First Address: The Pattern of Christ
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in the sight of the Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Just over six weeks ago here in this very space, and in churches throughout the world the faithful gathered to receive the sign of the cross in ash, to hear God’s word, and to receive Holy Communion. At the beginning of that solemn celebration, they were addressed in these or similar words, “Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting. By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.” We were then invited, “in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.”
This afternoon, in the same space, we gather again, one with another and in union with the faithful around the world to reflect on our Lord’s example of living the way of God, the way of spiritual growth and maturation, which requires a self-awareness that recognises the inadequacy of our self-determined and self-directed lives, and our consequent need to turn to God, the source and reality of our true humanity.
We gather to ponder the truth that such spiritual growth and maturation is costly and no easy task. Something our Lord constantly reminds would-be disciples of in such words as, ‘the road that leads to destruction is broad and many follow it but, the path that leads to life is narrow and few find it’, and ‘unless a grain of wheat dies, it remains but a single grain, but if it dies it yields a rich harvest’, again ‘those who lose their lives will save them’, and ‘What will it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your whole life’, and of course, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’
That string of challenging wisdom sayings alerts us to the truth that what we take for granted as the reality of life, the so-called real world, is indeed, deeply flawed and compromised, and we as human beings are far from what we are capable of being, which is the humanity that we were created for.
The words of St John Henry Newman remind us why Christ came among us: “O wisest love! That flesh and blood, which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against their foe, should strive and should prevail.’
We as the children of Adam are called to strive and toil in the life of the Spirit of Christ. To strive and toil to put off the ‘old self’ personified in Adam, and to put on the ‘new self’ that is Christ.
Our experience of life is a pervasive sense of fragmentation and separation that is, perhaps, most obvious to us in our suspicion and unease about the otherness of what is foreign and alien to us; nations, races, politics, people who do not look, think or behave like us – but when we have the courage to be truly honest, it’s also from our neighbours, friends, families, and yes, even separation from the better self we long to be, or perhaps for some of us, once longed to be – but have since settled for less. Ultimately, this sense of the separated self is rooted in our separation from the source and reality of our ‘true self’, the God in whom we live and move and have our being. The one in whose image we are created, and in whose likeness, we are called to grow.
Over the course of the next three hours, I invite you to ponder these holy mysteries, that contain the clues of life in all its fullness, if we have ears to hear.
I will explore the pattern of Christ’s teaching, witnessed to in his baptism, his temptations and his call to repentance. A pattern he enjoins on us with the call to recognise our need of God’s grace, to recognise all that tempts us to abandon our life in the Spirit, and to recognise our need to turn again to God; to repent, that is, literally to change the direction in which we are looking for happiness.
I will also be drawing your attention to three key words of scripture, which when they occur are pointing us to underlying spiritual realities, they are water, bread and blood. There are of course many others, but these three are especially resonated to the themes I wish to explore this afternoon. Water signifies that first spiritual intuition that there is more to life, God’s invitation to draw near, to wake up; bread denotes God’s nurturing and nourishment of those who have woken and are following; blood signifies the hard and painful reality of the transformative process. Together, they offer added insight into the spiritual life to which we are called as disciples of Christ.
Amen.