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Thought for the
Week 20 April 2008 – Fifth Sunday of Easter Alleluiah,
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluiah!
Jesus
said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
We have explored the “I am” sayings of Jesus before, but not everybody
hears or reads every homily, and perhaps those who have heard me talk about
“I am” before would not object to a reminder, so we will start there. For Jesus to use the word “I am” when
describing Who and What He is does not seem strange to us – we probably say
“I am” several times a day. But to the
devout Aramaic-speaking Jews, to whom our Lord was speaking, the phrase “I
am” would have been at the least arresting, and at the worst blasphemy. Jesus is echoing what God said his own name
was. It is not striking in English, or
for that matter in the Greek in which the New Testament is written, but the
Aramaic, which Jesus and the disciples spoke as their mother tongue, is a
dialect of Hebrew. In Hebrew, “I am”
sounds like, and conveys some of the same meaning as, the divine Name, JHWH,
which is pronounced “Jahweh”, and often called the Tetragrammaton, from the
Greek for four letters. When
Moses met God in the burning bush in the Sinai desert, he asked God, “Who
shall I say sent me?”, and God replied “I am Who I am”. Of course it may be that God meant, “Never
you mind Who I am, just get on and do what I have told you.” “Where is Fred?” “Fred is wherever Fred is.” This
would be understandable, but if God is to be the God of the Children of
Israel, and if the Children of Israel are to be God’s chosen people, then it
is not unreasonable that He should give them his name. In
fact, “I am” is not a very good translation of the Hebrew. Something much stronger is intended. Hebrew verbs are very difficult to translate
into English or the Romance languages, because they work so differently from
the verbs that we are used to using.
Their relation to time is much more fluid than that of the verbs we
are familiar with, and their range of moods is much richer. Better translations of the Hebrew would be
“I am the One Who causes to be” or “I am the present reality”. Perhaps it helps to know that when we read
in the Old Testament that “the word of God came to the Prophet …” the same verb is used for “came”. By the
time of Jesus, although all Jews knew that God’s name was JHWH, they did not
dare to use it. They called him “The
Lord”, or in Hebrew “Adonai” instead.
Only the High Priest, once a year, after many and complicated rituals
of purification, on the Day of Atonement would utter the divine name, in fear
and trembling, in the Holy-of-Holies, the most sacred chamber at the heart of
the temple, when he implored God’s forgiveness for the sins of the Children
of Israel over the past year. The
Hebrew scriptures were written in consonants.
Dots to represent the vowels were added much later, between 900 and
1000 years after the Birth of Jesus.
To help people avoid uttering the divine Name, JHWH, the vowel dots
for Adonai were put under the letters of JHWH, but in Hebrew this is a
problem, as there is one too many vowels, because the two Hs, though they are
consonants, also count as vowels.
Some people mistakenly conclude that God’s name is “JEHOVAH”. The
truth is that we human beings are too limited to comprehend the nature of
God. He is so many orders of magnitude
greater than us that we can never hope to understand his nature or being,
which his name expresses. The
second half of Jesus’ phrase, “the Way” is a bit easier. Christianity is not static, and our faith
is not an event in the past, but an on-going process. Jesus said that He would send us the Holy
Spirit, Who would lead us into all truth, and no matter how long ago you
started being a Christian, you still need to be lead by the Holy Spirit, now
and for the rest of your life. We
cannot say “Oh yes, I am a Christian” and then just get on with our lives as
before. Instead, we are called to
follow in Our Lord and Master’s footsteps, on the Way that leads to eternal
life. Jesus said this Way is narrow; it
is not a broad and easy path. It is
not surprising that while the Church was based in Christians,
of course, are still “People of the Way”.
For us, the Way is the Way of the cross, the Way of self-giving
love. Like all creatures, people are
naturally selfish, and self-giving does not come easy. In today’s reading from the Acts of the
Apostles, the first Christian, though he would then have been called “one of
the People of the Way”, is martyred.
Saint Stephen, like Nicholas of Antioch, was one of the very first
Deacons. They were appointed as servants
of the Church, and our word “Deacon” comes from the Greek “diakonos” which
means “servant”. Deacons took the
administrative burden off the Apostles, so that they could concentrate on
prayer, which included the sacraments of the Eucharist, Baptism and Healing,
and teaching and preaching. Deacons
made sure that the Church worked, that the widows were fed and looked after,
that the sick were visited, that the collections were properly accounted for,
that there was bread and wine for the Eucharist, that everybody knew when and
where the next service was, and all the myriad of things which need to happen
if a Church is to function. More than
that, they were a sign and reminder to everybody that Jesus came not to be
served but to serve, and that the heart of the Gospel is serving God and
other people. Of course, you cannot
earn salvation by service! It works
the other way round. We are saved by
God’s grace alone. However, having
been saved, we respond to our salvation by loving and serving. You
might expect that the first martyr after Jesus Himself would have been one of
the Apostles, but no, it was a Deacon, Saint Stephen. Serving God is costly, and Stephen, like so
many Christians after him, paid the ultimate price. We keep the Feast of Saint Stephen on 26th
December, the day after we have all celebrated the birth of our Saviour. It is a useful corrective to too much joy,
not mention too much Christmas cake!
His martyrdom also underlines the concept that the first shall be
last, and the last shall be first – the important ones in the Stephen
may have only been a servant of the Church, but his arrest, its pretext, his
trial and unjust sentence, were all exactly like those of Jesus. Only his manner of execution was different,
stoning instead of crucifixion, but his two prayers as he is being murderd,
“Lord, receive my Spirit” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”, are
the same words used by Jesus on the cross, except that Stephen clearly
identifies Jesus as the Lord. By
serving God faithfully, following in the footsteps of Jesus, even the
humblest Christian can become Christ-like. Perhaps
Nicholas, after the death of his fellow Deacon, Stephen, fled At
present, the Church uses the office of Deacon as a sort of year-long
apprenticeship for those who, God willing, will be ordained as priests. All priests are first ordained Deacon, and
are only ordained Priest after a year’s faithful and devout service as a
Deacon. Similarly, all Bishops have to
serve at least ten years as a priest before they can be considered for ordination
as a Bishop. Deacons
are clerics, set aside from the people of God, and ordained by the Holy
Spirit, through the hands of the Bishop, to serve. They wear the clerical collar, and the
stole, but a deacon’s stole is worn like a sash, over one shoulder. Deacons are called “Father”. In writing, they are addressed as “the
Reverend”. Incidentally, many people
today seem not to know that you cannot put “the Reverend” next to a surname;
you must have an initial or a Christian name, or “Mr.” or “Mrs.” between “the Reverend” and the surname,
which is why “the Reverend” is not used when speaking to a cleric. But that, interesting though it may be, and
how our ears do like to be tickled with such trivia, is about linguistic
usage, and not properly part of a homily. The
exciting thing is that we are re-discovering the office of Deacon. There have been a very small number of
people who have served as deacons in the Church without going on to be
ordained priest, Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of the community at Little
Gidding is probably the most famous, but in the Church of England, women were
ordained to the Diaconate some years before they could be ordained to the
priesthood. A few have chosen to
remain as Deacons, sometimes because they do not believe that women can (or
should) be ordained as priests. A few
people believe their calling is to the office of Deacon, and their service,
like that of Stephen, is an example to us all. At present, the Roman Catholic Church in
some places allows married men to be ordained as Deacons, but not Priests, so
they too are re-discovering this long-underused ministry. In
order to be the “Way the Truth and the Life”, Jesus had to serve us to the
extent of laying down his life for us.
Last week, we saw that Jesus is
This
week we are reminded that Jesus is the Way.
Nobody comes to the Father except through Jesus. May God
bless you on your Way, the Way of loving, self-giving service, that as you
follow Jesus’ Way, caring for others, you may find it a Way of joy and peace
in your time on earth, and the Way that leads to everlasting life in
heaven. Amen. Alleluiah,
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluiah! Amen.
Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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