Article
- Date:
- Sunday 6th February 2022
Year C, The Fifth Sunday before Lent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- 1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Luke 5.1-11
Setting aside some Denominational special pleading aside, Chapter 15 of Paul's First Epistle to the Christians, from which our First Reading is taken is, at the very least, the most important passage of New Testament Scripture outside the Gospels because it is not only chronologically the first full statement of the history of the Resurrection, it is also the first full statement of the doctrine of the Resurrection; Paul goes on to say, later, by way of explanation, that if Christ had not been raised from the dead, our faith would be futile.
There are, immediately, three basic points to be made. First, when Paul says that Jesus died for "our" sins according to the Scriptures, he meant that Jews were saved in accordance with the Jewish Scriptures for Jesus saved his people in the first instance as the Messiah. How Jews, in the context of emergent Christianity, was a subject with which Paul was to wrestle in his Epistle to the Romans, but the plain statement cannot be gainsaid. The second point is that the account of the post Resurrection Jesus is fuller in some ways than what we have been left in the later Gospels where all the accounts refer to small groups of followers. Five hundred people is far too great a number to be part of a conspiracy to subvert history. There is always an interesting speculation about the nature of the relationship of Saint Paul and the Evangelist Saint Luke on the basis of the use of the plural in Acts Chapter 16 but there can be hardly any doubt that there was a dense oral tradition before the first documents of our New Testament were written by Paul, followed later by the Synoptic Evangelists. The third point of immediate importance is the balance of emphasis in this passage between the death and Resurrection; the two events are deeply symbiotic as death is a necessary precondition of Resurrection and Resurrection is a necessary consequence of death. Had Jesus somehow metamorphosed from a human being into a hybrid being without the Crucifixion he would be no different from a host of Greek entities; there have been varied explanations in history concerning the Crucifixion but never any disagreement about its salvific necessity. At the same time, Paul's account, read dispassionately, calls at the very least for that mutual inter-dependence. Accidents of history, notably the temperaments of Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, led Western Christianity to focus much more on the Crucifixion than the Resurrection, notably its relationship to human failing whereas the Greek Church tended to move in the opposite direction. One might argue that concentration on human failing is most necessary because it is an aspect of our humanity that we can fix, except that there is a deep controversy about whether we can fix anything. All I can say for myself is that every time I open a human book or a prayer book I grieve at the hegemony of our concern with sin and our relative down-grading of the resurrection. perhaps as a topic it is just too big for us, beyond our comprehension.
Our Gospel Reading from Luke demonstrates above all, the plenitude of Christ beyond all human understanding which serves to reinforce what I have already said. The concentration on our shortcomings and how they relate to the Crucifixion, tend to make the discussion transactional, almost contractual, whereas the Resurrection is far beyond the transactional. When Jesus asks Simon Peter to lower his nets, he is answered in transactional terms: "we were out all night and got nothing" but the power of Jesus is beyond the transactional such that the catch almost broke the nets just as it should almost break our linguistic nets, those we use to try, with the best intentions, to try to catch Jesus. Before reflecting further on the theology, I should make one more practical observation; this miraculous catch would have been lost if there had not been collaboration between the boats. We are not going to succeed if we try to achieve our goal alone; that is why Jesus gave us the Church as his special gift; but in the pride of small differences we have been rather sniffy about other boats, not just those with different denominational names written on them but also some from our own harbours.
Every time I say our Prayer for Growth I smile at the phrase "joyful in our worship" because I don't find enough evidence of joy. Because we tend towards the transactional our worship easily tilts towards the moral where we are bound to end up, sooner or later, dwelling on our own shortcomings which should, naturally, lead us into penitence but that should naturally lead us to joy; just as the Crucifixion needs to be balanced by the Resurrection so our sorrow in our shortcomings should be balanced by the prospect of unconditional joy in the person of Christ and the economy of love in the Trinity. As long as we fail to maintain this balance, we will fail. There is no point running a beauty salon if the sign on the door says: "You're too ugly for us to help" rather than: "We can make everybody beautiful."
Of course, it would be deeply remiss of us to ignore our failings and to think that following Jesus is one long party, but I think in Western Europe that the balance has gone too far; but the incommensurable plenitude of Christ is a reality as immediate as our own human failings but we know that when these two realities come up against one another there is only one winner.
I therefore say, parodying Saint Paul: "Rejoice!" Leave this place with a smile on your face; thank God that you are, no matter how imperfectly, one with Christ, that the road may be hard for the pilgrim but that the final destination is worthy beyond all our striving, that no hardship is too great in view of the prize.