Dead Souls

The second of February is the fortieth day after Christmas and therefore the day on which the Church commemorates the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This commemoration is popularly known as Candlemas from the tradition of blessing candles in Church on this day.  There is an ancient folk tradition that says that if it is a clear day on Candlemas it will be a long winter.  A tradition derived from this one says that a hibernating animal – which depends on where you live – will temporarily awaken on Candlemas to predict the remaining length of winter by whether or not he sees his shadow.  In North America, the hibernating animal is the groundhog or woodchuck.

 

This year Candlemas fell on a Sunday.  On most Sunday evenings a friend comes over to watch movies and the obvious choice was “Groundhog Day” the 1993 film by Harold Ramis in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who goes to Punxsutawney, the small community in Pennsylvania where Groundhog Day is a much bigger deal than elsewhere, and becomes trapped in a personal time loop that forces him to relive the day over and over again.  The way in which Phil, Murray’s character who shares a name with the famous groundhog, responds to this dilemma evolves over the course of the movie.  At one point, fairly early in the plot, his response is gross self-indulgence since there are no consequences due to the slate constantly being wiped clean.  In this phase, the character of Rita portrayed by Andie MacDowell, watching him engage in reckless gluttony in the local diner, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him:

 

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he’s sprung

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

In the movie, Phil’s response is to laugh and make a joke about having misheard Walter Scott as Willard Scott.  Watching the movie with my friend, my response was to point out that Rita had misapplied the lines she quoted.  The lines are from Canto VI of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and refer not to a hedonist but to the person lacking patriotism.  The first part of the Canto goes:

 

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

 

After this comes the lines quoted in the movie.

Clearly Sir Walter Scott shared the opinion of Scottish-American, neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue as well he ought for that opinion is correct.  Note, however, that the correctness of the opinion depends on the definition of patriotism.  Nationalism, which is frequently confused with patriotism, is not a virtue.  It is not the opposite of a virtue, a vice, either, but this is only because it does not belong to the same general category, the habits of behaviour that make up character, of which virtue and vice are the good and bad subcategories.  Nationalism is an ideology.  An ideology is a formulaic substitute for a living tradition of thought (see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics And Other Essays).  Shortcuts of this type are always bad. 

 

In a recent column Brian Lilley spoke of “national pride” and criticized those who have only recently started to display national pride as Canadians in response to Donald the Orange.   While Lilley’s argument is related to my main topic in this essay, I bring it up here to make the point that “national pride” is not a good way of describing the patriotism that is a virtue.  To be fair, Lilley did not equate patriotism with “national pride” but this is because the word patriotism does not appear in his column.  Pride appears four times and the adjective proud appears nine times.  While it is easy to see why Lilley would use these terms, since much of the column is appropriately critical of the attacks on Canada and her history, identity, and traditions that have been coming from the current Liberal government for the duration of the near-decade they have been in power, pride is not the right word.  It is the name of a vice, indeed, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than a virtue.

 

Fortunately, we do not have to look far and wide to find the right term.  Patriotism, correctly defined, is neither the ideology of nationalism that values one’s country for its perceived superiority to all others requiring that all others be insulted and subjugated nor the deadly sin of pride as directed towards one’s country, but simply love of one’s country. 

 

Love of one’s country is indeed a virtue.  Whereas pride is the worst of all sins, love is the highest of all virtues. Of course, the love that is the highest of all virtues is a specific kind of love.  The Seven Heavenly Virtues include the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude and the Three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.  The Cardinal Virtues are habits that anyone can cultivate and so make up the best moral character that man can attain in his natural or unregenerate state.  While faith, hope, and love in a more general sense can be similarly cultivated, the Faith, Hope, and Love that make up the essence of Christian character must be imparted by the grace of God although the Christian is also expected to cultivate them.  Love is the greatest of the three as St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and therefore as Henry Drummond called it, “the greatest thing in the world”.  It incorporates the other two since they are built upon each other.  Natural loves are lesser than Christian Love or Charity, but they are still virtuous insomuch as they resemble, albeit imperfectly, the Theological Virtue.  Patriotism, the love of country, is such a love.  Edmund Burke famously described how it develops “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”  The “little platoons” include one’s family and local community and is Burke had wanted to belabour the point he could have said that the first principle is love of one’s family, which develops into love of one’s local community, and then outward.

 

It has been heartwarming to see Canadians display their love of country over the last month or so in response to the repeated threats of Anschluss coming from America’s Fuhrer.  While not all of these displays have been in good taste they do all demonstrate that Captain Airhead’s efforts to kill Canadian patriotism by endlessly apologizing for past events that need no apologies, cancelling Canada’s founders and historical leaders such as Sir John A. Macdonald, and other such nonsense have failed.  This resurgence in Canadian public patriotism ought, therefore, to be welcomed by the “conservatives” who rightly despise Captain Airhead.  Oddly, however, it has not been so welcomed by many of them. 

 

In part this is due to the fact that Captain Airhead, the Liberals, the NDP, and their media supporters who were all on the “cancel Canada” bandwagon until yesterday are now wrapping themselves in the flag and these do deserve to be called out for this.  The right way to do so, however, is to say something to the effect of “you are rather late to the party, but thanks for showing up.”  To Brian Lilley’s credit, that is the gist of what he says in the column alluded to earlier.  Many other “conservatives”, however, have responded quite differently.  In his 2006 book, In Defence of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue, Jeremy Lott pointed out the difference between Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy and Modern condemnation of hypocrisy.  In condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Jesus did not condemn them for the high moral standards they taught, but for falling short of those standards by sinning.  Moderns, however, when they condemn hypocrisy, condemn the moral standards rather than the sin.  The response of many “conservatives” to the newly discovered Canadian patriotism of progressives resembles this in that they seem to be criticizing the progressives more for their expression of patriotism today than for their lack of it yesterday.  One even quoted Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  I refer him to the comments of James Boswell, whose record of the remark is the reason we are familiar with it today, as to what it means.  Dr. Johnson was not impugning love of country, but a kind of pseudo-patriotism which interestingly enough was associated with the founding of America.

 

It can hardly be a coincidence that these same “conservatives” have been rather less than patriotic in their response to the threats from south of the border.  The founder of one “conservative” independent online media company first responded to these threats by saying they should be treated as a joke and a funny one at that. Then, when Donald the Orange said last weekend that it was no joke,  she flip-flopped and criticized Captain Airhead for having initially done exactly that and said the Anschluss threat was a joke.  In between she conducted and published an interview with an immigrant from America who twelve years ago proved herself to be exactly the kind of immigrant we don’t need when she published a book proposing the merger of our country with her country of birth. 

 

The general response to these threats in this organization’s commentary has been to treat the American dictator as a reasonable man, with legitimate grievances, who can be negotiated with and to propose an economic merger between the two countries that falls short of a political merger.  Ironically, their website is promoting a children’s book they just published on the life of Sir John A. Macdonald intended to counter the negative propaganda about the Father of Confederation that progressives have been spewing based on their skewed narrative about the Indian Residential Schools.  The book was a good and patriotic response to this blood libel of our country.  Sir John must be spinning in his grave, however, at the thought that the defence of his memory could be merged with the idea of an economic union with the United States.  Sir John spent his entire career as Prime Minister promoting internal east-west trade within the Dominion and fighting the siren call of north-south trade because he knew that this was the greatest threat to the success of the Confederation Project.

 

Free trade is a good idea from an economic perspective, but each of the “free trade” agreements we have signed with the United States has been a terrible idea from a political perspective.  The kind of economic union these “conservatives” are promoting would be worse than all of the other “free trade” agreements, since the United State is currently led by a lawless megalomaniac, who respects neither the limits placed on his powers by his country’s constitution nor the agreements he has signed and cannot be trusted to keep his own word – the “free trade” agreement he is currently, and deceitfully, claiming is so “unfair” to his country is the one he himself negotiated – and who looks at tariffs and economic measures in general as weapons to accomplish what his predecessors accomplished by bullets and bombs.  By his predecessors I do not mean previous American presidents, but Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  I recognized that this was what we were dealing with the moment he made his first “51^st state” remark and was confirmed in this when he doubled down on this talk after Captain Airhead announced his intention to resign.  No Canadian patriot could fail to recognize it today after he has continued to escalate his lies and rhetoric and threats for the last month.   Yes, the Left’s endless likeness of everyone they don’t like to Hitler has desensitized us to these comparisons, but let us not be like the villagers in Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.  This time the wolf is real. The sort of things the Left objects to in Donald the Orange, his immigration policies, his termination of the racist, anti-white, policy of DEI, do not warrant a comparison with Hitler, but his threatening us with Anschluss, his demand for Lebensraum from Denmark, his intent to take back his “Danzig Corridor” from Panama, his finding his Sudetenland in Gaza, most certainly do, as does the insane personality cult his followers have developed into.

 

Canadian conservatives ought to be leading the renaissance of Canadian patriotism, and yes, Brian Lilley, you are right that it should not have taken something like Trump’s threats to bring that renaissance about.  Liberals have always been the party of Americanization in Canada.  Sadly, today’s conservatives are mostly neoconservatives.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neoconservative is a conservative who has lost his memory.  On the authority of Sir Walter Scott I deduce from the disgusting anti-patriotism I have seen recently that many have lost their souls as well.

Lighting Candles and Cursing Darkness

The expression “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” is often said to be an ancient Chinese proverb.   Many even attribute it to China’s greatest philosopher, the legendary sixth century BC sage and government advisor/official Kong Fuzi himself.   There is not much in the way of evidence to support these claims.   The earliest known use of the saying goes back only to the early twentieth century AD, during which century it spread like wildfire due to its popularity among liberal Democrat American presidents and their wives.   Although Roosevelt and Kennedy predated the period in which liberal Democrats became enamoured of all things Chinese provided they were no older than the Cultural Revolution it is probably stretching credibility to the breaking point to suggest that they had some special insight into the Confucian origins of an adage that continues to elude the best scholars in the field. 

 

In actuality, it is difficult to imagine such a saying originating in the wisdom literature of any ancient civilization when it so clearly bears the manufacturing stamp of twentieth century, Western, liberalism on it.   As a comparative value judgement it is a truism and an insipid, banal, and trite one at that.   It implies that we are under some sort of moral requirement to make an either/or choice between lighting a candle and cursing the darkness, thus demanding the question why one cannot do both, to which question, of course, there is no answer.  

 

Today is a good day to be contemplating these matters.

 

It is the second day of the second month.   On the liturgical calendar it is a Feast Day, the official designation of which in the Book of Common Prayer is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple Commonly Called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin”.   This is because it is forty days after Christmas.   The Mosaic Law required in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus that after a woman gave birth to a male child she would undergo a forty day purification period after which she would present the child in the tabernacle – later the Temple – to which she would bring a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, or, if this was beyond her means, two turtledoves or pigeons for both offerings.   The fulfilment of these requirements is recorded in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke – it is specified that the second option for the offering was taken – which is the occasion upon which Simeon and Anna prophesy over the Holy Infant.   The informal designation of this Feast is Candlemas.  (1)  This title alludes to the ancient custom of the blessing of the candles which traditionally occurs on this day.   The candles, representing Christ as the Light of the World, are presented in Church in ceremonial reenactment of the presenting of Christ in the Temple, and are blessed.

 

In how many parishes will this be occurring this year?

 

Not very many.

 

The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler is most remembered for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon.   In the novel, his protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is taken away by the secret police of the revolutionary regime he helped create in the middle of the night, and imprisoned.   He is given a number of hearings, not for the purpose of determining guilt or innocence but obtaining his confession.  Ultimately, he gives the confession and is executed.   Although the story and its characters are fictional they represent real events that had just taken place in the Soviet Union.  After Joseph Stalin had become dictator he had secured his control over the Communist Party and his absolute rule over the Soviet Union by ruthlessly eliminating his rivals within the party.   One of the more conspicuous elements of the Purge were the show trials, held in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, in which Trotskyists and other Old Bolsheviks who dissented to Stalin’s rule were made to publicly confess to various crimes before they were put to death.

 

It was Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, Daphne Hardy who later went on to become a sculptor, who gave the book its title.  She was also the one who translated it from his German manuscript and arranged for its publication in London, while Koestler was fleeing the Nazis in a highly adventurous manner.   The title was inspired by the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Job although it has little to do with what Eliphaz the Temanite was haranguing Job about.   It refers to the contrast between the reality (darkness) and the illusion (noon) of Communism as experienced by true believers – such as Rubashov within the novel, and Koestler its author (2) – who are brought to the realization that the ideal paradise they believed they were creating was actually an extremely oppressive tyranny.

 

It seems that no matter how many times the darkness of Communism is revealed for what it is – when a Malcolm Muggeridge tells the world about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, when an Arthur Koestler paints a literary picture of the Show Trials, when an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brings the GULAG to light – there will be those who blindly look to Communism as a source of light.

 

Today, our governments have taken away our most basic rights and liberties.   They have forbidden us from gathering together socially, assembling as religious communities to worship, and in some jurisdictions, even to leave our homes without their explicit permission and a justification they consider valid.   They have forbidden large portions of the population from running their own businesses or earning their own livings for extended periods of time, and basically told us all that we must look to government rather than to our businesses and jobs for our means of support.   They have conditioned us to expect security guards to be the first and last people we see everywhere we go, to be under constant surveillance, and to be stopped by enforcement agents at any time and made to give an account of why we are out and what we are doing.   They have encouraged us to snitch on our friends and neighbours every time we see or suspect them of violating any of an ever growing list of infractions.   Protests against these lockdowns are broken up by police and the protestors fined and/or arrested.   We are told by the media, speaking with a monolithic voice much like the press in the Soviet Union, that all of this is humanitarian and necessary for the greater good.   Everything about this, right down to the “science” invoked as justification for it all, resembles nothing so much as the dark tyranny the Bolsheviks imposed upon Russia a century ago.

 

These lockdowns are the reason that Churches will not be meeting to bless the candles today.   The politicians and health bureaucrats have declared that Church services are “non-essential” and, even though it is clearly Satan’s opinion that the politicians and health bureaucrats are speaking, the Church leaders have decided to obey man rather than God.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.   The nonsense that it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

 

Unless the Churches start cursing the darkness that is Communism – including the Communism that wears the mask of public health orders to slow the spread of bat flu – instead of kissing its butt they will never be able to light candles again.

 

(1)   An old tradition says that fair weather on Candlemas indicates that winter will be long.   In North America, this has led to the day acquiring the secular name of “Groundhog Day” after the creature assigned the task of checking the weather.   The legend accompanying this name is more specific than the tradition from the Old World and the specifics are rather amusing.   The groundhog or woodchuck – a really big squirrel who lives in a hole in the ground rather than in a tree – comes out of hibernation on Candlemas to check the weather.   If he sees his shadow – which will only happen in fair weather – it means there will be six more weeks of winter.   If he does not – it will be an early spring.   The joke of this is that the vernal equinox in this part of the world is always more than six weeks after Candlemas.    It falls between the nineteenth and twenty-first of March – this year on the twentieth.   Thus, a mere six more weeks of winter after the second of February would constitute an early spring.   The outcome, in other words, is the same whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.   Very amusing – almost as much as Harold Ramis’ 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

(2)   Nine years after Darkness at Noon came out, Richard Crossman’s anthology of ex-communists-turned-anti-communists The God That Failed was published.   Koestler was one of the contributors.

Gospel Truths of Christ’s Early Life and the Beginning of His Earthly Ministry

Of the Christian festivals, Christmas and Easter tend to overshadow all the rest. This is understandable as these feasts commemorate the foundational truths of the Incarnation of the Son of God and His Resurrection from the dead. The fundamental importance of these truths, however, is no reason to overlook the other events in Christ’s life that the Church has traditionally seen fit to honour for these events have significance in the economy of salvation and the unveiling of God’s revelation of Himself to the world that is well worth our consideration.

The period following immediately after Christmas and preceding the Lenten preparation for Easter includes several feast days which honour events in Christ’s early life as well as the event which marked the beginning of His earthly public ministry. The Epiphany on January 6th is the most important of these and every Sunday until the beginning of Lent (1) is identified simply as the first, second, etc. Sunday after Epiphany. Epiphany is very closely tied to Christmas – in the Eastern Church, they are one and the same feast, and even in the West, where Epiphany is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the event which it points back to, the visit of the Magi to the infant Christ is inseparable from the rest of the Christmas narrative. The visit of these Gentile wise men from the East who had been watching for the star of “he that is born King of the Jews” points to the truth that the Lord Jesus, while He was indeed the Messiah, the deliver promised to national Israel through the prophets, was the Redeemer also of all the nations of the world.

Prior to the Epiphany there is another event from Christ’s early life that is honoured on January 1st. In the secular calendar this is New Year’s Day but in the Western liturgical calendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord falling, as it does, on the octave day of Christmas, i.e., the number of days after Christmas on which a Jewish boy would be circumcised after his birth in accordance with the commandment given to Abraham (Gen. 17:12). The telling of this event occupies the space of a single verse in the entire Scriptures, the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke which reads:

And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the Angel before he was conceived in the womb.

For the significance of this event in the economy of salvation, however, we must turn to the book of Galatians. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, beautifully explained this in a sermon preached before King James I at Whitehall on Christmas Day 1609 (2) on the text Galatians 4:4, 5:

When the fullness of time was come, God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law. That He might redeem them that were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

Commenting on the phrase “made under the Law” Andrewes said:

And when did He this? When was He “made under the Law?” Even then when He was circumcised. For this doth St. Paul testify in the third of the next chapter, “Behold, I Paul testify unto you whosoever is circumcised,” factus est debitor universae Legis, “he becomes a debtor to the whole Law.” At His Circumcision then He entered bon anew with us; and in sign that so He did He shed then a few drops of His blood, whereby He signed the bond as it were, and gave those few drops then, tanquam arrham universi sanguinis effundendi, ‘as a pledge or earnest,’ that “when the fullness of time came,” ‘He would be ready to shed all the rest;’ as He did….Well, this He did undertake for us at His circumcision, and therefore then and not till then He had His Name given Him, the name of Jesus, a Saviour. For then took He on Him the obligation to save us. And look, what then at His Circumcision He undertook, at His Passion He paid even to the full: and having paid it, delevit chirographum, “cancelled the sentence of the Law” that till then was of record and stood in full force against us.

It was an event brief in the telling but packed with significance.

Immediately after his mention of the circumcision, St. Luke’s Gospel jumps ahead thirty-three days to the day when, in accordance with the instructions in the twelfth chapter of Leviticus, His mother’s post-natal purification period being ended, He was brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, presented as the first-born son, and an offering made on His behalf. As with the circumcision, in this event Christ fulfilled a requirement of the Law albeit as a passive participant. The account tells of two encounters that took place during this visit to the Temple in which elderly servants of the Lord, Simeon and Anna the Prophetess recognized the infant Jesus as the promised Messiah. This event has been celebrated since ancient times on the fortieth day after Christmas, February 2nd in a Feast that has many names. In the East it is called Hypapante, a Greek word which means “meeting” and clearly emphasizes the encounters with Simeon and Anna. In the West it is known as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin, or more commonly, Candlemas, from the ancient custom of bringing candles to church to be blessed on this day. The candles signify light, the relevance of which to this particular Feast is to be found in the canticle Nunc Dimmitis which Simeon proclaimed upon taking the infant Messiah in his arms. He declared the Child to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” Note how the significance we observed in the visit of the Magi reappears here in the words of Simeon. Christ said of Himself that He is the “light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5), and He called His disciples to be the same (Matt. 5:14). This is a theme of all of these Feasts which receives a particular emphasis in that of the Presentation.

Christ’s birth, circumcision, the visitation of the Magi, and His presentation in the Temple, commemorated in the West on Christmas, New Year’s, Epiphany and Candlemas respectively, are all we are told in Scripture about the infancy of Christ and, except for the account of His visit to the Temple when twelve, all that the Scriptures tell us about His earthly life prior to the beginning of His public ministry. The event which marked the beginning of His earthly ministry is also commemorated in this time period. It too is traditionally associated with Epiphany. The name Epiphany comes from the Greek word for “manifestation” a word that is very appropriate for the way it has been applied by the Church to both the Visit of the Magi and the Baptism of the Lord – and, in the East, to His birth. The Baptism of the Lord was appointed to be celebrated along with the Visit of the Magi on Epiphany itself by the early Church and this continues to be the Eastern custom. In the West it may be celebrated on the Epiphany or in the following octave, usually on the next Sunday or Monday. It commemorates an event which is told in all four Gospels and which has great revelatory and soteriological significance.

The revelatory significance of the Baptism is, of course, Trinitarian. For while there are references to the Word/Son of God and the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament, beginning with the Creation account, it is at the Baptism that all Three Persons appear manifest together in their distinctiveness, relationships, and essential unity. The Father speaks from Heaven, identifying His Son and declaring Himself to be well pleased with Him, as the Holy Spirit visually descends from the Father upon the Son.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew records that when Jesus went to John the Baptist to be baptized, John initially refused, objecting that “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” To understand his objection, we must understand the nature of his message and ministry. John the Baptist had been preaching in the wilderness, proclaiming that the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and calling upon Israel to repent of their sins. The baptism that he administered in the Jordan River was a symbol of that repentance. Those who received his baptism confessed their sins as they did so and John himself said of his baptism “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance.” Jesus had no sin of which He needed to repent. Hence John’s objection – the impeccable Jesus ought to be the One administering baptism rather than taking the place of a penitent sinner and receiving it. Jesus’ answer was “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” What did He mean by this?

Jesus’ earthly ministry ended with His being betrayed, arrested, and then crucified. He had committed no sin, much less a crime worthy of capital punishment. He had told His disciples that this would happen, however, and after His Resurrection He explained to them why it happened, which they in turn passed on to us. St. Peter wrote:

Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. (I Peter 2:21-24)

Or, in the more concise words of St. Paul, “he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (II Corinthians 5:21)

This was the mission on which He had been sent into the world – to take the place of sinners as the spotless sacrifice that would satisfy the offended justice of God and restore fallen man to God’s favour bringing forgives and pardon, reconciliation and peace. Just as His ministry ended, so it began, with Him taking the place of sinners in undergoing John’s baptism. This is what He meant when He said “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” Everything which God’s Law required, Jesus fulfilled perfectly on behalf of the rest of mankind whose sins prevented us from meeting the requirements. This included the ceremonial requirements fulfilled by His circumcision and presentation in the Temple, the moral requirements fulfilled by His life of perfect obedience, and finally, the full payment of the penalty that had been incurred by those who had not been able to meet these other requirements, i.e., everybody else. Under the Law, repentance was the condition for forgiveness of sin. The prophet Ezekiel spelled it out this way:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? (Ezekiel 18:20-23).

Fallen human nature being what it is, however, we are as incapable of repenting so perfectly as to never sin again as were incapable of producing perfect obedience to the Law in the first place. When Christ took the place of the repentant sinner and underwent the baptism of John He signified that He undertook to make good for human failure with regards to this requirement of the Law as well. This, of course, no more excuses us from the responsibility to sincerely confess our sins and strive to repent of them any more than Christ’s perfect obedience gives us a license to disobey God but it places repentance like obedience on a completely different basis under the Gospel than it was under the Law. Under the Gospel God freely gives to man in Christ everything which He required of man under the Law. The message of the Law is “do and live”, the message of the Gospel is “it is done, believe and live” and our doing, under the Gospel, flows out of the life that we receive by believing. Under the Law God required that a sinner completely turn around and change his ways in order to be forgiven. Under the Gospel God gives to the sinner who believes in Jesus Christ a full pardon of all his sins and along with the pardon He gives the Holy Spirit Whose ministries of regeneration and sanctification gradually produce over the course of our lives the transformation of mind and behaviour that God required of the sinner under the Law. We are to repent of our sins and obey God to the best of our ability, but under the Gospel we are to place no confidence whatsoever in our own repentance or obedience but to confess our best efforts at either to fall far short of what God requires and to place all of our faith in Christ and His perfect and sufficient merits.

That Christ came under the Law and met all of its requirements perfectly so as to place us in a new standing with God under the Gospel, a standing of grace, is a theme which, like that of Christ as “light of the world” runs through all of these events of His early life and ministry. These are very important themes indeed and it is well that the Church honours these events annually giving us opportunity to contemplate them.

(1) Or, in the older liturgical calendar prior the revisions of the last century, until Shrovetide, the two and a half weeks prior to Ash Wednesday.
(2) This is the fourth in the first volume of Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons, compiled and edited by Bishops William Laud and John Buckeridge at the command of King Charles I following Andrewes death and first published in 1629.