I Shall Show You Plainly of The
Father
These things have I
spoken unto you in parables: the time cometh when I shall no more speak unto
you in parables, but shall show you plainly of the Father.
Today, the Fifth Sunday
After Easter, is known as Rogation Sunday.
Of course, you all know what that means because you hear it every
year. The word rogation is
derived from the Latin rogare, meaning to ask. The major Rogation is actually on April 25th,
according to my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and it is a
Christianized version of the pagan observance of the Robiglia. That was a ceremony in which people processed
through the cornfields to pray for the crops to be protected from mildew. There, now I have said it – let me move on.
Jesus tells us to ask God
for things, Ask and ye shall receive that your joy may be full. One of the things we need to ask for is clear
understanding of God’s word, especially as it is revealed in the New
Testament. In the Gospels we find that
Jesus spent a great deal of His short ministry teaching and His teaching
frequently took the form of parables. These
things have I spoken unto you in parables, He says.
In order to understand His
teaching in this form it is probably a good idea to understand first exactly
what a parable is. The Oxford Dictionary
of the Christian Church defines it this way, The name given to similitudes
drawn from nature or from human affairs, especially those containing a short
narrative, which our Lord used to convey a spiritual meaning. Now since Star Trek launched the English
language down a slippery slope with split infinitives, my own grasp of my
mother tongue is far from reliable, so I had to turn to the other Oxford
Dictionary to make sure I understood what is meant by a “similitude”. It is most easily understood as a comparison. What it all boils down to is that Jesus
painted word pictures of familiar topics to teach the lessons He wants us to
learn.
The meaning of what Jesus
says was not necessarily immediately obvious to His listeners and nor is it to
us. The best teaching usually has depths
to it which require careful consideration to uncover. Our Lord’s teaching arises from the Divinity,
My doctrine is not mine, He says, but His that sent me (Jn7:16),
and it reaches deep into the unseen mysteries of the Divinity.
We are here this morning to
participate in one of the deepest of those mysteries, one which embodies so
many of the most important of those doctrines, the Holy Eucharist. This past week in Bible study we considered
the verses from Matthew 26 which deal with the institution of the
Eucharist. In the institution, as you
will hear again in the prayer of consecration, Jesus says, This is my
body and This is my blood. He does not take the bread and say “this
represents my body”; and the cup and say, “this wine represents my blood”. No, His words are This is my body;
This is my blood.
There is nothing of the
parable in the Last Supper and there is nothing of the parable in the
celebration of the Eucharist today. It
is a real participation in the perpetual sacrifice of our Lord, in which we
join in communion with His real presence.
My doctrine is not
mine, but His that sent
me. Take, eat, this is my body. What an extraordinary gift, and what an
unfathomable mystery. Drink ye all
of this, for this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and
for many for the remission of sins. (Mt.26:27-28). Has there ever been such a blessing bestowed
upon mankind? Or ever such a mystery set
before us? How can millions of
Christians at one and the same time, but in very different places be eating the
body and drinking the blood of a man who died over two thousand years ago?
Yet we believe that that is
precisely what we do do, we and all other faithful Christians.
The Church Fathers accepted
both the reality of Christ’s words and the mystery. In fact their writings show that they saw
nothing here that needed to be debated, defended against heresy for sure, but
not debated. It was to them a universal
truth that we do indeed eat the body and drink the blood of Christ in the Holy
Eucharist.
I used just now a most
important word, the word “faithful”. St.
Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 AD to 604 AD said of the Sacrament, Christ’s
body is taken, His flesh is distributed for the salvation of the people, His
blood is poured, not now into the hands of unbelievers, but into the mouths of
the faithful.
Therein lies yet another
part of this unfathomable mystery. To
those who believe, it is what Jesus says it is, and it is efficacious for
salvation. To those who do not believe,
it is a waste of time and can be downright dangerous.
The Last Supper was shared
the night before Jesus died and the Eucharist leads us inevitably back to the
Cross, before which we must be broken by our sins. If we do not believe we do not repent and if
we do not repent we cannot believe and the Cross has no meaning for us. Without the Cross there is no sacrifice and
there is no body and blood of Jesus Christ in which we can share. For the faithful Christian the Cross is as
real as the Eucharist and the Cross and the Eucharist are united at the heart
of our faith.
But the Eucharist also leads
us forward from the Cross, because on the Cross Jesus sacrificed Himself to the
Father in propitiation for our sins.
From the Cross comes our Salvation, and through the Cross the words of
Pope Gregory are true His flesh is distributed for the salvation of the
people, His blood is poured into the mouths of the faithful. The Eucharist, received with proper preparation,
in the good faith which our Book of Common Prayer reminds us is required of us
is an essential, life giving force. It
fuels our progress along the road of sanctification. It fills Christianity with glorious hope.
There is nothing of the
parable about the Holy Eucharist. It is
at the very centre of our Christian reality.
Jesus Christ makes that plain.
But, like so many of
Christ’s teachings, we can turn the Eucharistic Feast into a parable, and it is
tragic that many who call themselves Christian do exactly that. They do it when the use words like “symbolic”
to describe the body and the precious blood.
They do it when they see no need to join in this most Holy Communion
with God except on rare occasions. When
we say we do not need to receive more than once a month, or once a year, what
are we doing but denying the vital and life giving nature of this most precious
and essential food.
Worse than that, we can turn
the Eucharistic Feast into a parody, a complete and dangerous travesty of what Jesus
instituted it to be and intends it to be.
If the Eucharist were a parable
and not a fundamental reality, such a dire warning would never have been
necessary.
The time cometh when I
shall no more speak unto you in parables, but shall show you plainly of the
Father. The mighty Resurrection of our Lord shows us
plainly the power of the Father. It
proves to us the reality of those words, This is my body; this is my
blood of the New Testament. And
conversely, as faithful Christians participating worthily in the perpetual
sacrifice of our Lord, we affirm our belief in the Resurrection and Ascension
of our living Lord. If we can not affirm
that belief we are indeed taking part in a charade, a memorial to the dead.
And we are also denying the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity. I quote
from Dr. Darwell Stone’s book, The Holy Communion. In the Holy Eucharist, we move forward to
God’s high altar surrounded, encompassed on every side by the whole fulness and
abundance of the Godhead. It is the
Highest, the Holy, the Eternal, who spreads His table; it is the blessed, the
everlasting Intercessor whose flesh and blood we eat and drink; it is the Holy
Comforter, who spreads out hands from within us to receive from the hands of
the Father the body of the Son. And all
three are one. That which is given is
holy as God Himself, the Giver; it is not less holy than He; the Gift is as
utterly and entirely divine as the Father Himself who gives it; the Receiver is
no less holy and pure than the Gift or the Giver. Nothing is lost of the preciousness of the
Gift, nothing is spoilt or sullied; whole and entire, the Spirit of God
receives that holy thing which the Father gives and presents.
That is the reality of what
we are about to join in communion with.
The working of all three persons in our one Almighty God to carry us
along the road to our heavenly home.
In a few minutes we will be
invited to confess our sins to God. On
this Rogation Sunday, let us ask the Holy Spirit to show us those sins and
assist us to confess them truthfully and fully.
God knows what we have done wrong, but we often need help to see those
things ourselves. Let us ask, especially
today, but throughout the year that we come to the Altar in the full and
certain knowledge that we are joining in most Holy Communion with our Living
God.
This is not a parable. It is Jesus Christ keeping His promise, I
shall no more speak unto you in parables, but shall show you plainly of the
Father.
Peter
Jardine+
Rogation
Sunday, 2008