The Church's Missionary Programme at the West Façade of Chartres Cathedral, 3

The north portal tympanum of Chartres Cathedral's west facade presents a few hermeneutical difficulties:  Does it depict the Ascension or the Second Coming of Christ?  Why are there ten Apostles instead of twelve--and why are they seated?  Why are there symbols of the constellations in the archivolts?

At the centre is Christ--as in the central and south portals--the very subject of the Church's proclamation:  "For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord" (2 Cor 4:5).  The mandate to preach Christ was bequeathed to the Church in the days leading up to His Ascension:  St Matthew the Evangelist shows one moment in the delivery of the Great Commission in Galilee, with the mandate to "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you..." (Mt 28:16-20); St Mark the Evangelist shows the Risen Jesus "at table" with the Eleven--apparently at Jerusalem--repeating the same mandate in a slightly different fashion:  "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.  He who is baptised will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned" (cf Mk 16:14-18).  St Luke's version fills in a few more blanks:  while his gospel mentions the Ascension, he postpones the Great Commission to the second volume, the Acts of the Apostles; in this case, instead of telling them outright that they ought to preach the Gospel, the Risen Lord simply says that imminent experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit will ignite their worldwide mission:

[Jesus] said to them, "it is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.  But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.  And when He had said this, as they were looking on, He was lifted up and a cloud took Him out of their sight.  And while they were gazing into heaven as He went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?  This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven." (Acts 1:7-11). 

 In the Markan version of the Great Commission, Jesus warned that refusal to heed the Gospel would spell everlasting loss (Mk 16:16).  The Lukan version also hints at the eschatological implications of the Gospel proclamation by evoking Zechariah 14:4, "On that day His feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives which lies before Jerusalem on the east."  This is why those "two men" who appeared to the Apostles "in white robes" spoke of Jesus' return "in the same way you saw Him go..."  Recall, too, Jesus' Olivet Discourse where, among other things, He spoke of the future Judgment (cf Mt 24-25).

It seems to me, then, that--not wholly unlike the tympanum at Vezelay--the north portal is a 'mash-up' of the Ascension and Second Coming.  The clouds in the sculpture are reminiscent of Matthew 24:30-31,

...and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory; and He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (cf Mk 13:26; Lk 21:21).

Could it be that the two angels beside Christ in the tympanum sculpture are reminiscent of Acts 1:10, and the four angels below Him are reminiscent of those who were to assemble the Elect from the "four winds" in Matthew 1:31?

If that is the case, it would certainly make sense of the meaning of the constellation symbols in the archivolt, showing the months of the year and their respective labours.  The cosmic clock will continue to tick, but only until human history has run its course; someone once said that "death is a remedy for sin" because there is an inevitable but unknowable deadline appointed to us.  Therefore, as St Paul wrote to his young co-worker St Timothy:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His Kingdom:  Preach the Word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching (2 Tim 4:1-2).

It seems to me, then, that describing the tympanum sculpture as a 'mash-up' of the Ascension and Second Coming is too facile, after all; rather, it illustrates the urgency of mission.

It is only right, then, to ask:  How do we account for the Church's missionary lethargy of late?  What is especially troubling is that many people, in the name of their Catholicity, want to remedy structural injustices in the world by turning more quickly to social activism than to the Gospel.  Sure, they call what they're doing "Gospel" but it is not, because such people rely upon their own moxie and the good will of others to repair a broken world.  They are, essentially, self-styled Donatists while being unwittingly Pelagian.

As a Black police officer rightly pointed out, the world's problem is, at its deepest level, one of sin, and no amount of graceless wokeness can remedy that, because to be "woke" is to be in the deepest of slumbers, and to be a woke Christian is to be spiritually comatose.  What the world needs is the enlightenment which Christ alone provides:

"Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light."  Look carefully then ow you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil (Eph 5:14-15).

I will be so bold as to say that for Christians to try to remedy the world with "wokeness" only serve to darken the world further.

With her main doors facing the sunset and the Church thus confronting the waning world's darkness, Christianity's urgent mission is to proclaim nothing other than that illumination given by Christ alone.

The Church's Missionary Programme at the West Façade of Chartres Cathedral, 2

A number of years ago, I received a barrage of bullying messages on one of my social media platforms from leaders who have made their fame and fortune in anti-bullying campaigns.  I'm not sure they understood "irony," especially since they opted to descend upon a disabled person like me.

What garnered so much hostility was a simple, straightforward, historical fact that I dared to articulate:  That the Catholic Church invented schools.  Not 'education,' not 'schooling,' but schools as we have them now--with courses, class meetings, and professors.  More to the point, we also invented universities, a system of degrees, and faculties.  When I teach mediaeval ecclesiastical history to our permanent deacon-candidates, one unit is given entirely to the subject of education in the Middle Ages, which has been otherwise coloured by our post-Henrician Reformation, post-French Revolution societal bias.  One of the questions on my doctoral comprehensive examination touches upon the question of education between the years 500 to 1500, which I confess is something I also enjoy reading about "for fun."  In this vein, I prefer to pass the time with Boëthius, Cassiodorus and High of St-Victor while everybody else is watching Modern Family.

I can summarise the Church's invention of schools in one paragraph:  First, St Augustine thought it fit to retrieve classical learning--especially rhetoric and logic--for the Church's purposes, especially Biblical literacy; he says as much in his On Christian Teaching.  A short while later, the monk Cassiodorus 'codified' the Christian programme of learning in his Institutes, in which he gives us a synopsis of the seven liberal arts.  With the rise of the monastic movement especially after St Benedict of Nursia, monasteries began to to school their young monks in some of those liberal arts which Cassiodorus explained in order to fortify and enhance Bible reading; it was not until the Emperor Charlemagne, in the ninth century, that every monastery and every cathedral was required to have a school attached to it.  The eleventh century saw explosive growth of universities (the first being at Bologna, founded in 1088), followed by the "Twelfth Century Renaissance" in learning, to the zenith of mediaeval education in the thirteenth century, the same epoch when the Fourth Lateran Council ordered monastic and cathedral school to provide a free education for those who could not afford.  It was the universities that gave us, in addition to the seven liberal arts, the "higher disciplines" of theology, medicine, and law.  Finally, with the Council of Trent, finally, came the system of seminaries as we know them today.

So much for "the Dark Ages" we've been brainwashed to believe.

When I first visited Chartres Cathedral in 2017, my friend and fellow-pilgrim--himself a specialist in the history of the Middle Ages and soon to begin his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto's exclusive Centre for Medieval Studies--knowing my love for all things mediaeval and scholastic, pointed out to me the "South Portal" to the right of the doors whose tympanum we discussed in our previous blog post.  When my friend introduced me to it, I immediately fell in love with the sculpture and the imagery that was above the South Portal:  The Seven Liberal Arts tympanum, which you can see in the image at the top of this entry, itself a nod to the famous 'School of Chartres' that flourished in the high Middle Ages.

This tympanum over the South Portal shows two rows of figures with the outer archivolt showing feminine personifications of each liberal art (since the Latin term is ars libera, "ars" being second-declension/feminine) and one of the ancient writers whose claim to fame is a classical work on one of these arts.  The arrangement of the figures is like this:

Geometry          Arithmetic

EUCLID          BOETHIUS

Rhetoric                              Astronomy

CICERO                              PTOLEMY

Logic                                        Music          Grammar

ARISTOTLE                         PYTHAGORAS     PRISCIAN or

                                                                            DONATUS

I am always scandalized at how many grammar and junior/high school teachers do not know much about the seven liberal arts besides maybe naming them off; their ingenuity is that three of them--the trivium--are about order in the mind, namely logic (or dialectic), rhetoric, and grammar, and the remaining four--the quadrivium--are about order in the world, namely geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.  I am even more scandalized that education in the liberal arts--with its concomitant hope of teaching young people the basic skills of careful and critical thinking, is almost entirely absent in current schooling.  As Revd Dr George Rutler recently observed:

The cruelest illiteracy consists in a pantomime education which commands what to think rather than how to think, and erases from a culture any memory of its tested and vindicated truths.  Technological literacy easily becomes a camouflage for cultural illiteracy.

And, more that, public narrative has come to replace knowledge, and not a few recent professors have lost their jobs precisely for refusing to be thus illiberal.

Frustration with this fixation on "pantomime education" where sociopolitical indoctrination replaces authentic learning is the raison d'être of grammar schools such as the New England Classical Academy and universities such as Thomas Aquinas College with their emphasis on the classical liberal arts.  As the word-play libera suggests, there is a certain libertas (liberty) that comes with reading libri (books).

It is also important to bear in mind that this is precisely why the Soviets, and later the Nazis rounded up and murdered intellectuals and university professors:  Because, as George Orwell predicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."  Currently, that translates into destroying statues of saints who instigated laws safeguarding the rights of Natives.

By now, I should hope, you are asking:  "What has this to do with the Church's missionary mandate?"

As I said in the previous post, the west façade of the Chartres Cathedral symbolizes the Church's confrontation with darkness--of both sin and ignorance.  More to the point, ignorance is a byproduct of sin, and four out of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (which is my doctoral research specialization) are intellectual gifts which can be had only by those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, giving us the ability to see things "as they are."  The logic and order discovered by the liberal arts points to a deeper, underlying Logic, namely, that "in Him all things hold together" (Col 1:17).  There's a reason that the Greek word for "logic" is logike, from which we derive Logos, the "Word," namely the Second Person of the Holy Trinity:

In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.  He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.  In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men.  The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:1-5).

This, in turn, is reminiscent of that "Wisdom" described in the Old Testament:

 Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things (Wis 8:1, KJV)

The Church, facing east--symbolizing her fundamental Christ-ward orientation--sheds light on the world's darkness of, among others, ignorance and barbarism.  This is why the Seven Liberal Arts tympanum has the "Seat of Wisdom" motif at the centre:  The infant Christ, who is the Word or Wisdom embedded in Creation thanks to the Incarnation (cf Jn 1:14; 1 Jn 1:1-3), is enthroned upon the lap of the Virgin Mary, from which the Eternal Wisdom inherited both the wisdom of ancient Israel and the fleshliness of the human race.  By viewing Creation through the lens of the seven liberal arts, we come to see the innate order and structure of the universe and arrive at the God who gave it existence.  Christianity is not a 'layer' thrown over the world, but the articulation of the universe's meaning.  Why else did people like Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Lemaître make the discoveries they did, if not their friendship with Eternal Wisdom?

The Church's missionary programme is described by St Paul thus:

...for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.  We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ... (2 Cor 10:3-6).

 

The Church's Missionary Programme at the West Façade of Chartres Cathedral, 1

This summer is my first since 2017 that I have not visited Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres.  Last year, I set off on foot (mostly, until the blisters on both feet rebelled) from Paris to Chartres on the weekend of Pentecost with 14,000 other pilgrims.  The previous two years were homecomings, because it is here that Our Lady has much to say to us about following and worshiping her Son, especially at the Verrière, whom I met and fell in love with on my first visit.  But that's a topic for another day.

On the West façade of the Cathedral--where the Royal Portals are--tells us something of the Church's 'Missionary Programme,' and I'm going to begin to unpack that in this post, though not exhaustively, as there is simply too much to say and, more importantly, I hope to lead a pilgrimage there in the near future.  But, like I said, the doors face westward, the place of sunset and therefore of darkness.  In the early Church, when catechumens were making their profession of faith, they would often turn toward the setting sun and its rising darkness:

     Priest:  Do you renounce Satan?
     Catechumen:  I do renounce!

     Priest:  And all his works?
     Catechumen:  I do renounce!

     Priest:  And all his empty show?
     Catechumen:  I do renounce!

Our timid-as-a-mouse translation currently in force simply has the response "I do" when, in fact, the Latin is much more forceful:  Abrenúntio!  I do renounce!

Since the 'west' is the place of darkness, which overshadows "the world":  "I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to Light and from the power of Satan to God" (Acts 26:18); Saint Paul challenged the Christians at Corinth:

Do not be mismated with unbelievers.  For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity?  Or what fellowship has light with darkness?  What accord has Christ with Belial?  \or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? (2 Cor 6:14-15).

Once the renunciation takes place, catechumen then turns around to face East, with the backs to the world's darkness, giving physical obedience to 2 Corinthians 6:17-18,

Therefore come out from them, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters.

The Bible repeats the injunction for Christians' separation from the world on account of its darkness.  St James challenges us:  "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?  Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God" (Jas 4:4).  Similarly, St John the Apostle and Evangelist tells us, "Do not love the world or the things in the world.  If any one loves the world, love of the Father is not in him" (1 Jn 2:15).

Traditionally, churches face east, with the doors at the west end; in the Gothic churches of Europe--especially France--the west façade was so decorated so as to symbolize the Church's confrontation against the powers of darkness and Christians' triple renunciation facing west symbolized the basic commitment of discipleship which begins with a rejection of Satan, darkness, and his bombast.

At Chartres Cathedral, in particular, there is a set of three portal sculptures over each of the doors--the Royal Portal being the central and largest doors, and their adjacent North Portal and South Portal.  Above the Royal Portal is the tympanum sculpture titled "Christ in Majesty," with the Lord Jesus Christ enthroned and surrounded by a mandorla, an almond-shaped halo surrounding His entire body, thus showing forth His glory and majesty.  His right hand is held up in blessing, reminiscent of the "good thief" crucified at Jesus' right who received His offer of eternal life (Lk 23:40-43); in His left hand, Jesus holds the Book of Life, closed, symbolizing the finality of His judgment, also reminiscent of His crucifixion when the impenitent thief on His left rejected Jesus, thus by his obduracy sealing his eternal self-separation from Christ's offer of mercy and grace.

Around the majestic Christ are the symbols of the Four Evangelists:  St John's eagle, St Luke's ox, St Mark's Lion, and St Matthew's angelic man.  These remind us of the basic evangelical proclamation:  JESUS IS LORD!  We find allusions to the sovereign Lordship of Jesus in Matthew 28:18, Mark 16:19, Luke 24:51/Acts 1:3, 6-8, and John 20:28.  Below Christ in majesty are the Twelve Apostles who are appointed to be witnesses of His Resurrection (cf Acts 1:22), with two additional figures--the "two witnesses" mentioned in Revelation 11:1-14.  Regarding these Two Witnesses, the Church's Tradition holds that they are Enoch and Elijah.  Finally, the archivolt shows the twenty-four presbyters spoken of in Revelation 4:4, interspersed with angels.

What is the purpose of these eschatological symbols in terms of the Church's "missionary programme"?  Quite simply, it is part and parcel of the basic Gospel proclamation:

And Peter opened his mouth and said:  "...And He commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that He is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead" (Acts 10:34, 42);

So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said:  "...but now [God the Father] commands all men [and women] everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a Man whom he has appointed..." (Acts 17:22, 30-31). 

Please get out of your head the cartoonish image of the fire-and-brimstone huckster televangelist; when the Church preaches the Gospel, it comes with the basic promise that when the Lord returns, He will put all wrongs to right and will come with recompense (Mk 16:16).

"Christ in Majesty" invites us to be "marked safe" from the future judgment by receiving His offer of salvation by turning to Him.  When we enter the church, we process eastward, towards Mount Olivet, where the Lord ascended into heaven (Acts 1:9, cf v. 12); the Bible suggests that the dawn hints at the Light which Christ is (Lk 1:78-79, cf Malachi 4:2) in order to illuminate us (Jn 8:12; Eph 5:14), which is also why we face east.  It is likewise from the east that the Church awaits the Lord Jesus' return (Acts 1:11, cf Zech 14:3-4).

Hence, when catechumens become Christians, they turn around with their backs to the world, facing eastward:

     Priest:  Do you believe in God, the Father almighty...?
     Catechumen:  I do believe!

     Priest:  Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord...?
     Catechumen:  I do believe!

     Priest:  Do you believe in the Holy Spirit...?
     Catechumen:  I do believe!

The posture of the Christian--with their backs to the world's darkness, backed by the Church's confrontation with the world by proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus as Chartres does with its "Christ in Majesty" portal sculpture--and facing east--the place of dawn, of light evoking Light, towards the place of the Lord's Ascension and in expectation of His return--this posture marks the fundamental orientation of the Christian believer:  turned towards the Lord.

As the song goes, "The Cross before me, the world behind me..."

The Church is the Lord Jesus' "diplomatic mission" to the world:  As heralds of the "King of kings and Lord of lords" (Rev 19:16, cf 17:14), as citizens of heaven (Phil 3:10; Eph 2:19), we welcome the entire human family to share in unconquerable Christ's conquest for hearts:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him" (Jn 3:16-17).

 

The Evangelical Moment

Ten thousand years ago when I began seminary formation, I took a course titled "Catechesis and Catechetical Method" taught by a wonderful lay professor.  Among the things she shared with us was to be on the lookout for the catechetical moment, that is, an opportunity in which we could explain this or that aspect of the Catholic Christian faith.

The idea of the "catechetical moment" never left me.

When my dear Mother went home to the Lord, I had many catechetical moments when my family asked me all sorts of questions about death, the afterlife, salvation, and the End of All Things, which I tried to answer to the best of my knowledge.  Or, when my own Deaf community asks me questions about the sign CHRISTIAN and how Protestants are "Christians" but we Catholics are not, I use that opening to explain that, as Catholics, we are Christians too, in fact the "original" Christian community (though, please God, save us from that ugly sin of 'Catholic triumphalism'!).

I have also seen catechetical moments left unseized, opportunities to explain this or that aspect of the Christian faith squandered for more interesting conversations.

In recent years, something analogous has been brewing in my mind, something that our Protestant friends are better at doing than we are because, as Catholics, we're more fixated on "maintaining" our numbers than "growing" them:  The evangelical moment.

Before I explain the evangelical moment, an anecdote.

Recently, a document came across my desk lamenting, rightly, the sin of racism.  It was issued by a certain network of Catholics working in one area of the secular order--you'll forgive me for being intentionally vague as to whom I talking about, as finger-pointing is not here my, well, point.

In the course of this document, I noticed two glaring omissions:  Racism was not decried as a "sin," nor was the "Gospel" offered as a way out.

In other words, an "evangelical moment" was lost.

It is utterly baffling to me, after Vatican II's ad Gentes on the Church's missionary identity, after St Paul VI's Evangelii nuntiandi, after St John Paul the Great's Redemptor hominis and Redemptoris missio--to say nothing of his letters bringing us to the Third Millennium of Christianity--after the XIIIth Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelisation in 2012, after Pope Francis' Evangelii gaudium, it remains utterly baffling to me that the wider Church still hasn't caught on that our fundamental task is to win souls for Christ.

It is even more baffling still that the Gospel is too infrequently offered as the only solution to the world's problems.  That is what we mean by the evangelical moment:  That, when an "opening" presents itself, to declare the inescapable need for Jesus Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

Friends, the world is in chaos, and Christians are at fault.

Going back to that document I mentioned:  That would have been a golden 'evangelical moment.'  That would have been an ideal opportunity to explain that what's "systemic" about racialism is that it is part and parcel of "systemic" sin that the whole world is under the power of:

[F]or I [= St Paul] have already charged that all men [and women], both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written:  "None is righteous, no, not one: / no one understands, no one seeks for God. / All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; / no one does good, not even one."  / "Their throat is an open grave, / they use their tongues to deceive."  / "The venom of asps is under their lips."  / "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness."  / "Their feet are swift to shed blood, / and the way of peace they do not know."  / "There is no fear of God before their eyes" (Rom 3:9-18).

The impression that is easily given--not only by the document that came across my desk, but by the talk of many Christian leaders--is that we can simply pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and become equitable and just by our own moxie.

No, we can't.  The Church condemned the idea of self-made righteousness at the Second Synod of Orange in 529 and again at the Council of Trent in 1547--to say nothing of the scores of theologians who've dismantled that fantasy in the meantime and since.  Often--not always, but often--talk about "social justice" leaves aside the problem of sin and often--not always, but often--it tries to apply natural Pelagian remedies to the preternatural problem of gracelessness.

Which brings me to a second, related 'evangelical moment' that was lost by this document:  Jesus Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit was never mentioned as a solution, let alone as the only solution to racialism.

Isn't it odd that Christians often try to find every solution to a problem other than Jesus Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit?

Any Christian worth his or her salt knows that St Paul, as the "Apostle to the Nations," was fixated on this point in the Gospel:  That is is offered to all peoples, and in being offered to all peoples, ethnic and social animosities begin to dissolve.  For example:

For by one Spirit we were all baptised into one Body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Cor 12:13).

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you all are one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28).

 For He [= Christ] is our peace, Who has made us both [= Jews and Gentiles] one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility... (Eph 2:14).

In the Acts of the Apostles, the Lord Jesus said something that the Apostles were slow to catch on:

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

As Acts unfolded, the Gospel was proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit for the first time on Pentecost morning to the people in Jerusalem (cf Acts 2:14); the Gospel was expanded in the "Samaritan Pentecost" (Acts 8:14-17).  In Acts 10:34-48, the Gentiles, for the first time, received the Gospel and were filled with the Holy Spirit.  The mandate to preach to non-Jews became "dogmatic" with the Jerusalem Conference in Acts 15:1-35.  Finally, the Gospel reached the "end of the earth" when St Paul arrived at the Caput mundi--the "Capital of the World":

And he [= St Paul] lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered (Acts 28:30-31).

More than that, St Paul tells us--almost like a broken record--that the indwelling Holy Spirit in Christians unites all believers together (1 Cor12:12-27; Eph 2:18, 4:4-5; Acts 2:45-46).  In fact, Old Testament prophecies about "Mount Zion" were, really, an allusion to that first Pentecost, because the "Upper Room" where the Holy Spirit was outpoured on the first Christians was right there on Mount Zion:

It shall come to pass in the latter days / that the mountain of the house of the Lord / shall be established as the highest of the mountains, / and shall be raised above the hills; / and all the nations shall flow to it, / and many peoples shall come and say:  / "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, / to the house of the God of Jacob; / that he may teach us his ways / and that we may walk in his paths."  / For out of Zion shall go forth the law, / and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Is 2:2-3).

The Lord Jesus told us:  "And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed My voice.  So there shall be one flock, one shepherd" (Jn 10:16).  It is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that the peoples of all nations are gathered together under the Lordship of Jesus.

As I'm sure you've seen before, "No Jesus, no peace; Know Jesus, know peace."

This is a beautiful Biblical truth, is it not?

Yet many Christians are silent on this, and an "evangelical moment" thus lost.

Why are so many in the Body of Christ keeping quiet on the only true solution to the problem of racialism?  Why are so many believers enthusiastic about every other possibility, except the one that Jesus gave us?  Why are so many members of the Church Johnny-on-the-spot about worldly answers to spiritual problems?

G. K. Chesterton said it best:  "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

The Lord has not given us an option.  He has given us a choice to disobey, yes; but He has not given us an option to do so, because to follow Jesus is to obey Him.  Jesus gave us the Great Commission not once, or twice, but three times:  First in Galilee (Mt 28:19-20), as He "sat at table" with the Eleven (Mk 16:14-18), and finally just before His Ascension (Acts 1:8).  Each time He commanded us to evangelise, He made a point of saying that the Gospel is for all peoples:  "...to the end of the earth" in Luke, to the "whole creation" in Mark, to "all nations" in Matthew.  He couldn't be clearer.  The Great Commission is not the Great Suggestion.

Sadly, the document that came across my desk decrying racialism failed to summon Christians to deeper repentance; sadder still, that same document encouraged us to defeat racialism without showing us that the Gospel is the only way to do so.

As my own Archbishop once said, "Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life."

Make no mistake:  When we withhold Jesus from others, we multiplying the world's chaos.

To Lay Siege the World

Like wall crucifixes that make Jesus look like He's only having a bad day, the word "Gospel" has been sanitized and turned into a "religious ornament."  Let's make it offensive again.

St Mark's gospel begins like this:

The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Mk 1:1).

Now that is offensive, at least it would've been to the Emperor Nero.

In the first place, many scholars  think that Mark was written in Rome on account of its emphasis on St Peter's preaching (who ended his days at Rome), the many Latinisms in the text, and the witness of the earliest Fathers.  My friend, Prof Dr Daniel B. Wallace, gives a good summary, if you'd like more information.

The clause, "the Son of God" title given to Jesus Christ was a slap on the face to the emperors of Rome who imagined themselves to be divi filius, "son of a god."  Writing under the nose of Nero Caesar, St Mark is effectively denying the divine status of the Imperator.

Adding insult to injury, St Mark also assigns "Gospel" to Jesus Christ--not merely "good news" to send us on our merry way, but precisely to let the air out of Nero's balloon, because the Latin word evangelium (and its Greek equivalent, εὐαγγέλιον) originally referred to that specific "good news" about the accession of a new Roman emperor or about Roman victory at war.  The incipit of Mark's gospel (lowercase gospel refers to the text of one of the four Evangelists; uppercase Gospel refers to...well, hang on) was calculated to theologically unseat Nero and to declare (as he does at the very end of his gospel) that Jesus Christ is enthroned and, therefore, is in control.

That is the "good news," the Gospel:  That Jesus Christ has conquered, that He is seated victoriously at the Father's right hand, and that He reigns.  Similarly, at the end of St Matthew's gospel, the Risen Lord said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me" (Mt 28:18).  Hence in the Septuagint version of Psalm 110 (109):1 foretold, "The Lord said unto my Lord:  Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet."  About this, the Old Testament prophet St Daniel saw

in the night visions, / and behold, with the clouds of heaven / there came one like a Son of Man, / and He came to the Ancient of Days / and was presented before him. / And to Him was given dominion and glory and kingdom / that all peoples should serve Him; / His dominion is an everlasting dominion, / which shall not pass away (Daniel 7:13-14).

I remember, back when I began to study New Testament Greek at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, our professor gave us a classic 'Christmas story' out of one of the gospels (without telling us) to translate; I was roundly surprised at how "imperial" the language was in describing the authority of Jesus.  (Which gospel text was it, you ask?  It's too good to leave in a blog online, so when I speak in person about the Gospel, I'll tell that story in full!)

In the previous post, I spoke at length about the Lordship of Jesus.  It is in this context that the Gospel must be understood:  The Good News is that Jesus is Lord--not only has He conquered sin, death, hell, and the Enemy, but He has also conquered the world.

Remember what I also said in the previous post about the meaning of "preaching"--that it was a heralding of the Lordship of Jesus?

The preaching (κηρύσσων) of the Gospel, therefore, is to lay siege to the world with the love of God and to win people from "every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues" (Apoc 7:9) for Our Lord Jesus Christ.  The extent of Jesus' Lordship is absolute--which is why we speak of "the Kingdom" and, more precisely, the "Gospel of the Kingdom" (cf Mt 4:23, 9:35; Mk 1:14).  The task of preaching is simply to invite people to join themselves to Him.

But, what has this got to do with salvation?

Again, this is another slap across Nero's face.  The Roman emperors imagined themselves to be salvator mundi--"saviour of the world."  John 4:42 was also calculated to show that Jesus is the "saviour of the world," not Augustus.  Whereas the Roman emperor sought to be the "saviour" of the Roman peoples by crediting himself with the success of Rome's infrastructure and the security of its citizens, Jesus offers a salvation that is far more wholistic, one that heals (salvator is related to salve, "health") us right at the heart--sin; the Lord Jesus repairs the world's ills by first repairing human brokenness resulting from our separation from God.  With hearts healed, we can set out to put wrongs to right.

This is exactly why the ambition of social activism under the banner of "Christianity" is inimical to the Gospel--because it bypasses the source of all societal ills, My sins and your sins, and it aims to create a just society based on man's wants instead of Jesus' rights as Lord.

When we speak of the "New Evangelisation," we must first understand evangelisation in the original sense of the term:  To lay siege to the world with Jesus' lordly love by winning souls for Him.  It is "new" because, as Christians, we have permitted Christendom to collapse by aligning ourselves with worldly values; we thus seek to recover for Jesus Christ what we have cost Him.

As I watch to many Christians wring their hands at the Church's state of affairs in a secular society and listen to them talk about the need to cope and compromise in the name of laïcité, I think of St Paul, who rigged the Roman legal system (Acts 25:11-12) in order to pursue the Lord Jesus' summons for him to preach the Gospel in Rome (Acts 23:11) until, finally he arrived at the Capital of the Empire,

preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus quite openly and unhindered (Acts 28:31).

But, then again, as he said in 2 Corinthians 4:13,

Since we have the same Spirit of faith as he had who wrote, "I believed, and so I spoke," we too believe, and so we speak...

If we remain silent about Jesus' reign, if we keep the Gospel to ourselves, if we aim to make Christianity more "relevant" to a world desperate for mercy and grace, we must honestly ask whether we really believe.  Actions speaks louder than words, and to evangelise is to act on the reality that JESUS IS LORD.

Pentecost and Mission

At the Abbaye Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Vézelay, there is a powerful tympanum over the main doors leading out of the vestibule and into the narthex of the Church, depicting a kind of mash-up of the Ascension of Christ and Pentecost.  Instead of tongues of fire, rays of light emanate from the hands of the Lord Jesus and onto each of the Twelve Apostles, thus illuminating them.  The Apostles are so postured to show their readiness to spring into action, each of them holding a book representing the Gospel to be proclaimed.  Below the Apostles are a row of grotesquely-formed people representing the unevangelized, grotesque because they are bereft of grace.

I cannot help but wonder if those mesmerizing swirls on the garment of the Lord Jesus are supposed evoke the "mighty wind"--the Ruach ha-kodesh that swept throughout the house and the Upper Room on the morning of Pentecost (cf Acts 2:2).

If the previous several posts are any indication, the mediaevals liked to depict the Ascension and Pentecost together; the tympanum at Vézelay combines the two events into one, as I said, in a mash-up.  St Mark's gospel, for example, gives such an impression:

So then the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.  And they went forth and preached [ἐκήρυξαν] everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it.  Amen (Mk 16:19-20).

Keep your eye on that verb for "preached"--ἐκήρυξαν--we're going to come back to that.  What's curious here is that the Lord Jesus is both seated "at the right hand of God" and "worked with them" as if He was two places at once.  But was He?

The Ascension of Jesus meant that He became more present to the Church, not distant from it, which is why the Apostles "returned to Jerusalem with great joy" in St Luke's account (24:52).  Who rejoices when a loved one departs?  No one--here, though Jesus went up, He most certainly did not go away.  More than that, since the Holy Spirit is also "the Spirit of Christ" (Rom 8:9) and the "Spirit of his Son" (Gal 4:6)--not that the two Persons are conflated but that they are related--the Holy Spirit (if I may be so crude) "immanentizes" Christ to His believers.  It is for this reason that the rays of light emanate from the fingers of Jesus (perhaps an allusion to the tradition that describes the Holy Spirit as "the finger of God"?) and touch upon the head of the Apostles like the tongues of file in Acts 2:3.  The tympanum, with its almost ridiculously-oversized Christ does indeed show the immanence of Jesus--perhaps, even an almost menacing presence--in the apostolic Mission.  If this be the case, then, clearly the tympanum shows a connexion between the Ascension, Pentecost, and Mission.

Immediately prior to His Ascension, the Apostles asked Jesus a question, and He gives what appears to be an evasive answer:  "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6).  They were still too thick to understand that Jesus' kingdom was not an earthly kingdom (Jn 18:36) and the reasons why He refused an earthly throne (cf Jn 6:15).  In reply, Jesus essentially says, "How and when--mind your own business."  It's the very next verse that ought to catch our attention:

But [ἀλλὰ] you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses...to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

 "But" is a conjunction--it 'conjoins' two different ideas but on a slightly different note.  "I don't want to eat a candy-bar, but I am hungry" means I'm conjoining my reluctance to eat something unhealthy while needing something to eat just the same.  So when Jesus says to Peter, "But..." He means to say, "Same destination, different course!"

Same destination, different course.  What's the destination?  The fullness of the Kingdom ("restore the kingdom to Israel").  What's the course?  Pentecostal power for witness ("power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses").

Witness what?  On the basis of Acts 2:36, 10:36, Romans 14:7-9, we give witness to the Lordship of Jesus. The Ascension of Jesus Christ--with His enthronement at the Father's right hand--is precisely the "iconography" of the Lordship of Jesus; from the Father's right hand Jesus sends forth the Holy Spirit so that the Church may both be born and be fueled for Mission.  This is exactly at the heart of St Paul's words, "No-one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (Rom 10:9)--not merely by an utterance but by a heralding.

Let's go back to that Greek verb in Mark 16:20, ἐκήρυξαν, "preached."  which is the aorist tense for κηρύσσω, 'I herald, I proclaim.'

Nothing bores me into a coma more than conflating "preaching" with "homiletics"--they are not the same thing.  To preach--κηρύσσειν in the infinitive mood--originally meant to proclaim or to herald the imminent arrival of a monarch.  In antiquity, before a king was to make a royal visit to a city, a "preacher" (κήρυκα) would go ahead of the visiting monarch and warn the citizen-subjects that their monarch was about to arrive.

A Christian preacher does just this, except he or she does not herald the imminent arrival of a king, but the current Lordship of Jesus.  Jesus "preached" in the original sense of the word (cf Mt  4:17; Mk 1:14); with His glorification at His Resurrection (whereby He conquered sin, death, hell, and Satan) and at His Ascension to the Father's right hand, "He has put all things under His feet" (Eph 1:22), the task of "preaching" shifted from "the Kingdom is coming" to "the Kingdom is now--whose side are you on?"

At the jubilee of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in 2017, on the platform at Circus Maximus, there was a huge mural with JESUS IS LORD printed in the languages of the world.  This is at the heart of the Gospel preaching--to declare the Lordship of Jesus:

...the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows His riches upon all who call upon Him.  For, "every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved."

But how are [people] to call upon Him in whom they have not believed?  And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard?  And how are they to hear without a preacher [κηρύσσοντος]?  And how can [they] preach [κηρύξωσιν] unless they are sent?  As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach [εὐαγγελιζομένων:  literally, "evangelise"] Good News!"  But they have not all heeded the Gospel; for Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed what he has heard form us?"  So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ [ῥήματος  Χριστοῦ:  literally, "utterance about Christ"] (Rom 10:12-17).

Clearly, St Paul intersects "preaching" and the "Lordship of Jesus." Clearly, too, St Paul understands that the declarative utterance (ὁμολογήσῃς...ἐν τῷ στόματί, in the same sense as "utterance about Christ in Rom 10:7) that "Jesus is Lord" can only be done Pentecostally, that is, in the power of the Holy Spirit who, when imbuing us, imbues us precisely for Mission.

This is precisely what the tympanum at Vézelay intends to tell us:  The Apostles, baptised in the Holy Spirit, are dispatched for Mission to declare to the peoples of the world that "Jesus is Lord"--symbolized by the immense statue of the enthroned Lord who outpours the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

Today's Church seems to be languishing in her Mission, despite the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council's renewed summons to proclaim the Gospel in its decree ad Gentes, despite Pope Paul VI's Evangelii nuntiandi, despite Pope John Paul II's Redemptoris missio, despite Pope Francis' Evangelii gaudium.

Despite Vatican II and the magisterium of the recent popes, there is a definite missionary laziness in the Church, and here's why:  Many have substituted ideological verbiage in place of preaching, social activism for Mission, and human prowess for the Holy Spirit.  Resolving the world's miserable lot--whether it be poverty, starvation, war, oppression, or every existential crisis--can only be done successfully when we are on the side of the Lord Jesus, and only be done successfully when we are "clothed with power from on high" (Lk 24:49).  As St Paul wrote--

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  And  I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message [κήρυγμά] were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Cor 2:1-5).

Billy Joel naïvely sang, "We didn't start the fire!"

Oh, yes, we did.

But we can only fight fire with Fire--with the Fire of the Holy Spirit, preaching the Gospel of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and bringing the world into sweet submission to Him.

JESUS IS LORD!

The Power of Pentecost, 1

St Peter the Apostle on Pentecost morning, preaching the first sermon.

Just before the prophecy delivered by St John the Baptist about the One who would "baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (Mt 3:11), this 'last Old Testament prophet' warned his hearers to not

...presume to say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father"; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham!

Most people, it seems to me, think that the Forerunner is slighting the smug, self-satisfied religious folks' ancestral purity when, in fact, he was highlighting God's power to produce offspring to Abraham apart from pedigree.  This was St Paul's exact point in several of his letters:

And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise (Gal 3:29).

For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants...  This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise (Rom 8:7-10).

This "promise," of course, refers to the Promise of Worldwide Blessing which God gave to Abraham in Genesis 22:15-18.  The question, then, becomes:  How does one become heirs to this "promise"?  How can an ethnic non-Abrahamite become his offspring and, more importantly, his heir?

The answer begins in Acts 10, when St Peter the Apostle receives two prophetic words:  First, the vision of a diversity of non-kosher, "unclean" animals to eat and, second, the request to visit the house of Cornelius, where he comes to understand the meaning of the vision.  Cornelius was a member of the Italian cohort (Acts 10:1) and a Gentile who invited Peter to visit with him, his family, and close acquaintances. It is there that Peter begins to understand the vision, that "What God has cleansed, you must not call common" (Acts 10:15; cf vv. 28-29).

Then "Peter opened his mouth" and preached

Good News of peace by Jesus Christ--He is Lord of all--the word which was proclaimed throughout all Judea beginning from Galilee after the baptism which John preached:  How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power... (Acts 10:36f)

The final piece of the puzzle was yet to come:  "While Peter was still saying this, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word...

And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.  For they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.  Then Peter declared, "Can any one forbid water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?"  And he commanded them to be baptised in the Name of Jesus Christ (Acts 10:44--48).

 And--BOOM--the "power" to raise up children to Abraham was precisely that "power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you" (Acts 1:8; cf Lk 24:49).  It is the same power which St John the Apostle and Evangelist wrote in his Prologue--

But to all who received Him, who believed in His Name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God (Jn 1:13).

This is precisely the overarching narrative of the post-Pentecost Christian community:  The indwelling Holy Spirit--not Abrahamic ancestral pedigree--makes us his heirs.  The 'Jerusalem Conference' in Acts 15:1-35 met to discuss the very question of whether the Gentiles could also become Christians because it was only since Cornelius' baptism in the Holy Spirit that non-Jews could became members of Christ's Body:

And God who knows the heart bore witness to them [= the Gentiles], giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us [= Jews] and them [= Gentiles], but cleansed their hearts by faith...  But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will (Acts 15:8-9, 11).

This was St Paul's 'sticking point'--that the indwelling Holy Spirit is precisely what gives us the "pedigree" to be counted as Abraham's offspring.  In fact, Paul plays with the idea of the Gentiles being a wild olive branch grafted onto the domesticated olive tree of Israel, implying the olive oil in the fruit olive which is suggestive of the anointing of the Holy Spirit (Rom 11:17f).  He makes a similar point in his epistle to the Galatian churches--

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise... (Gal 3:29-29).

In the very next paragraph, Paul bats a home-run:

I mean that an heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave...  But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a Woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law, so that we might receive adoption as sons [and daughters].  And because you are sons [and daughters], God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba!  Father!" (Gal 4:1, 4-6).

It is the Holy Spirit who indwells us who is the great gatherer of the Gentiles to form the one Body of Christ (Rom 12:4; 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:26-29).

But why am I belaboring what ought to be Biblically obvious?  Because the indwelling Holy Spirit is the only solution to the sin of racism.  Sin, by definition is divisive; that is why Adam and Eve hid from both each other and from God (Gen 3:7, 8).  Paul tells us that division, party spirit, and the like are "works of the flesh" (Gal 5:19-20).  It is only in the power of Pentecost that there can be true "unity in diversity."

This is the Gospel that is left unannounced by many leaders in the Christian community.  As the Body of Christ, our solution to the problem of racism is not the world's; our solution is a supernatural one; it is to the enlarge the Body of Christ by inviting all peoples to receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit of love between the Father and Son, the Spirit whom Jesus promised in John 17:20-26  who would be the source of unity.

For Christians to adopt worldlings' "solution" to the problem of racism instead of the Gospel's is like trying to light up a room with a battery-operated flashlight instead of turning on the light-switch.  Why would Christians opt for a powerless solution to the brokenness and fragmentation of the human race resulting from preternatural sin when the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit is given to us precisely to unite us all?  As St Peter said on the morning of that first Pentecost, "For the promise is for you"--remember the vast assembly of races assembled at Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks--"and for your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him" (Acts 2:39).

The Lord Jesus explicitly connected the Outpouring with Mission:

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

When we stand before the Judgment-Seat of Christ, what answer will we give to Him, while bragging about our anti-racism, when He asks us, "But why did you refuse the power of Pentecost?  Why did you not invite Blacks, First Nations, Arabs, and Amazonians to experience baptism in the Holy Spirit and to become members of My Body?  That, and that alone, was My appointed ending to the confusion of Babel."

     Almighty and ever-living God,
     who willed the Paschal Mystery
     to be encompassed as a sign of fifty days,
     grant that from out of the scattered nations
     that the confusion of tongues
     may be gathered by heavenly grace
     into the one great confession of Your Name.
     Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
     who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
     one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

          --Solemn Vigil of Pentecost, Collect before the Epistle