BILLTESKA

Twice in this Gospel, there is reference to the heart. Jesus commands the disciples to take heart, but their hearts were hardened. Apparently you can’t take heart very well if your heart is hard. A hard heart is not a source of daring. No good to anyone who wants to make headway against the wind. Of no use at all to the mission of the Church, because that mission has to do with what happened with the loaves, which the hard heart does not understand. What happened with the loaves last week is the Mystery of the Church. So is the boat, in which the hard-hearted disciples are struggling at the oars and making no headway against the adverse wind.

“He intended to pass them by,” and stopped to get into the boat with them, apparently, only because they were so afraid. In other words, the natural location of the Lord is out in front of the Church. It reminds me a little of a similar detail in another story about the Church, the Supper at Emmaus, when Jesus made as if to go on, but the two disciples implored Him to stay, because it was almost dark. And then He made Himself known to them in the breaking of the bread. In both stories, the disciples fail to recognize Jesus and He is moving out in front of the Church.

I have recently seen some negative assessments of the Primate of Nigeria. Maybe it is true. It is so satisfying in time of controversy to think of one’s opponents as wicked. It is better not to think so, though, because unity in Christ has nothing to do with personality. And woe to him who utters another’s sin! Such judgments do not uphold the Truth or edify the Body. Such judges are already sinners at least as bad as the one they judge, and they are certainly not teachers of the Truth. Before we speak the truth to anyone, we must love him. If we cannot love him, we must be silent. And even if we do love him, we must speak only that part of the truth that we can speak in love, for otherwise there is no edification – no building up of the Body of Christ, of which we hear today from Paul – and with out love, truth can even tear down the Body as viciously as the one whom we excoriate for doing so. And then we are all deceived. If a brother is in error, let us try to understand him, plead with him, and seek every possible means of reconciliation up to but not including the sacrifice of either Truth or Love.

The fashion of relativism leads many to speak of the Truth as “my truth” and “your truth” and “the truth for them” and “the truth for us”. As though the truth differed from place to place, person to person. The Truth is one. Still, there is this much truth to relativism: nobody has the whole truth. If the Anglican tradition has ever understood anything, it is that. We are and ought to be wary of anyone who tells us he has a corner on Truth! As the Apostle said in another place, we know and believe and bear witness in part – we never have the whole Truth.

In point of fact, we never have any of the Truth, bercause it is the other way around: the Truth has us. If there is any relationship at all between me and the truth, it is this: the Truth has invaded my space and invited me into the Body, which is on a communal spiritual journey into an ever-fuller relationship with the whole Truth, which possesses all of us together. Not you and me and the Primate of Nigeria separately, but together as one Body. In Paul’s word’s today: “all of us come to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of the Messiah.”

The Truth may have us, but we each understand the Truth partially. Still, we must be faithful to that part that does have us. We must proclaim it and live it and act on it fearlessly, with neither reservation nor hardness of heart. As faithful persons, we are not free of the Truth that has us. Nor is proclaiming that Truth some kind of self-fulfillment project; it is not a matter of asserting “our truth”, but that part of the whole Truth which has been entrusted to us to proclaim. We are not to hide it in the ground like the unprofitable steward of last Summer’s parable; we are commissioned to invest it, to put it in play out there in public. We have to proclaim it precisely because it is not ours, but a trust from our Master. But our proclamation must always be loving.

Truth and Love must always go together:

Or, in the somewhat less exalted form of our contemporary adage:

Now, keeping Truth and Love together is not always so easy, especially in times of crisis and anxiety, when we seem to be rowing against a dangerous wind. Then the temptation is to fulfill our commission by casting out those brothers and sisters who will not heed us. But the Master has not given us part of the Truth to use as a weapon to bludgeon them with. We are to proclaim the Truth in love, or not at all. But we are to proclaim it: with Love, but without compromise, unto the building up of the Body.

The building up of the Body means that the Body will change. The Body is growing ~ growing up into the full stature of the Messiah, and that means change, and change is painful. We are to be kind to one another’s suffering. This adolescence of our common Body is tumultuous, but insofar as it depends on us, we are never to break communion. If some cannot stand the pain for a while and refuse to share with us the Signs of unity, we must nevertheless continue to welcome them, and grieve if they will not come. Let there be no spirit of triumph, no glory in our own righteousness. We are not free to condemn or to ridicule anyone; but neither are we free to compromise the truth some find painful to hear.

If, God forbid, we are deceived and possessed by Satan as Archbishop Akinola says we are, then we will die out on our own. If not, then as Gamaliel said to the Sanhedrin, those who condemn us will find themselves opposing God. Our only rôle in this little drama is to be faithful in manifesting our part of the Truth and to pray for those who take offense at our fidelity. The public blessing of homosexual relationships and the elevation of a man in one to the episcopate is unheard-of – just like walking on water.

Well, maybe not entirely unheard-of, but pretty-much forgotten, just as the Apostles had forgotten, for the moment, about Moses and Elijah and Elisha, the greatest of the prophets, who like Jesus, had made water into a solid footpath. But the disciples didn’t make the connection because they didn’t understand about the loaves and their hearts were hardened. Real Communion in Christ is an unprecedented miracle, in which strange and new things happen. Five loaves and two fish feed thousands, people walk on water, and gay bishops are accepted by a large majority.

The Godman always intends to pass us by, to go on ahead of the Church as at Emmaus, to go on our in front of anything we know, and we will have to struggle against the strongest of adverse forces in order to follow Him. And maybe we will mistake Him for a ghost – not the Lord at all, but a satanic deception. At such times of crisis, we must listen for His voice; Take Heart! Do not be afraid!

The Church is the miracle of the loaves; the Church is also the boat; the Church is a New Creation, an unprecedented thing, and a thing that is growing. And that metaphor does not refer to numbers but to growing into the full measure of the stature of the Messiah. The Church is His creature, but He Himself is ahead of us – all of us. The Church is comprised of confused, astonished, terrified human beings; but the Church is not a human institution. When He commands us to do the impossible (You give them something to eat), we must not refuse. Even if it means sharing Communion with Archbishop Akinola. When we are able to let go of our terror and astonishment and accept the pains of our adolescent Body, our hard hearts melt, the sea becomes calm, we find the Lord in the boat with us and known to us in the breaking of the Bread.