[Sermon delivered Iudica Sunday (the Fifth Sunday in Lent), March 17, 2024 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
The temptation of many ascending the pulpit today will be to preach a sappy, sentimental sermon about the Apostle to Ireland, whose departure from this life to the next we commemorate this day. I do not believe that he would appreciate that much. Many of us know his story, how he was raised in Roman Britain, captured and enslaved by Irish raiders, only to escape and enter formation as a priest and later as a missionary bishop in Gaul only to return to the land of his captors for the express purpose of turning them from the darkness and into the living light of God. His true legacy is bringing the hope of the Gospel to those without it, not green beer, mythic creatures, or pots of gold at the end of rainbows, but instead the message that God, in His love for us wayward children, wants to make a deal with us. This is a deal where God offers to write a new, indelible agreement within the very hearts and souls of His people, [1] crafted and sealed by Our Lord’s suffering, [2] and open to all who would receive it.[3]
I admit that this is impossible to address adequately in a few minutes. Let us make a covenant that in exchange for a brief sermon you would take what we read today and think upon it, but also pay very close attention to the rest of the Mass, particularly to the entire Eucharistic Canon and the Lord’s Prayer. Contained within them we have the crux of the message given to us, the agreement placed before us, the challenge offered to us. As St. Patrick preached so long ago, as Moses and the Prophets tried to hammer in before that, as the Apostles handed down to us, God wants a real, heartfelt relationship with us, and He stopped at nothing, paying a price we just cannot, even after studying it for the past two thousand years, really fully understand or appreciate.
Why then does God go to such lengths? At our best a shadow lies within our core Nature. The good we attempt or evil we try to avoid are still stained with unintended consequences or limited effectiveness. We get tired. We hurt each other’s feelings. We purchase products whose legacy is not squeaky clean. We lapse in judgement. We accidentally hurt others or their livelihood. Sometimes Death pays a visit. In fact, Death eventually does come calling no matter what we do. This tendency is not limited to us, indeed, it is so pervasive throughout the cosmos that Sir Isaac Newton enshrined it as a Law of Thermodynamics. Everything spirals toward chaos and nothingness, either as lifeless dust or crushed under its own weight in a singularity. The whole Cosmos, us included, marches inexorably toward Death because, as we have received in Holy Tradition, all Creation has fallen out of relationship with its Life, Creator, and Lover.
Yet according to Holy Tradition, of which our Scriptures are a large and important part, we learn that God, Who loves His works and His creatures, does not idly stand by, letting His Creation rot from the inside out. We hear repeatedly God entering into agreements, Covenants, if you will, with members of a rational species within this Creation. In each Covenant, God and Humanity enter into a relationship marked by promises on both sides. Some are big, for example God’s pledge not to obliterate all life in a flood as we take care how we use the earth and its creatures entrusted to us, or God’s protection and guidance of a specific people as they adopt a culture and ethos showing it neighbours a different way of being in relationship with the Creator. Some are small, for example one woman lending her only child to lifelong service to God as God removes her grief and unwarranted shame at her childlessness, or a man leaving his ancestral land for God’s promise of a new life and a better homeland for his descendants. In each Covenant described, wonderful things happen, but there is always a fly in the ointment: we misuse the world given to us, Israel turns away from the ideal, Samuel’s legacy is not spotless, Abraham has family problems. Entropy always sneaks in somewhere.
Our end of the deal is sadly lacking, of which God is well aware. The BIG covenant, where God entered into agreement with the tribal federation of Israel, was a shambles. The Kingdom of Israel (and later Israel and Judah), which was built upon that agreement, failed in its goals and eventually failed altogether. The agreement passed on by formal and informal teaching failed in its intent, despite God reminding Israel at every turn through the prophets.[4] In short, to be effective the Covenant, the agreement between God and Humanity, could not simply be taught, but it had to be innate, part of one’s nature, but that God would have to, “Write it on their hearts.”[5] No longer could the Covenant between God and Humanity be an agreement entailing action, but a Covenant rewiring of our very Nature. Our corrupted Nature to this point had scuttled every Covenant with God from the beginning. No longer was it enough, in fact, it never was enough, “To say to each other, ‘Know the Lord.’”[6] Our Nature as Humans had to be rewritten so that God could say, “All shall know me, from the least to the greatest.”[7]
Our Lord said, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”[8] Our old Nature, the corrupted Cosmos proves inadequate. The old rules established in defiance of God will suffer their ultimate purpose, separation from Life itself. Jesus Our Lord would effect a New Covenant, a new agreement, paid for in His Blood. No longer would there be agreements made that would eventually pass away, but a new agreement in which God would enter into His Creation, in which God would take the Nature of a rational species within that Creation, so that God would effect the following:
Seal the new agreement between God and Humanity with a Sacrifice truly costly to both sides.
In that Sacrifice God would remake that Nature so that it was no longer corrupt, but able to “Know the Lord” deep within itself, as the Prophets foretold.
With that Sacrifice extend the Blessed Hope that Death will not have the final word and that our actions are no longer futile attempts to stave off the inevitable, but that God has removed the barriers that ultimately separate us from Him and that would eventually hobble all other Covenants made before.
Our Lord said,
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”[9]
This seems counter-intuitive, but if we consider that our old Natures are corrupt, unable to maintain a covenant with God, unable to stay in relationship with Him, and that Our Lord has won for us a new incorruptible Nature then it all makes sense. The Way of the Old Nature reflects a path toward ultimate ruin. We must turn our backs on the old Nature, daily put it to death, daily feed the new Nature we have taken up in Baptism, the Nature that knows God and honours Him and thereby partakes in God’s Light, Life, and Love. The Way of the New Nature, the Way of the Cross, is often at odds with the Way of the Old Nature, the Way of Sin and Death. That is not to say that we let down our guard and the old Nature surges forward, but instead of a hopeless march toward nothing the old Nature promises, we now have opportunity time and again to turn our back on it, to repent, and to take up again the Way of the Cross. The Way of the Cross is not as some would tell us an unhealthy hatred of our being, but a denial of our old selves, the old selves that cannot love God, that cannot love what God loves, and that only ultimately feeds on itself and those around it, a parasite bent on its own ultimate destruction. The Way of the Cross is loving God, loving whom and what God loves, taking our nourishment from Him in the expectation that as Jesus rose from the Dead so we too will rise from the Dead and no longer be dragged down by the selfish demands of Entropy to our annihilation.
Like St. Patrick, like the Apostles before him, this is what we preach, this is the message of the Law and the Prophets, what is brought to life at every Mass. We preach a New Covenant. We preach Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified, Who is our Life, and our Hope, and our Salvation.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
Image of St. Simon of Cyrene taking up the Cross for Jesus, Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
[1] Jer 31.31-34
[2] Heb. 5.5-10
[3] Jn. 12.20-33
[4] Cf. Jer. 31.32
[5] Jer. 31.33
[6] Jer. 31.32
[7] Jer. 31.34
[8] Jn. 12.31-32
[9] Jn. 12.24-26
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