The Fourth
Sunday in Lent
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church Windsor NS, AD
2005
“Stand fast therefore in
the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made us
free”
Exodus is the going forth. The book of Exodus tells the story of the
going forth of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt. The Exodus is the going
forth from slavery into the freedom of God’s people. God is their
liberator. God is the condition of their freedom.
The freedom has to be learned. In the wilderness, they learn what it means
to be God’s people. They learn the law. The people of God are the people
of the law. The law defines them. God’s word defines God’s will for his
people. It, too, is given by God. The God who has freed them from
oppression in Egypt gives them his will for them in the law. The Ten
Commandments is the law in its completeness. It recalls the theme of
liberation at the outset: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”(Ex.20.1).
The freedom from oppression signals something more. There is a greater
freedom - a freedom for God’s people. They are freed to God. The law is
his will for his people. It establishes a relationship. The God who has
freed his people from slavery has freed them to himself. He is with them in
the covenant of his will for them.
The going forth is not easy. The way of Exodus is hard. It is a wilderness
journey in which all the comforts, the conveniences and the old
complacencies are not there. But the hardness of the way is as nothing
compared to the hardness of our hearts along the way. Exodus chronicles
something of the hardness of our hearts which resist the liberating spirit
of God’s Word. Yet the Exodus is God’s doing. God brings his people out.
Their going forth is his doing. He sustains them in the way. He provides
for them. There is the strengthening presence of God. There is
refreshment.
It is not just that there are the occasional oases in the desert. No. The
refreshment in the Exodus story is something deeper. It is the presence of
God in his written will for his people. That is to be the constant measure
of their lives, a continual source of refreshment. The law is a delight.
It teaches us our freedom. Our freedom is to be found in the will of God
for us.
There is a greater Exodus however. It is the Exodus of God for his people.
God goes forth to accomplish our greater liberation. It is not only taught
but accomplished. It remains to be willed and lived. The greater Exodus is
the going forth of the Son into the wilderness of our sin and death to
accomplish our liberation to the will of the Father. The greater Exodus is
the Passion of Jesus Christ. “I have come to do the will of him who sent
me” - the Father’s will for us. It is written in the blood of Christ.
We have to learn what he has accomplished for us.
Our freedom is to will what he has done for us. The condition of our
freedom is Christ in us. St. Paul states the condition of our freedom:
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ
who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the
Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”(Gal.2.20.). Thus, it
is a freedom in us. “Another lives in me” as Ignatius of Antioch
puts it.
Our works are faith works. His grace feeds and nourishes us in the
way of pilgrimage.
St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is his great manifesto of Christian
liberation. He reminds us that “Jerusalem which is above is free; which
is the mother of us all”. The Jerusalem of which he speaks is above,
yet present. He is not speaking of a political or a future state - an
utopian ideal - but a present spiritual condition or state of grace. We are
the children of promise, the promise fulfilled in Christ Jesus. The freedom
is inward and spiritual. The children of freedom are the children of Sarah
not Hagar.
The freedom is the release from the oppression of sin. It is a release to
God and it is a release in the soul. It puts us in the spiritual place of
freedom. That is the “Jerusalem which is above...which is the mother of
us all”. That Jerusalem is present now for us in Mother Church. She is
the place of our life with Christ, here and now, where we live by faith not
by works, by what is inwardly and spiritually achieved for us being inwardly
and spiritually realised in us.
That mother would sustain us in the wilderness pilgrimage of faith. She
would sustain us by the grace of Christ. It is more than a “little touch
of Harry in the night” (Shakespeare, Henry V), more than
words of encouragement. It is the reality of Jerusalem in our midst. It is
always more than we need. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that
nothing be lost...and they filled twelve baskets” – twelve baskets that
signify Christ’s sacramental provision for his apostolic Church. We live
graciously from those fragments of the heavenly banquet provided for us by
the sacrifice of Christ in the greater wilderness of our sin and death. At
a time when our church is sadly fractured and broken, we need especially to
remember the provisions Christ makes for us even in our brokenness, even in
the brokenness of our communion. We live from Jerusalem but only in and
through the passion of Christ. He is our freedom and it is “for freedom”
that he “has set us free”. Our freedom is only in him and he in us.
“Stand fast therefore in
the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made us
free”
