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The Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Trinity
by R. D. Crousefrom COMMON PRAYER, Volume Six: Parochial Homilies
for the Eucharist Based on the Lectionary of the Book of Common
Prayer, 1962, Canada.
St. Peter Publications
Inc. Charlottetown, PEI, Canada. Reprinted with permission of
the publisher.
In the Epistle for today, St. John speaks to us of the glory
of divine sonship:
‘Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon
us, that we should be called the sons of God; and so we are.”
As we read the Scriptures, such an assertion as this can pass our lips
(and our minds, too, I’m afraid) with a certain deceptive fluency. It is
nothing new or surprising to us that we should think and speak of ourselves
as God’s children, for so we are. It’s quite obvious. After all, the religious
mind has always known that the whole world, and we ourselves, somehow derive
our reality from a source which is eternal and unchanging, the source and
true end of all temporal change and motion. Thus the whole of existence
is a sort of divine household, with God as the Father, and his creatures
as children. So, of course we are Sons of God.
It is sometimes claimed that what is really essential in Christianity,
when one gets behind all the trappings, is the great doctrine of the fatherhood
of God and the brotherhood of man. And no doubt this is marvelous doctrine;
but there is certainly not anything peculiarly Christian about it. It is
rather the common insight of our whole religious tradition, whether Biblical
or pagan. We are not surprised, therefore, to be called sons of God, nor
do we sense any special privilege in speaking of God as our Father: He
is the father of all his creatures.
Yet, St. John speaks of our sonship with a kind of awestruck gratitude:
“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we
should be called the sons of God.” He speaks of a very special, peculiar,
incredible grace and favour of God: “behold, what manner of love.
He is not talking about the general relation of creatures to the Creator,
but of the grace of a particular divine act, establishing a new relation
of man to God, in the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ. That
is the theme with which his whole epistle opens:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands
have handled, of the Word of life…declare we unto you, that ye also may
have fellowship with us: and truly, our fellowship is with the Father,
and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1.1,3)
He bears witness to the Incarnation, the coming of God in the flesh: the
“word of life,” which “we have heard and seen and handled.” That is the
basis of his whole message, and he declares it to be the whole basis of
Christian faith: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God.” (1
John 4.2-3)
In Jesus Christ, the divine and the human are brought together: we are
made partakers of his divinity who emptied himself to share our humanity.
In him, we are taken into that relation of the Son the Father which is
the very inner life of God himself. This is the relation of the Son to
the Father in the unity of the Spirit. “Truly our fellowship is with the
Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The limitations of the purely natural
creature are overcome, and in this new relation to God in the Incarnate
Lord, we see a destiny of unimaginable glory:
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet
appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall appear, we shall
be like him; for we shall see him as he is.
It is this liberation from the shackles of our nature, this opening up
for us of an eternal destiny in the life of God himself - not just in fantasy,
but in the fact of the Incarnation - it is this which underlies the awestruck
gratitude of St. John. “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed
upon us that we should be called the sons of God.” It is a destiny which
is to be fulfilled in likeness to God himself: “we shall be like him.”
And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as
he is pure.” St. John goes on to draw out the implications of our divine
Sonship in Christ: “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth
hath not seen him neither known him. . . he that committeth sin is of the
devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning.”
Now, these seem to be very hard and uncompromising words, and so they
are; but what precisely do they mean? We commonly think of sin in terms
of sins, in terms of vices of one kind and another. But St. John here is
not thinking of vices. He is thinking of the very root of sin in us: the
denial of the divine destiny which is ours in Christ. “Every spirit that
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and
this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should
come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 John 4.3)
“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law, for sin is the
transgression of the law.” Sin expresses itself in sins, in particular
vices contrary to the law of God. It shows itself outwardly in that way.
“Let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous.” That
is how sin is defined and recognized. But if you look at sin just on that
level, as transgression of the law, it seems so often such a very trivial
matter, and the law appears as a narrow-minded kill-joy, an arbitrary limitation
of our freedom.
But sin is so much deeper than that. Fundamentally, sin is the spirit
of antichrist, the denial of our eternal life as sons of God. It is the
denial of that vision and hope.
“Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as he is
pure.” “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.” Fundamentally, sin is a
turning away from the vision and hope of glory. It is a kind of diabolical
despair, which destroys the very basis of spiritual life. “Whosoever abideth
in him sinneth not”; that is to say, so long as we hold on to the vision
and hope of our calling as sons and daughters, so long as our love is focused
in that end, our life is a purification. It is an increasing clarity of
vision and simplicity of love: “we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is.”
The whole message of the Epistle is beautifully summed up in the Collect
for today:
O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy
the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of eternal
life: Grant us, we beseech thee, that, having this hope, we may purify
ourselves, even as he is pure; that, when he shall appear again with power
and great glory, we may be made like unto him in his eternal and glorious
kingdom…
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