Christ Our Passover

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According to the Gospels, Jesus placed all events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter within the context of the Jewish Passover. See especially Matthew 26.1-2, 26-29; Mark 14.17-25; Luke 1414-23; and John 13.1-5; refer also to Paul’ statement in I Corinthians 5.7-8. A thoughtful and prayerful reading of these passages would make an exceedingly fruitful Holy Week devotion.

The Passover is the first and probably the greatest of three major Jewish festivals. While origins and details are obscure, two fundamental features of the developed observance stand out clearly.

First of all, the Passover commemorates God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from long captivity in Egypt. Secondly, central to Passover is the sacrificial offering of an unblemished Lamb, which shows general thankfulness to God on the part of the people for their rescue, and the blood of such sacrifice marks the homes of the faithful as God “pass(es) over” the Hebrews while slaying the first-born of the Egyptians, an unspeakable plague resulting in the Pharaoh’s freeing of the Hebrews.

By placing his last supper, death, and resurrection in the midst of these things, Jesus is, in effect, creating an entirely new context, a totally new covenant.

He states thereby that his sacrifice on the cross is to be understood as the offering of the New Israel, his Church. Moreover, he declares that his resurrection is the new deliverance from the greater captivity of sin. Finally, he shows in all this that the Last Supper (or Eucharist, Communion, or Mass) is the New Passover meal celebrating God’s presence and the people’s thankfulness in the new relationship.

As a notable commentator observes, in the early Church Easter was called Pascha, a Greek form of the Hebrew term Passover. Our English name comes from an old pagan festival in honor of the goddess of spring, Eastre.

Borrowing such festivals and terms was good in itself, for it sought quite successfully to convert pagans by assimilation. Unfortunately, it also has the effect of emptying the Christian faith of much of its original meaning, leaving it vulnerable to re-paganism by the increasing secularism of the modern era.

The powerful expression of our Prayer Book Eucharist (page 263) has matters right and provides the faithful with an effective hedge against such danger: Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us! Alleluia!

- JR Hiles

Epiphany: Its Haunting Message

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January 6th is the Feast of the Epiphany, one of seven principal holy days on the Church calendar. Its season extends for six weeks or so (this year it’s eight) until Ash Wednesday.

The central story of the Epiphany, a Greek word meaning “manifestation,” is that concerning the Wise Men and how they were beckoned from the East by a great star marking the birth of Jesus. As the Gospel of Matthew records it (2.1-12), they came for two purposes: worship him and offer him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Having sensed that a new ruling force had come into the world, they brought to him gifts fit for a king.

Gold simply represented primarily material things, and inasmuch as the givers in this instance were astrologers, highly esteemed and rewarded intellectuals of their day, it may be supposed that the gift was substantial.

They also brought frankincense. Due to its rich fragrance, this points somehow to inner treasurers which these notable figures likewise presented to the one marked by the star.

Finally, they brought myrrh. Since such was used in embalming dead bodies, this very likely indicates a desire to lay before this new being all their grief and sorrow for what had gone wrong in their lives.

These were indeed gifts fit for a king, for these wise men were somehow persuaded that the star marked the coming into the world a king who could give a life fit to live.

The Epiphany poses a haunting – yea, spiritually tormenting – message for Christians in every time and place, right down to today. Do we truly worship him? Because we name ourselves after the Christ child, we may feel confident that we have indeed sought him, found him, and adore him sufficiently.

In as much as most members of the Church attend services from time to time, put something in the offering plate, and see to it that their children are baptized, educated in the faith, and confirmed, they may think that they have offered to him adequately. But have we? Have we really given Christ our myrrh, our sorrow, pain, and disappointment in life, believing that He is the one sent from God to “turn our sorrow into joy?”

Have we given Him our frankincense, our inner treasures of thought and influence, understanding that, as God amongst us, he is worthy of our deepest devotion?

Have we given Him and his Church sufficient of our gold, our material substance, believing that life is worthless unless dedicated to Him?

- JR Hiles
Adapted from a sermon on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1991

The Power of Pentecost

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Sunday, May 23rd is the Feast of Pentecost, a singularly significant event on the Church calendar. Originally it was part of a fifty-day celebration of the establishment of the Church, embracing the resurrection and ascension of our Lord and culminating in the coming of the Holy Spirit upon it on the Day of Pentecost; indeed the word itself means fiftieth day after Easter. Only in the fifth century were these three elements separated into distinct observances and holy days.

As for Pentecost, it can be confidently believed (with Luke, in his Gospel, 24.49 and in Acts 2.1-42) that the Holy Spirit indeed came upon Christ’s followers at the first Christian Pentecost according to his promise and formed his Church as he would have it. In the power of that Spirit his close followers declared the “mighty works of God” and Peter preached the first Christian sermon with such force and authority that “about three thousand souls” were added to the body of believers that single day, hence the birthday of the Church. In the strength of the same Spirit the apostles performed “many signs and wonders among the people”, as Stephen, who was said to have done so for Christ with “the face of an angel.”

It was the Spirit in the form of a light from heaven that converted Paul from being the chief persecutor of Christians to its chief preacher, transferring to him in turn the power to convert others throughout the eastern Mediterranean, especially Gentiles, so manifesting Christ for the world. The power received at Pentecost and thereafter was clearly a power to prevail, to succeed in the Lord’s Name.

On the other hand, success was by no means assured. From the beginning the apostles faced opposition, suffering, and death for the Lord, Paul indicating that he had had to endure more labors, imprisonments, and beatings unto death in his ministry than others (II Corinthians 11.23). At one point, he said, metaphorically, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2.20) – only to have such prophetically come to pass when imprisoned and apparently chained to a guard (Acts 28.20) he preached the Lord Christ in Caesar’s household in Rome until presumably his martyrdom for the same around A.D. 65. Even in this, however, Paul had already grasped the paradox, the mystery of the spiritual power promised by Christ and delivered at Pentecost, for as the Lord tells Paul in a vision, his “power is made perfect in weakness” (II Corinthians 12.9).

Early on, in his first missionary journey, and after having been stoned and dragged about, Paul said, “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14.22).

He grasped fully the power both to prevail and to persevere in the Lord’s Name.  We need to be ever mindful of this truth of truths with regard to the power of the Spirit given to the Church on Pentecost. Especially so today!

While, as Paul well shows, opposition to the Christian faith has been present from spiritual and secular realms from the beginning, it is particularly vexing now.

Revisionist forces within the Church seek to deny or dumb down timeless basic doctrine. The secular media delights in publicizing and mocking the Church for its faults, for its sins, even as it promotes every manner of sin. Secular and patently anti-spiritual enterprises seek to drive Bible reading and prayer from schools, sports teams, and government offices, all the while conducting business without moral or ethical principles.

If all this were not bad enough, just the past week a Christian street preacher in England was arrested and locked up on a charge of hate speech for quoting the Bible and saying that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. Next, we can be sure, priests will be charged with discrimination for being unwilling to marry same sex couples in obedience to Scripture.

These are what they are! More tribulations through which Christians must pass to enter the kingdom of God!

- JR Hiles

On Giving to the Church

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After warning people gathered at the temple in Jerusalem to be wary of the Scribes, who along with others gave seemingly large sums to its treasury, Jesus goes on immediately to praise a poor widow for her sacrificial contribution, “two mites” (as the King James Version has it), about an eighth of a laborer’s daily wage, or “her whole living.”

Just below the surface in this contrast is the apparent fact that the Scribes, the professional theologians who functioned there, and who presumably had defrauded worshippers (in something of a spiritual foreclosure) in order to perpetuate their cushy positions and enhance their showy religious wardrobes, gave but a pittance out of their abundant wealth. On the other hand, the poor widow, who had been victimized by those same Scribes, gave “out of her poverty… everything she had.”

Approaching the time when once again we’ll be asked to give for the work of the Church, it’s time to see our Lord’s teaching in this regard in the widow’s mite. As we seek to do so, bear in mind that this was not so much his teaching out of thin air, but rather spiritual instruction based on a real incident observed by him at the entrance to the temple.

First of all, it must be admitted that Jesus says very little about financial gifts, and actually seems personally to have cared nothing at all about material things. Yet, he uses this incident at the
temple gate to make a fundamental pronouncement to the effect that there is a connection between spiritual and material things in God’s overall economy.

Secondly, for Jesus the Church like the temple is God’s spiritual and material house amongst us. It is where God causes his Name to dwell – where he meets us in word, in prayer, and in the gift of his body and blood at the Altar for our redemption.

Thirdly, by extension, on analogy of exchanging currency between countries to transfer purchasing power, gifts to the Church are necessary – they are simply the means of exchanging heartfelt faith for concrete ministry in the Name of God and his Son Christ Jesus.

Finally, in such giving it’s the sacrificial heart behind it that is all-important: not something meagerly offered to God and his Christ boastfully while all the while but a pittance out of abundance, but rather that which is gladly presented out of our real poverty, i.e., a recognition that ‘everything we have, … our whole living’ comes from them.

- JR Hiles
Adapted from a sermon on Mark 12.38-44 – November 8, 2009

For All the Saints

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November 1st is All Saints’ Day, a principal holy day on the Church Calendar. Indeed, it is a day of obligation in catholic tradition.  This year, quite happily, it falls on a Sunday, allowing participation by the largest number of people on the day itself.

The day and its octave commemorate the saints who have passed from earthly life into the land of life and joy. While we truly rejoice in those super star believers of Scripture and Church history that are often depicted in stained glass, we commemorate too all the people of God who have been sanctified by the Spirit and gone from this world to the next.

And although from the middle ages on the Church saw fit to remember the two separately, i.e., the greater from the lesser known, the latter being given a day of their own, November 2nd, we will do so jointly on Sunday, the 1st . We will recount by name at the Altar those  who have passed from the Parish family in the past year as well as all those indicated on the inserted form.

All Saints’ Day is also one of four customary days for baptism by the Church. Ritually, then, the saints who have gone before are connected to those beginning their journey of
faith. This gives the day and the season a unique drama and color, declaring as it does
something of the length and breadth and depth of the Church of Christ.

In keeping with the festival nature of All Saints’ Day, a Reception Luncheon in honor of both the faithful departed and the faithful newly arrived by baptism will follow the ten-thirty service in the Foyer at noontime. Everyone is invited, and contributions of favorite dishes will be gratefully received.

- JR Hiles