Homily for Catholic Renewal Sunday

The Homily Delivered in Saint Mark’s Fitzroy – 16 July 2023
for Catholic Renewal Sunday
by The Reverend Dr Russell Goulbourne

In today’s Gospel – Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes – Jesus tells us where God’s blessing – where God’s favour – is to be found: it is to be found with the lost, the least and the last. Jesus teaches us that God is to be encountered in – and is on the side of – the weak and the powerless, the vulnerable and the downtrodden, the abused and the oppressed. This view of the world – the world stood on its head – is so beautiful and so disorientating – so different from what we’re used to – that we risk passing over what might look like simple scene-setting at the beginning of the passage: Jesus sits down, the disciples come to him and he speaks to them.

For this is much more than simple scene-setting. At the end of the fourth century, St Augustine notes that ‘[Jesus’s] disciples came to him, in order that they might be nearer in body for hearing his words, as they also approached in spirit to fulfil His precepts’ – so the physical presence of Jesus is, for his disciples, the first step towards following his teaching. And St Jerome – also writing at the end of the fourth century – notes how Jesus speaks to his disciples ‘not standing, but sitting and drawn in’, because, he argues, ‘they were unable to understand him shining in his majesty’ – so the emphasis here, unlike in the later account of the Transfiguration, is on Jesus as man, not dazzling his disciples, but getting on the same level as them as a fellow human being. So for St Augustine and St Jerome there’s a deep spiritual meaning behind Matthew’s apparently simple act of having Jesus sit down. Yes, sitting down was the standard mode of operation of the late antique teacher teaching his pupils – but for the ancient Christian commentators, there’s much more than that to this description of Jesus’s posture. For them, what’s being emphasised is the Incarnation, the union of divine and human in Christ, the Word made flesh – God with us.

Why does this matter for us today – on Catholic Renewal Sunday? Well, for two reasons. First, one of the great riches of the Catholic Anglican tradition is to read Scripture through the eyes of, and in the company of, the earliest Christian readers and theologians, often referred to as the Church Fathers and Mothers. The great nineteenth-century Catholic revival in the Church of England known as the Oxford Movement was, in essence, a revolution by tradition: it sought to recover the Catholic and apostolic patrimony of the Church of England by following the stream of Christian faith and practice flowing from the Fathers and Mothers of the Church.

The priest and poet John Keble made this point. He was one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement; he delivered his famous Assize sermon on 14 July 1833 – 190 years ago last Friday, hence our keeping today as Catholic Renewal. Three years later, in a sermon he preached in Winchester Cathedral in September 1836, Keble criticised the Protestants of his day for their ‘presumptuous irreverence of disparaging the Fathers under plea of magnifying Scripture’: in short, the Protestants thought there was only one true interpretation of Scripture – and that it was theirs – sound familiar? – and that they didn’t need to trouble themselves with the centuries of interpretation that had preceded them. In contrast, Keble championed the value of, and himself drew deeply from, the collective witness of the Church Fathers and Mothers.

That collective witness is one that we as Catholic Anglicans are invited continually to rediscover, taking seriously the heritage which is ours and recognising that tradition is not the dead weight of the past, but the voices of the whole company of heaven, testifying to the work of the Spirit in their times and that continues in ours. As we as Catholic Anglicans recover these early readings of Scripture, we deepen our knowledge of God by participating in others’ quest for God.

And that brings me to the second reason why these early readings of the Beatitudes matter to us today on Catholic Renewal Sunday: because they draw our attention to Matthew’s emphasis on God made human – the Word made flesh – which in turn reminds us that the deepest theological conviction of Catholic Anglicanism is the doctrine of the Incarnation, the realisation that God gives us of God’s own self in Jesus Christ.

As Catholic Anglicans we believe the Incarnation is the key to understanding the life of the Christian and therefore the life of the Church, within which the Word of God – God’s own self-expression – takes flesh; we believe the Incarnation is the key to understanding the sacraments, signs that effect what they signify and tokens that veil what is invisibly given; and we believe the Incarnation is the key to reading the world around us – a sacramental universe, symbolic in its particulars of the God who created it.

As Catholic Anglicans we believe the Incarnation is the key to understanding the life of the Christian because, as God has given us of God’s own self, utterly and entirely, so in that self-giving God draws us into the very life of the blessed Trinity, transfiguring us into God’s own self, so that we become what God is. This deification of the human person mirrors the humanisation of the divine Word: Incarnation and deification go hand in hand. God enters humankind to make humankind like God.

As Catholic Anglicans we believe that, through our participation in the sacraments, we encounter a God who transforms us; fed by his Body and Blood in the Eucharist, we share in the divine life itself, growing within our very embodiedness to live more and more in the likeness of God, to live more and more in the ways of God’s love and grace.

As Catholic Anglicans we believe that to be a Christian – to be ‘in Christ’ – is so much more than just following a charismatic leader; it is to empty ourselves – and so to be filled with the overflowing life of God; it is to be totally conformed to God – and so to be totally conformed to our true selves: we share in the life of God, not to escape from our humanity, but to become more truly human.

And as Catholic Anglicans we know what it means to live an incarnational faith, a life lived loving as Christ loved, a life lived in love for our neighbours – for that is what it means to share in God’s mission in the world.

And this brings us back, finally, to the Beatitudes, which were so important both to the Oxford Movement and to the Church Fathers and Mothers – because it’s in the Beatitudes that we come face to face with the incarnate God who shows us what it means to be human; it’s in the Beatitudes that we see that the glory to which humankind is called is that we should grow more like God by becoming ever more human. Think, for instance, about the fifth of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.’ As St Gregory of Nyssa noted in the fourth century in his homily on this text, Jesus’s words call us to ‘mutual charity and sympathy as demanded by the capricious inequality of the circumstances of life’ – and he goes on to define mercy as ‘a voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the suffering of others’. The merciful, in other words, are those who share in God’s work here and now, who live in the likeness of God and participate in the divine life by embodying God’s loving presence in the world.

Like St Gregory, Keble also devoted a significant homily to that single verse about the merciful: the sermon he preached on All Saints’ Day in 1848 at St Saviour’s Church in Leeds. Keble underscores the counter-cultural force of this beatitude: ‘True Christian mercy is altogether opposite to the false good-nature of this world. […] Blessed are they who labour and pray to be merciful, not after the false and spurious pattern of this world, but after His [Christ’s] pure and high example.’ Keble draws attention to the fact that Kingdom values are not the values of this world – and that it is Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, the Word made flesh, who shows us what it means to be human, who draws close to us, and draws us close to God, so that we might be transformed and be fellow workers with God in the world, sharing in God’s plan for the reconciliation of humankind.

So let us recommit ourselves today to being agents of God’s mercy and justice and peace in the world, for that is our calling as Catholic Anglicans – for that is our calling as Christians.