Fr. Mark’s Trinity XII Sermon

“Such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.”

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This week’s propers teach us about the sufficiency of God’s grace. But sufficiency for what? In today’s Collect, we ask God to

Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.

So the first thing to say is that grace is sufficient for the forgiveness of sins. Through the mediator Jesus Christ, our sins are expunged, and we are brought into right relation with our Creator. We cannot do it ourselves. God’s grace alone is sufficient.

But the sufficiency of grace — the power of grace — is not only about forgiveness. The Epistle tells us that God “hath made us able ministers of the new covenant.” “Able,” in this case, is about sufficiency or qualification: he has made us competent and able to be ministers of the new covenant. St. Paul goes on to contrast the old and new covenants: the old is a “ministration of death” or “of condemnation”; the new a “ministration of the spirit” or “of righteousness.” Some preachers and theologians see this as saying that the old covenant’s purpose was to uphold an impossible standard in order to emphasize the cursed state of humanity. When you read it this way, the difference between old and new is that the new covenant includes forgiveness, while the old ends in condemnation.

On the surface, this seems a plausible reading of our Epistle, but it does not fit with the Old Testament or with St. Paul’s writings as a whole. After all, the point of the sacrificial system was to offer forgiveness to those under the condemnation of sin. The holiest day in Judaism is Yom Kippur — which means the Day of Atonement, not the Day of Hopeless Condemnation!

So if the old covenant in some sense offered forgiveness, what makes it, in St. Paul’s words, “the ministration of death”? Well, for one thing, it involved a lot of death. According to the Talmud, on one Passover around the time of Christ, 1.2 million animals were sacrificed in the Temple. In another place it describes the temple priests as wading in blood up to their knees! Whether or not these descriptions are hyperbolic, the basic point stands: the Temple was a very bloody place.

Of course, death also stands very near the heart of the New Testament. Those animal sacrifices foreshadowed the supreme sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. We can easily forget what that means — how subversive, how morbid, how downright bizarre all our crosses would seem to an ancient Roman audience. To a Roman, going to worship in a building surmounted by a cross or wearing one on a necklace would be something like putting an electric chair on a steeple or hanging a decorative noose around one’s neck today. Even that doesn’t quite get at the real shock value, because we don’t have anything in our culture that so perfectly communicates not merely state execution but also abject humiliation and torture. “I just love that beautiful torture device you have around your neck!” I once heard an atheist describe Christianity as a “gold-encrusted death cult,” and it’s not hard to see where he came up with that.

So, if the old and new covenants both communicate forgiveness, in some sense, and if death stands at or near the center of both, what’s the difference? In the old covenant, sacrifice was not understood as the destruction of a creature or the annihilation of a life; rather, in sacrifice the life of a creature was offered back to the Creator. But the animal stayed dead. In the new covenant, Christ’s resurrection reorients the nature of sacrifice and upends the meaning of the cross. By his death, Christ tramples down death, and in his resurrection, he raises us to walk in newness of life. This is how a Roman torture device can be, for us, a symbol of life. The old covenant did not offer life through death. It forgave sins, but it did not regenerate sinners.

In Christ, we are not merely forgiven. We are also given the grace to live a new and holy life. In a few minutes, Fr. Sean will pray “for the whole state of Christ’s Church.” Listen for the three places where the word grace appears in that prayer:

“Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and other Ministers” — grace to what end? — “that they may, both by their life and doctrine, set forth thy true and lively Word, and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments. And to all thy People give thy heavenly grace; and especially to this congregation here present” — why do we all need grace? — “that with meek heart and due reverence, they may hear, and receive thy holy Word; truly serving thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of their life… And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service, and to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.” (...this partaking is not primarily about one’s state after death… to follow the example of the faithful departed is to partake of the heavenly kingdom, here and now…)

I grew up in a tradition that emphasized the sufficiency of grace for forgiveness. Preachers often talked about how hard it was to believe the promises of God, to accept forgiveness as a pure unearned gift. And they were right. But there is another side to grace — another element of its sufficiency — one that may be even harder to believe, at least for someone with my upbringing: its sufficiency for holy living. Through the grace of God, we walk by the Spirit. We have been freed from sin, therefore we do not have to sin. To embrace this truth has nothing to do with earning your salvation; it is simply a matter of believing God’s promises, obeying his commands, and clinging to his grace.

Being freed from the ultimate consequences of sin — from hell and from death — is part of our freedom in Christ, but it is only one part. Closer to the heart of freedom is our capability as ministers of the new covenant — as a royal priesthood — to walk by the Spirit in holiness, which in turn brings us to our final state, our true freedom, which is to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 

Our Epistle text comes from 2 Corinthians chapter 3. That chapter concludes, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (v17b-18). As we behold the glory of God, we are transformed and perfected…. This process continues eternally, but it begins now, and our Gospel text is a good place to start.

The Gospel describes the healing of a deaf and mute man’s ears and tongue, and at first it seems like an odd companion for our Collect and Epistle, but it is a fitting conclusion. First, it reminds us that grace perfects nature. It does not destroy nature. Jesus opens the man’s ears and looses his tongue. This miracle allows his ears and tongue to do what they were created to do. Being grafted into Jesus Christ does not destroy who we are; rather, it heals our wounds and makes us more authentically ourselves. It is not sin that makes us authentically ourselves. Sin corrupts personality and flattens character. Sin makes us stupider. It makes us less ourselves. As St. Irenaeus famously said, in a quote that is one of our mottos at St. Dunstan’s Academy, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Consider too the lesser known second half of that quote, drawing directly upon 2 Corinthians 3: “The glory of God is man fully alive… and the life of man is the vision of God.”

The Gospel reminds us that the healing God brings, the work of his grace, applies not only to immaterial souls but also to our flesh. In hindsight I trace the beginnings of my journey into the Anglican tradition to a line I read in one of C. S. Lewis’s books in high school, where he says something like, “Of course we kneel to pray, because what we do with our bodies matters spiritually.” I can distinctly remember reading that line while laying down on my bed and thinking, “That’s dumb. I can pray just where I am.” Which of course was true and also irrelevant. So I rejected the line, but it stuck with me….

The miracle in our Gospel text is a remarkably tactile healing. The senses of touch, taste, sight, and hearing are all packed into one-sentence. Jesus “put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.” 

The Gospel concludes, “He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” In Isaiah chapter 35, we learn that when God comes to save his people, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing” (v5-6). Likewise, in Exodus 4, God tells Moses, “Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord?” (v 11). And so here, as in so many other places throughout the Gospels, we find Jesus doing what only God can do.

And so, to contemplate our Gospel text is to behold the divine. If 2 Corinthians 3 is right, then, when we gaze upon Jesus presented to us in the Gospel and in the liturgy, and when we receive him in Holy Communion, we will be further transformed into his likeness. We too will seek to bring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing to the lame, and song to the mute. We will flourish. We will become more of our true selves. 

And as able ministers, as a royal priesthood, we bring the life of God with us into our homes and into our several callings. By grace, as you are transformed from one degree of glory to another, you carry Christ with you. Indeed, you convey Christ — to your coworkers, your friends, your neighbors, and your children.

It is a great and fearful thing, this grace of God.

“Such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.”

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