By: The Rt. Rev. Darryl Fitzwater, Bishop Coadjutor of the Missionary Diocese of All Saints
Today, I would like to talk about beholding the Glory of the Lord. In our reading from the prophet Jeremiah, when God speaks to the young prophet, He does so with a series of questions, which He does with Jeremiah throughout his ministry. He asks, “What do you see?” He is not talking about seeing with his eyes. Rather, He is asking what does he perceive?
They asked Einstein once about the theory of relativity, and how he came up with it. He said he used his scientific imagination. He imagined what it would it be like if he could ride a beam of light. And so, taking that fictitious idea, something that is completely impossible, he began to theorize, to create a hypothesis of what it would be like. And that positing of his mind, that looking at that idea—because ideas are things, even though they are intangible—he looked at the idea, and he thought, well, if this is the case, what would be the result?
Christian theology both past and present is full of that kind of stuff. Maybe you have read some theologians and you think, “How did they get that idea? That is so terrible.” Or you may have read other writings and find them brilliant and magnificent. Commentator GK Chesterton criticized scholastic medieval thought like this: If a unicorn has one horn, he said, then a cow has as many horns as two unicorns. You are not debating whether or not unicorns exist. You are saying that, if they do exist, here’s what it has to look like.
All of this is to say that I think, sometimes, we can let something like the sanctity and dignity of life become so far beyond what we do in our daily experience that the only way to reengage with it in a healthy way is by having our ears attuned to the Holy Spirit, like the prophet Jeremiah. What do you see? It’s not just what we see plainly with our eyes, as in Jeremiah’s case, such as a pot that’s tipped over or an almond tree that’s in bud. Sometimes we only see the literal thing and completely miss what it all means.
And I think that’s part of what’s happening in our reading from the New Testament today, from the gospel of Matthew. Herod could see that there was a youth that needed to be killed to preserve his throne. Wise men could also see a star in the heavens, but they were beholding. They knew what it meant. They knew where to go. When we are summoned by the Lord into His presence, into His holy, heavenly counsel, and He asks us what we see, we need to be able to respond not just with what our eyes are seeing, but to perceive what He is revealing by the kingdom of God.
Remember what our Lord told Nicodemus? No one can see the kingdom of God unless he’s born of water and the spirit. It’s not just that you can’t enter the kingdom without being born of the water in the spirit. You can’t even perceive it correctly. And how do we do that? Well, the sacrament of baptism and the Word of the Lord explains and opens up for us what it is that we’re seeing. For every hot button life issue today, we need the word of God so thoroughly wrapped around our minds and our hearts so that, when the Holy Spirit quickens it, we can look at every issue and understand what God’s mind is, with the great confidence that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And if it ever was a sin as far as the character of God goes, it still is. If it was ever righteous, if it was ever a blessing, it still is. Otherwise, we will quickly stumble in the mire of the cultural issues of the day.
Here are a few points to share. First, as the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, spiritual does not mean ghostly. As a culture we have started equating the two words, made synonyms of spiritual and ghostly, because of a shared etymology. But this is very dangerous, because the meanings of the words are not based upon how they were derived. To be spiritual people does not mean we are only transfixed on disembodied things like spirits or the soul. Too often, when people talk about being spiritual, they are referencing events like this. Read chapter 2 of Matthew with me. “Now, when they had departed”—that’s the Magi— “Behold”—see, perceive—”an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.”
Then, later on, in verse 19, after Herod had died: “Behold an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt.” And so, when people want to be spiritual, they think about the appearance of angels, and dreams and visions, and they regulate and define their spiritual vitality upon those particular kinds of phenomena. Well, praise God if He gives them to you, but that’s really not the driving emphasis in these passages, nor is it the driving emphasis of what it means to be spiritual today. Those particular events that happened to St. Joseph compelled him to act physically, concretely, and tangibly for the protection of our Lord and of the blessed virgin Mary.
Jesus Himself defines for us what it means to be spiritual. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God wants us to be looking at the cities and the towns that we live in and to look at the world that’s right in front of us and ask: what does it look like when God’s reign in heaven visits this place on earth? What kind of physical transformation takes place? Jesus is so spiritual that He goes around healing physical bodies. He doesn’t say, “Hey guys, endure a little bit longer. You’re eventually going to get to heaven where you don’t need it anymore.”
Consider the prayer that He taught us: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Specifically, that is being realized in Jesus’s own person. Then, by sacramental extension, the entirety of His body, wherever His body is going or doing, is to be so intimately tied together with Him that you can’t differentiate between the head and the member, because there’s only one Christ. Spiritual doesn’t mean ghostly.
Secondly, Jesus’s humanness confirms and restores the dignity of all persons. When He became human, He confirmed that we were created in the image of God already—all of humanity, already created in the image of God. But then He does one better. He restores the perfection that will be ours at the resurrection. He restores the dignity and the sanctity of that.
If you look at the New Testament, there are roughly three different ways that our Lord signifies something by His presence. Sometimes His physical presence is because He’s there to bless and to sanctify, giving a level of value and holiness to something. For example, His presence at the wedding in Cana of Galilee demonstrates Jesus’s personal endorsement of marriage. Other times His personal presence is meant to be reconciliatory. He’s eating with the sinners and the tax collectors, not to endorse that behavior, but to go out and rescue the lost sheep of Israel, to gather in those who are fallen away and disassociated from the life that God wants to give them. The third way that our Lord makes His presence known is not to sanctify, not to reconcile, but to judge, as when He’s carrying the cross. The women are weeping, and He says, “Don’t weep for me, weep for your own sons.” So, the presence of His battered body is not there to authenticate and endorse the behavior of the crowd, or even for the people who are grieving for Him, but as a sign of judgment against them.
What do you see, people of God? What do you perceive when the Lord’s presence rests in upon a congregation, when His presence rests in upon your own heart? Is He calling you to repentance? Is He calling you to be reconciled? Is He authenticating and endorsing what you’re doing?
In this case specifically this morning, our Lord confirms and restores fatherhood with Joseph, motherhood with Mary, and childhood with His own infancy, and He sets that in contrast to Herod. The passage in the Gospel contrasts a fallen and corrupt family against a holy family, a family that’s following spiritual principles, because Joseph is a righteous man, and Mary is a righteous woman. Christ is sanctifying the entire family structure. He’s sanctifying fatherhood and motherhood, male and female, in very particular ways, and that is a blessing for all of us.
There are times when the circumstances and scenarios by which a woman becomes pregnant are not ideal, but that life is always sacred, always blessed, always given dignity. And the Church must respond—stepping in but not snuffing out a smoldering wick, not breaking a bruised reed, but rightly and truly setting bones, so that they heal and grow into the fullness of the grace that God has already amply poured out through Jesus Christ, in situations and issues both in the present and in the future.
Speaking of the future, consider the growth of artificial intelligence. At what point does artificial intelligence begin to take the place of people? Once innovators and engineers take AI and unite it to robotic bodies—folks, we’re dealing with a whole new level of issues. And we are going to have to be able to say that it is not a human being. It doesn’t have the dignity and the integrity of what it is to be made in the image of God. And for some people that sounds so far left field, but that future is already upon us, and we need to be prepared to contend for the dignity of all life.
Lastly, this passage speaks to the power of our Lord’s redemption. Matthew 2:17: “A voice was heard in Rama, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they are no more.” On our church calendar, right after Christmas, we have the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The fathers of the Church said that those holy innocents were the first martyrs of Christ. One of them wrote, “Thus it is that those blessed babes have deservedly lasted beyond others. They were the first who were worthy to die on Christ’s behalf.”
When we go out to the March later, we know that we will be surrounded by lots and lots of people in the flesh, and hopefully none of us trip over each other’s shoelaces. But we’ll be walking, locked arm in arm, next to each other. And I want to leave this last thought with you. The book of Revelation teaches us, with the breaking of the fifth seal in chapter six, that there are martyrs under the altar who are crying out to the Lord for justice, for their blood that has been shed upon the earth. And, in response to their prayers, God gives them a white robe, and He says, “Wait a little bit longer until the full number of those of your brothers who are going to be martyred are added.” These martyrs would be amongst that number, these holy innocents. Later in the book, we see that an angel takes fire from the altar of heaven and offers the incense of that fire, the incense that rises to God, and in it is mingled the prayers of all the saints—the cloud of witnesses referenced in the book of Hebrews.
So, when I see this passage in Matthew, I do not think he is quoting Jeremiah to say, oh by the way, this fulfilled a prophecy. I think the entire written Word of God is a vibrant sacramental kingdom interaction. To whatever extent God was permitting Rachel in her eternal rest to perceive what was taking place, she was engaged in a weeping, a kind of intercession for these children. And when we go out into this March today, we aren’t just walking with the people next to us. We are enveloped. We are immersed by a cloud of witnesses, whose lives and legacies are pleading to God. And, as we walk, as we smile, as maybe we cry, let us not forget that the chief responsibility, the chief aim that we have, is to join with the prayers of all of God’s people. Let us pray.
Nothing is hard for You, O Lord. Teach us the value that You have given us through the wounds of Your beloved Son. Empower us to see and grace us with courage to do so. May Your Spirit give us all the wisdom and insight and understanding that we need to know the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation and what it is that He’s doing on this very day. Protect each heart and mind, O Lord, as we go to do what You’ve given us to do. We thank You, Father, in Christ’s name. Amen.
