained guarantees. The story line of redemption is very precarious: it could so easily happen otherwise or sink into the abyss of unrecorded history. Jesus sets out no argument but proclaims release to the captives and the recovering of sight to the blind. He responds in person to this situation and to that: the Syro-Phoenician woman appeals for a compassion beyond the lost sheep of Israel and He recognises the validity of her urgent claim. He grows and he learns. He writes no book and his words are cast on the wind. They rely on testimony and fallible memory. Yet it seems in retrospect to follow a loose and recognisable pattern, it ‘comes to pass as it is written’, there is a scripture and a script has been roughed out. As the people of Israel pass through the wilderness for forty years, so Jesus enters the wilderness for forty days, as Israel came to Jordan to enter into a promised land so Jesus passes over the Jordan to proclaim a coming kingdom. as there were originally twelve tribes so he chooses twelve disciples, as Moses went up into a mountain to transcribe the law so Jesus ascends the mount to deliver a new law, as the people of Israel are famished and receive manna so the bread of heaven is passed from hand to hand among the hungry crowd by the lake, as the prophets envisage a people entering into Jerusalem ‘with everlasting joy on their heads’, so Jesus enters into Jerusalem ‘meek and riding upon an ass’ to great rejoicing by all the sons and daughters of Jerusalem.

Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, not a truth about some thing but He who is. He is known only in the communion of I and you established only and solely by calling upon and responding. The source of all being, ‘before whom all mortal flesh keeps silent’, whose glory emerges – so the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says – with Spring, with ‘growth in everything, flesh and fleece, fur and feather, grass and greenwood all together’, speaks in the first person singular. The universal is known in a scandalous particularity and singularity: the world in a grain, eternity in an hour, the cosmos confined in tiny space. It is embedded in humanity, embodied, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, the ‘express image of the Father’, the word made flesh ‘unable to speak a word’. ‘We do not have bodies; we are bodies’. The ‘God of the philosophers’ is ‘not a body’; but in Christ the Word is touched and handled, dandled on a mother’s knee.

‘He came all so still where his mother was
As dew in April that falls on the grass’.

‘To be’ is linked in a knot with ‘not to be’: coming to be depends on vulnerability, to sudden arrest in time or before time, struggles with identity ‘Who do men say that I am?’, to sleeping, dreams, sadness, the inability to do a great work or give a clear sign, grief and the death of friends, testing and being tempted, misunderstanding, having to find strength in loneliness, dereliction: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

When Pilate ‘marvelled greatly’ at his silence in the judgement hall and asked ‘What is truth?’ he answered his own question by parading him before the crowd saying ‘Ecce homo’, ‘Behold the Man’. He is known in the moment when Mary of Magdalene turns, thinking he is the gardener, simply because he speaks her name ‘Mary’, and she replies ‘My Lord’. He is known in the act of offering up in thanksgiving and in the breaking of bread. ‘This is my body given for you’.

‘’Tis the strength in weakness, that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead, I seek and I find it...

A Hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee’.

Amen.