[Sermon for Easter V (the Fourth Sunday after Easter), May 15, 2022 at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona]
✠ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We often think the Paschal cycle is the reward for having put up with the dreariness of Lent. I present as proof: forty days of sombre, multiple confessions, penitential prayers, music in minor keys, an emotionally intense Holy Week, and did I mention music in minor keys? In contrast, forty days of the joy of the resurrection with upbeat readings, hymns with some bounce to them, bright vestments, and enough lilies to keep my sinuses in a permanent state of congestion. And if that is not enough, there is the added ten bonus days of Ascension to Pentecost. That is more than enough to offset the glumness that is Lent.
The problem with this viewpoint is that while the Great Fifty Days are indeed a time for rejoicing, we often obscure another ancient purpose to this season. In the earliest years of the Church, people were often baptised at the Paschal Vigil after a lengthy catechumenate. Also, the Church was then not the open-door society that we are familiar with, where everyone is welcome, with coffee and doughnuts afterward! Early Christians were very careful not to expose the Mysteries of the Church (the Sacraments) to casual observers. Eastern liturgies even today at mid-Liturgy have a deacon or priest bellow, “The doors! The doors! In Wisdom let us attend! All catechumens, depart! Catechumens, depart! Let none of the catechumens remain; all the faithful, again, and again, let us pray to the lord in peace!”[1] Even the catechumens, who have already thrown their lot in with the Lord Jesus, were shown the doors by the liturgical bouncers which today we call ushers. The Mysteries, the Sacraments were too holy to be viewed by just anyone, but only by those who had shuffled off the old nature and put on the new nature of Christ in their Baptism. At this point, the catechumen became a neophyte and confronted a whole new sphere of Christian experience, that up to this point, was only a whisper, a promise. Here began the process of mystagogy, a fifty-dollar Greek word literally meaning “Sacramental Education.”
This is the season where the rubber is supposed to meet the road. We as the body of Christ have exposed the catechumens to the stories of Jesus, even to the Law and the Prophets, but now we have neophytes who literally have taken on the Nature of Christ, and it is our solemn duty to help them fully understand just how deeply their being has changed. Here is where we should the neophyte, who has taken on the nature of Christ and is now fed by that same nature in the Sacraments, know exactly what they have taken up.
You may ask, “Wait, what? You mean literally?” Oh yes.
In our daily lives we often forget that a major point of Christian doctrine is that in the Person of God the Word, Our Lord Jesus, has not only a full Divine Nature but also a full Human Nature. In the economy of salvation, both Natures are necessary. As God, Our Lord reached out in love and offered Himself for us. This is no vengeful sky deity that killed a perfect person in our place to satisfy an affront to his honour (with apologies to St. Anselm[2]), but the Eternal God who instead offered Himself to win back a creation that through Human agency had gone awry. The key to restoring His beloved creation involved the interplay of those two Natures that allowed Jesus not only to suffer and die, but to rise again. Up until this point, a resurrection into incorruptibility was not a part of Human Nature. Jesus raised Lazarus, He raised the Widow of Nain’s son, and in Jesus’ Name St. Peter raised Tabitha, but these people eventually died again because they were not raised into the final state. However, at His Resurrection, Jesus, having Divine Nature and thus unable to stay dead, rose to a new, incorruptible state and by that union between Human and Divine made incorruption a part of Human Nature. Not the old nature of which we are all too familiar, prone to sickness, injury, decrepitude, and eventual dissolution, but a new Human Nature immune to all of that. We take on the promise of that new Nature in our Baptism, overlaying the Old with the New and for the rest of our lives dealing with that tension between corruption and incorruption until our bodies, entwined with that old nature, run out of steam. And then that promise comes to pass; because we took on that new Nature, God will raise our bodies from the dead into the same glory which Our Lord describes in today’s Gospel, not because we now have a Nature like Christ’s, but because we have the Nature that is Christ’s.
While that may be difficult to comprehend, that has been the teaching in the East and the West for centuries. “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” That is not an allegory, my brothers and sisters. In today’s reading from Revelation, Our Lord said, “Behold, I am making all things new,”[3] not just creation, not just heaven, not just earth, but also our very Nature. Certainly, we still have the old Nature we share with our ancestors, but we now have this new Nature, each and every one of us, as the “Body of Christ.”
But what does having this new Nature mean? If we have now the new Human Nature of Jesus, if we have the redeemed Human Nature, then even though we are separate Persons we are the same Nature, and if we share that same Nature with Jesus, who loves us without condition or bound, then it stands to reason that we all are indeed one with Christ. Since we are indeed one with him, then we are to love each other without condition or bound as he commanded in our reading from the Gospel today. St. John Chrysostom, whom we love to quote this season, preached, “Passing over the miracles that they were to perform, He makes love the distinguishing mark of His followers…Miracles do not attract unbelievers as much as the way you live your life. And nothing brings about a proper life as much as love.”[4] In fact, because Jesus is both Human and Divine, He brings to the economy of salvation that greatest of attributes, love.
Love is the hallmark of the Divine Nature. St. John the Divine tells us, “God is Love,”[5] and that it was God’s love for us that He delivered us from our sin and corruption.[6] St. Paul tells us that of the eternal things, faith, hope, and love, that love is the greatest.[7] Therefore, if we share the Nature of Christ, we cannot hate each other. It stands to reason. If we have the Nature of Christ, and if those around us who are baptised share in the same Nature, then hatred of our brother or sister is tantamount to hatred of self, a personal dissonance, and that is unsustainable.
Granted, we are all individual persons, and we still possess our old human Nature, fractured among all our individual persons, and that old human Nature is quite unlovable. While it is dead, it is not yet gone. Because it is still there, we often see the sin and corruption in each other, but we also must see the new Nature, the one made in the Image of God, even if the old Nature should obscure it. What of those who are unbaptized, who have yet to put on the new Nature? St. Paul reminds us that, “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”[8] Our Lord Himself said, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”[9] God loves us all. Nothing makes that more evident than when St. Peter, confronted for consorting with Gentiles, told the Church in Jerusalem about the marvelous events in Joppa where Gentiles not only believed, but were indwelt by the Holy Spirit, showing God has opened the way of life to everyone.[10] The new Nature is offered to all who throw their lot in with Our Lord, who would lose their old Nature and take on the New Nature, who would exchange “…the leaven of malice and wickedness with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”[11] If we are now share Jesus’ Human Nature, it is in our Nature to love all whom He loves, and we must not deny that.
If Jesus was not God, then His Sacrifice has no power. If Jesus was not Human, then His Sacrifice has no relevance. But because it has both power and relevance, then His glory is our glory, and this glory is our love for each other which will endure from ages to ages. It is because of this love that we can say even now, “See, the home of God is among mortals.”[12]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us. Amen.
Notes [1] Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Liturgy of St. Basil of Caesarea. The Liturgy of St. James of Jerusalem has, “Let none remain of the catechumens, none of the unbaptized, none of those who are unable to join with us in prayer. Look at one another. The doors!” [2] St. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo. This treatise first put forth the doctrine of satisfaction, which became the precursor to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement in the West. [3] Rev. 21.5 [4] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 72.5 [5] 1 Jn. 4.8 [6] 1 Jn. 4.10 [7] 1 Cor. 13.13 [8] Rom. 5.8 [9] Jn. 3.16-17 [10] Acts 11.15-18 [11] 1 Cor. 5.8 [12] Rev. 21.5