holy cross sermon for the last sunday after the epiphany, 2010

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s readings speak to us of the glory of the Lord, and of the encounter of the Lord’s disciples with his glory. The Gospel reading from St. Luke is the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. What I am going to say is a little challenging, so put on your thinking caps. To get us thinking in the right direction, I am going to ask (and suggest and answer to) the question: why does the Lord hide his glory, revealing it only to a few, and in brief glimpses?

St. Luke says that Jesus goes up on a mountain to pray. This is something we see Jesus doing from time to time in the Gospels. Pope Benedict, in his book “Jesus of Nazareth” says that in these discreet Gospel episodes where we see Jesus up on a mountain, usually alone, in prayer – we catch a very brief, dim glimpse of the eternal communion of mutual delight that Jesus shares with the Father, which constitutes the very essence of God himself, the inner life of God, the love that St. John says God IS.

But in the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus does not go up onto a mountain “by himself” (cf. Matt. 14.23), but takes with him Peter, James, and John – the most inner circle of his disciples. And Luke says that “as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.” (Luke 9.29ff)

Here we have the crux of the Transfiguration story, from which it takes its name: “the appearance of [Jesus’] countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white.” And Moses, the giver of the Law, and Elijah, representative of the prophetic witness of the Old Covenant, appear “in glory” and speak about Jesus’ death on the cross.

What is happening here? Each year, on the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, the Church sets this text before us. This year we hear the version from St. Luke’s Gospel; last year we heard St. Mark’s version; and next year we will hear St. Matthew’s. What does the Church wish us to see in the Transfiguration on this last Sunday before the season of Lent?

St. Maximus the Confessor – a great teacher of the faith who lived in the 600’s – wrote about the message and meaning of the Transfiguration. He said (in Chapters on Knowledge):

To those who apply themselves with the utmost zeal to the divine Scriptures the Word as Lord appears under two forms: first, a general and public sight not reserved to a small number of which it is said, “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him”; the second [form under which the Lord appears to those who apply themselves to the divine Scriptures] is more hidden, and accessible to a small number, to those who have already become as Peter, James, and John, the holy apostles before whom the Lord was transfigured in a glory overpowering the senses, in which "he is beautiful in appearance before the sons of men." Of these two forms, the first is fitting for beginners, the second is proportioned to those who have become perfect in knowledge, insofar as this is attainable. The former is the image of the first coming of the Lord to which the letter of the Gospel refers and which purifies by sufferings those who are in the stage of striving. The latter is a prefiguring of the second and glorious coming in which is understood the Spirit. It transfigures the [disciples] by wisdom with a view toward their deification. By this transfiguration of the Word in them, they behold with unveiled faces the Lord's glory.

This is what we are after. And this is the singular purpose of Lent. Our goal, the goal of all our spiritual striving, is the vision of the Lord with unveiled face, in his glory. We must desire this, because this is the experience of eternal blessedness. This is what will be “going on” in heaven: the unclouded perception of “the king in his beauty”. (Isaiah 33.17) And to discover a DESIRE for this in ourselves is to discover the cornerstone of salvation. And so we have to foster this desire in ourselves, and when we find it, even fleetingly, we have to run after it, nourish it, and coax it to grow. And this is the life of Christian devotion, and it is broadly speaking the point of Lent.

The perception of the “king in his beauty” is what the story of the Transfiguration is all about. Yet what is its “content”? What can we say about this vision? We may certainly say that it is the perception of the hidden glory of God – a glory that often – usually – remains hidden from many of Jesus’ own disciples, a glory that seems prone to be caught only in glimpses and for brief moments in this life, even for the greatest saints. But even if it is a glory that remains hidden, we can yet come to know it. For, as St. Paul says, “it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor. 4.6)

So why does God hide his glory? I think it is because of his great mercy toward us, because our nature could not bear the sudden disclosure of the Lord’s glory. We would be undone. We read in the Old Testament today of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, where he had encountered the Lord. Exodus says “when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.” (Ex. 34.30) But when Moses was on the mountain, when he asked to see the Lord’s glory, the Lord told him “No,” – “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name `The LORD'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.” (Ex. 33.19f) And the Lord hid Moses in the cleft of the rock and made his glory to pass by, and allowed Moses to see him from behind.

So it remains for us. The Lord is with us even now, particularly in the tabernacle, veiled under the species of bread, yet we are separated even from his presence there by veils – literally: there is a veil over the ciborium that holds the consecrated hosts, and a veil that covers the tabernacle itself. The Lord “sits among us silently and secretly. When we approach Him, we know it only by faith; and when He manifests Himself to us, it is without our being able to realize to ourselves that manifestation.” (JH Newman in Sermon 1: Worship, A Preparation for Christ’s Coming)

Yet why? What is it about the Lord’s glory, and its sudden disclosure that means the undoing of worldly nature? Why can even the very pure only bear it, at best, in brief glimpses? Our Archbishop of Canterubry, Rowan Williams, has said “The hidden glory is not simply an arbitrary paradox or simply a consequence of the impossibility of God appearing as God in the created order: it is the outworking in finite form of the eternal self-yielding, self-hiding… of the Son before the Father, the Son who does not will to be 'visible' except as the living act of the Father.” (from Theology in the Face of Jesus) In other words, the disclosure of the Lord’s glory is the disclosure of the mystery of divine love. We can’t bear it because we are wrapped up in the world’s “system” of carefully managed egoism. To be ready to encounter the Lord’s glory we must first be absolutely willing to be “decentered” and dispossessed of self. And that prospect, if we are honest, is a terrifying one. It requires perfect trust.

As the believer begins to be free of self-absorption, s/he begins to see a little of what might be thinkable about a God wholly free of self-interest. Such a God is, on the one hand, free to be present without self-protection or reserve in any place, including the places most remote from 'heaven': he can be in the hell of suffering and abandonment without loss of self, since the divine self is utterly invested in the other; and on the other hand, such a God cannot be conceived as an eternal individual self, but as a life lived eternally in that 'investment' in the other. Thus the believer perceives what I have called the interiority and integrity of God, the resource and solidity of divine life: what is indestructibly solid in God is this life-in-the-other. To see the freedom of God to be in the cross is to see glory, because it is to see how God's utterly non-negotiable presence and action can be real in the physical body of the tortured and dying Jesus.

That is why the Lord’s transfiguration is perennially held before us on the last Sunday before Lent: because we are entering into the preparation that leads to the cross, and through it to Easter morning. If we are to reach Easter morning and its glory, we must understand that it is hidden behind “the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations” (Isaiah 25.7), death itself – that God’s glory is to be found by, with, and in the tortured, dying, and dead Jesus.

As this realization is lived-out in the lives of the faithful, it is inevitably a painful and fearful process, but one nevertheless undergirded by a deep peace that transcends circumstance. At the end of today’s Gospel reading, we have an intimation of that: “a cloud came and overshadowed [the disciples]; and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.”

Having come to some knowledge of the glory of the Lord, let us stir up within ourselves a willingness to enter the cloud, trusting in the Lord’s mercy and loving-kindness, and let us attend to the voice of God in the darkness of the cloud bearing witness to his Son. And knowing that the cloud will dissipate and the darkness be turned to light, let us press on with boldness to find Jesus alone.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

the ordination of a priest

Last Saturday I had the extraordinary privilege of preaching at the ordination to the priesthood of Fr. Michael Cover, a great friend from seminary. Here is what I said, and a picture of Fr. Michael at the moment he became a priest. My head is barely visible on the right.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

First of all, I want to say what an honor it was for me when Michael asked if I would preach today – and I want to thank him, and to thank all of you.

I would like to begin by posing this question: what are priests for? Priests do all sorts of things, as I’ve learned in the few years that I have been one. Priests visit and minister to people at every stage of life, from the delivery room to the deathbed; they share in every joy and every sorrow of human existence. They visit nursing homes and prisons, they give out alms to the needy and food to the hungry, and sometimes they have the sad task of turning away the hungry and needy when the alms and the food run out. Priests pray and teach; they lead people in worshiping God; they counsel sinners. It never occurred to me as I was preparing for ordination, but priests also become intimately acquainted with the tediousness of life. Priests manage and administer and host. They make photocopies and prepare budgets; they cook meals and mix drinks; they sweep floors, arrange furniture, change light bulbs, polish silver – and a million other things that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.

These are all aspects of a normal priest’s existence. But what are priests FOR? After all, one doesn’t have to be a priest to visit the sick, to give out alms and food, to run photocopiers or mix drinks. Our Prayer Book also makes it clear that you don’t HAVE TO be a priest to anoint the sick, preside at a wedding, or hear a confession (though, its true, you must be a priest to absolve the penitent). Under some circumstances a deacon or a layman may even minister communion to the faithful. But there is one thing that only a priest may do, from the earliest days of Christianity to today, and that is the central fact and the central act of Christian life: only a priest may offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood. THAT is what a priest is for. As Jesus said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” Dom Gregory Dix put it very well. He asked:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

THAT is what a priest is for. That is why his hands are anointed and that is the task to which he is set: as the Lord himself said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” And this action is the wellspring of grace from which flows everything else, every other facet of Christian ministry, for laymen and clergy alike: the acceptable offering of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ to the Father for the remission of sins.

From this fact we may draw an important inference, and it is this: PRIESTHOOD DOES NOT BELONG TO MICHAEL COVER. It does not belong to Will Brown, or to Paul Lambert or to Pope Benedict. Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ, and to him alone, because he alone among human beings offered himself acceptably to the Father – with every ounce of his being, with every breath he took, at every moment of his existence, the life and death of Jesus was perfectly conformed to his loving communion with the Father. And this means that he lived a life and died a death that was perfectly empowered by the Holy Spirit because, as St. Augustine says, “the Holy Spirit IS [that] unutterable communion of the Father and the Son…. [And] In order, therefore, that the communion of [Father and Son] may be signified from a name which is suitable to both, the Holy Spirit is called the gift of both. And this Trinity is one God, alone, good, great, eternal, omnipotent; itself its own unity, deity, greatness, goodness, eternity, omnipotence.” (De Trinitate, Book V, Ch. 11)

And this in turn is why we will invoke the Holy Spirit – when we sing Veni Creator Spiritus, and through the laying on of apostolic hands – because it is only by the Holy Spirit that “the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father” (ibid. Book XV, Ch. 19) may be ineffably demonstrated; and THIS is the job of the priest at every mass: To show forth this eternal, divine, all-powerful love, which bubbles out (cf. Meister Eckhart) from the inner life of the Holy Trinity in an ecstasy of creation and redemption.

Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ alone because Jesus Christ demonstrated this ecstatic, all-conquering love ALONE – for three hours, amid darkness and earthquake, at the place of a skull. In this place, on the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus, in his theanthropic solitude, cut off even from the tightest bonds of the love of his all-holy Mother, Jesus Christ broke the power of selfishness, envy, violence, corruption and rot; and there, from the depths of his woundedness, in water and blood, drove out the ruler of this world and demonstrated himself to be the earth’s Judge and the Lord of heaven. Here, on the nuptial bed of the cross, Jesus opened a new way for us, through his sacred heart, to the communion of mutual delight that is his alone, forever and by right, together with the Father.

It is this power acceptably to offer the body and blood of Jesus, which breaks down the dividing walls of hostility (Eph. 2.14) erected by human pride – it is this power of the cross that is being given to Michael today – the power to celebrate the memory of God’s only Son, to show forth the sacrifice of his death (cf. BCP p. 400) for the sins of the whole world, to proclaim his resurrection from the dead and his ascension in the flesh to the right hand of power. Today Michael is being given the power and the authority, in short, to celebrate the mass, to offer to the Father the substantial and inexhaustible contents of the mystery of our faith, the body and blood of his only Son – crucified, died, risen, glorified and reigning forever – and so perpetually to make known to the people who belong to God the all-conquering power of his love.

Michael, I want to leave you with three things. First, I want to exhort you to let your marriage be Eucharistic. Love your wife, and remember that your union with her, as the apostle says, demonstrates the mystery of our redemption (Eph. 5.25); that she shares your priesthood in a unique way, in virtue of the sacramental union of your flesh; and that there is perhaps no better way for you to demonstrate God’s love for his children than by your love for your wife. Let your marriage, your love for one another, be sustained and empowered by the marriage of divine nature and human nature in the one flesh of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father on the nuptial bed of the cross.

Secondly, I want to exhort you to let your whole priestly life be Eucharistic. Let everything you do – all the sublimities, tediousnesses and absurdities of priestly life and pastoral work – let it all be sustained and empowered by the body and blood of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father for the remission of sins. For the sake of Jesus, hold the people of God in your heart. Share their joys and allow yourself to be afflicted by their sufferings. Hold them all in prayer – the living and the dead. Remember them at God’s altar, breathe their names into the chalice of Christ’s blood. Live the difficult circumstances of God’s people as their brother; sincerely suffer them in your heart. Draw them, in the power of your Master, out of their anonymity and fear. Acquaint yourself with them and call them by name to walk in safety along the paths of life, to be found again when they become lost, to be loved, and to receive salvation as the supreme gift of God’s love. God has promised to his Church not hirelings, but shepherds after his own heart (Jer. 3.15). And his heart has been made known to us in the sacred heart of his only Son Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and our great High Priest. Allow your priestly life to be Eucharistic. (cf. JP2 in Pastores Dabo Vobis)

Thirdly, I want you always to remember that this mystery of God’s love is the TRUTH. It is the Gospel. It is to this truth that the whole economy of the Catholic Church bears witness. The blood of the martyrs cries out from the earth to proclaim this truth. When our Lord stood before Pilate he said, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18.37) Attend to this truth. Listen for his voice in your study, in your life of prayer, in your adoration of our Lord’s sacramental presence. Give your voice, your pen, your hands, always in loving obedience and faithful service of this truth. Let your priestly ministry perpetually deepen into this truth. In this culture of clever incredulity, and in a Church that has in many ways conformed itself to this clever incredulity, suffer no denial of this truth. Allow yourself to be regarded as a fool for the sake of this truth. Live for this truth. Die for this truth.

And remember the words of the apostle, whose ministry you have now come by grace to share, who said: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Cor. 2.2ff)

So to God most holy in his divine majesty of trinity-in-unity, to Jesus Christ our Lord and God, made man and crucified for us, to blessed Mary, ever-virgin, from whose glorious purity he took flesh, and to the entire company of the saints in heaven, be everlasting praise, honor, power, and glory, from every creature on earth, and unto us sinners may there be full remission of all our sins, through the blood of Christ’s cross, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.