Patrick Comerford
We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and tomorrow is the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity (15 September 2024). The Church Calendar marks today as Holy Cross Day (14 September).
We are in Belfast this weekend for a family celebration later this evening. But, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
John 3: 13-17 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said to Nicodemus] 13 ‘No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17 ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’
Today’s Reflection:
The cross on which Christ was crucified has become the universal symbol of Christianity, replacing the Ichthus or fish symbol of the early Church. After the early persecutions ended, early in the fourth century, pilgrims began to travel to Jerusalem to visit the places associated with the life of Christ. Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor, was a Christian and, while she was overseeing excavations in the city, it is said, she uncovered a cross she believed to be the Cross of Christ. A basilica was built on the site of the Holy Sepulchre and dedicated on this day, 14 September 335.
Nicodemus only appears in Saint John’s Gospel, and in this morning’s Gospel reading (John 3: 13-17) we read the first of his three appearances. He is a leading Jew of the day, a Pharisee and a rabbi, a doctor of the law, a member of the ruling Sanhedrin. He comes to visit Jesus at night, and he comes with a bundle of questions.
But, despite his erudite learning, he finds it difficult to understand the answers Christ gives. Yet, it is all so simple: ‘God so loved the world …’ (verse 16).
In fact, what Jesus says here is deeply profound. The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, the neighbouring island of Patmos, the island where Saint John spent his time in exile.
Most of us know about Pythagoras because of his calculations about right-angle triangles. But he also provides an insight into one of the key concepts in Saint John’s writings. His understanding of the cosmos (κόσμος) includes the earth, the planets, the stars, the whole created order.
It is an idea derived from the mathematician and philosopher, Pythageros of Samos. In Pythagorean thinking, the cosmos (κόσμος) includes the arrangement of the stars, ‘the heavenly hosts’ as the ornament of the heavens (see I Peter 3: 3). It is not just the whole world, but the whole universe, the whole created order. It is earth and all that encircles the earth like its skin.
It is as if everything is wrapped into and lives within God’s skin, that we live in God’s womb, and it is there that God loves us. It is not that God so loved the saved, or men, or humanity, or even the world. What Christ says here is that God so loved the cosmos, the whole created order, that he gave, or rather sent, his only-begotten Son.
This key phrase is often translated as ‘God so loved the world’ (John 3: 16). Indeed, in China, I was shocked to see this verse translated into Chinese in a way that it means ‘God so loved humanity’ … ‘that he gave his only Son.’
The original text tells us that God so loved the κόσμος – the whole pulsating, created order as imagined by Pythagoras and the philosophers – God so loved the cosmos that he sent his only son … [Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν Υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν …] Not that he gave insipidly, but that he sent actively, sent him on a mission.
Nicodemus is a little nonplussed, but he comes back again and again, a second time (John 7: 45-51) and a third time (John 19: 39-42), and the third encounter is on Good Friday.
When Christ dies on the Cross, and the women come to bury him, Joseph of Arimathea provides the grave (Matthew 27: 57; Mark 15: 43; Luke 23: 50-56; John 19: 39-40), and Nicodemus steps forward to provide the customary embalming spices, and he assists them in preparing the body of Christ for burial (John 19: 39-42).
Nicodemus brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes, estimated at about 33 kg, to embalm Christ’s body. In his book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, the late Pope Benedict XVI observes that ‘the quantity of the balm is extraordinary and exceeds all normal proportions. This is a royal burial.’
So, in the story of Nicodemus, we find birth is linked with death, new birth is linked with new life, and before darkness falls Nicodemus really comes to possess the Body of Christ, to hold the Body of Christ in his hands, and in anointing him to recognise him as priest, prophet and king.
If being a priest is about presenting God through Christ to the world in word and sacrament, and presenting the world through the Christ to God in word and sacrament, then Nicodemus both receives and presents the Body of Christ, in a very Eucharistic way, and is a model for priesthood.
But we could say the same too of the women who seek to comfort and console Christ as he carries his cross to Calvary, who stay with him at the Crucifixion, who bury him, and who at great personal risk set off early on Easter morning to anoint his body, not knowing then that the Cross is not the end of the Christ story, but that it reaches its climax at the Resurrection.
The Body of Christ is the Church. Nicodemus claims his place in the Church. He acts on his faith. But he could never have known what the consequences would be for him, for the Church and for the world because he first came to Jesus in the dark, because he engaged with the fact that this Jesus would die, because he claimed the Body of Christ and because he engaged in an Epiphany-like moment, revealing that the Christ who became his teacher, the Christ who was to be betrayed, the Christ who was executed, is also the Risen Christ.
Today’s Prayers (Saturday 14 September 2024, Holy Cross Day):
Each year, on 14 September, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Cross, known as ‘Holy Cross Day’ throughout the majority of the Anglican Communion. The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), has been ‘What does the holy cross mean to you?’ This theme was introduced last Sunday with a reflection by Rachael Anderson, Senior Communications and Engagement Manager, USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Saturday 14 September 2024, Holy Cross Day) invites us to pray:
Let us pray for strength and courage of the glory of the cross as we give thanks for all Jesus has done for us.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
who in the passion of your blessed Son
made an instrument of painful death
to be for us the means of life and peace:
grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ
that we may gladly suffer for his sake;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
Faithful God,
whose Son bore our sins in his body on the tree
and gave us this sacrament to show forth his death until he comes:
give us grace to glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
for he is our salvation, our life and our hope,
who reigns as Lord, now and for ever.
Collect on the Eve of Trinity XVI:
O Lord, we beseech you mercifully to hear the prayers
of your people who call upon you;
and grant that they may both perceive and know
what things they ought to do,
and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil them;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Yesterday’s reflection
Continued tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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