Saturday, April 30, 2016

VI Easter, May 1, 2016



Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
Year C  ~  May 1, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

My Father is still working, and I also am working.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Today, we pray that we may love God so that we may obtain the divine promises. In fact, to love God is to obtain those promises. Our experience of loving and desiring God is already celestial bliss. We ask God to pour into our heart love toward God. But in so asking, we acknowledge that God is the Source of our own love.
It is usual to speak of my life and your life. But that is misleading at best. A moment’s reflection compels one to agree that life comes to us and through us and then departs. It is never my life in the deepest sense. Religion – all religion – teaches that there is only One Life. So it is with Love – at least the love we mean when we pray that God may pour it into our hearts.
The similarity in Teutonic languages between live and love (Lebe and Liebe) – hints that the realities named are also the same. The Love that is in our hearts is no more my love than the life that beats there is my life. What we ask God to pour into our hearts is God’s own Love, which is to say God’s very Being, for God is Love. If we experience Love for God in and above other people and all creation, it is because God is loving within us. Just as if we live at all, it is because God lives within us. We have nothing to do with this except to let it happen.
St. Augustine observes that God fashions in us a delight and attraction to God, which we experience as our own delight. We are free to block the attraction, to stifle this delight: we are free not to love – just as we are free to kill ourselves, which amounts to the same thing. We cannot understand this, but we can accept it, rejoicing in the promise that exceeds all that we can desire. So Jesus healed the paralytic on the Sabbath and commanded him to work. The passage goes on to record a dispute about working on the Sabbath.
So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The Man Who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” … Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because He was doing such things on the Sabbath.
Not only did He work on the Sabbath (originally, a capital offense), but He commanded others to do the same. To issue commandments was to claim Divine Authority. What is worse, what He commanded seemed to contradict the Law of Moses. Genesis records that God rested on the Seventh Day,
But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” For this reason, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God His Own Father, thereby making Himself equal to God.
Because God stopped working on the Seventh Day, it was the day of rest for all. The word Sabbath means ceasing – stopping, finishing. Rest from all labor. But Jesus says that His Father never stopped working and neither will He. The process of creation has never stopped, and now He commands creation itself to join in the process.
Our ancient teachers found much significance here. The Holy Sabbath that followed Good Friday was a day of apparent rest – rest in the Tomb – but God was still at work in the unseen realms completing Creation, or rather making a whole new world, by trampling down the stronghold of Death and liberating all its captives. This Mighty Act of New Creation He accomplished on the Seventh Day, the Day of (apparent) Rest, of ceasing from work, just as He healed the paralytic on the Seventh Day.
The work is complete only on Sunday, the First Day of the week,  when God began the process,  but now the Eighth Day of Creation. Here is a paradox, because a week has only seven days. The Eighth Day is not the beginning of a new cycle, but a Day that transcends time – the Eternal Day of the New Creation, the Day of the Kingdom of God, as seen in the Apocalypse. The Greeks call this Day ἀνέσπερος ("without evening" following a famous commentary of St. Basil the Great). The "Eighth Day" is the Day without an evening – it never ends.
Not only did the Godman work on the temporal Sabbath, He commanded the healed paralytic to do so, too: to carry off his bed-roll. He represents the fallen world. He experiences New Creation. Then Jesus directs him to share in the work. Jesus clearly commands humanity to participate in the process of creative work, from which His Father has never ceased.
Here’s what St. Maximos the Confessor had to say in the 7th Century (remember that in Genesis, Friday was the completion of all material creation, and Saturday was the Day that began when God saw that creation was very good):
The Sixth day betokens the inner essence of the being of created things. The Seventh signifies the quality of the well-being of created things. The Eighth denotes the inexpressible mystery of the eternal well-being of created things.
The former paralytic walks and carries his bed. He joins the Godman in the work of re-creation, which He accomplished as He apparently rested in the Tomb. The Eighth Day, toward which the former paralytic  walks, fulfills the “promises, which exceed all that we can desire,” promises which are not for us alone but for all created things. This is an inexpressible Mystery, because there are only seven days in a week; it is a mystery because created things are creatures of time and space. How can creatures of time live beyond time in eternal well-being, as Maximos says? This supremely good thing surpasses understanding. We can only adore the paradox and depict it in ecstatic vision: New Creation, the New Jerusalem descending to earth. The Eighth Day.
The Eighth Day begins now, ἀνέσπερος, without evening, as God pours into our hearts His own inexpressible love. Like the paralytic carrying his bed, we join in God’s hidden, Sabbatical work; like him, we walk. That is, we know the delight of desiring God, helping to move creation toward the Kingdom, and experiencing God’s Love as our own. We begin to enjoy such good things as surpass our understanding, which exceed all that we can desire.


           
ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS RISEN FORM THE DEAD
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH
AND BESTOWING LIFE
ON ALL IN THE TOMBS


ALLELUIA!

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