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!
