Romans 8.28-39

2 Corinthians 6.1-10

Luke 21.12-19

Luke 5.1-11

Our Gospel this morning draws in the mind a beautiful icon of Our LORD Jesus Christ as we now set out from the Feast of the Cross on the Gospel’s inner Exodus through the wilderness of this life to the Gate of the Land of our inheritance. The Gate is the Cross and Tomb of the LORD’s Holy Passion. The Land of our inheritance is the Kingdom of Heaven; and, more precisely, it is the LORD Jesus Christ Himself. Partaking of His risen Body and Blood, we become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pt 1.4).

The image drawn in our mind in this morning’s Gospel shows the LORD standing where land and sea meet, the crowds pressing upon Him to hear, it says, the WORD of God. But Christ is Himself the WORD of God. With their ears, the crowds are touching as it were God Himself. Each word that comes from the LORD’s mouth carries Him Who Is Himself the WORD of God. Each WORD coming from His mouth is saturated with the Living Waters of His Holy Spirit. And so they are life-giving words, filled with the uncreated Light of God. They are going forth from the Mouth of the WORD of God now incarnate, Jesus Christ, into the darkness of our death and corruption, and they are filling the darkness of our death with the Light of God that is the Life of men, which the darkness of death cannot put out (Jn 1.3-4). The crowds are pressing upon Him because they long to receive the WORD of the LORD’s words of Life that illumine the soul.

The image of the LORD standing where earth and sea meet is of the LORD high and lifted up on the Cross. We see in this Gospel image of Christ standing by the sea, the Sun of Righteousness rising above the horizon where earth and heaven, the sea, meet. We see Him on the Cross drawing all men to Himself. He draws all men to Himself because the Exodus of His rising – following the Psalmist (Ps 18/19.6) – which proceeds from His Bridal Chamber (Ps 18/19.5) in the Tomb, in the midst of the earth (Ps 74.12) where He has united Himself to His Bride, the human soul, by His death on the Cross, and where He has poured out His Living Blood and the Living Waters of His Holy Spirit into the womb of His Bride’s heart that was dead in her sins and trespasses – the Exodus of His rising is from one end of the heavens to the other. It covers the whole heavens; it covers the whole earth, and, as the Psalmist says, “There is no one who is hidden from His warmth.” (Ps 18/19.6)

And what is this warmth of the Heavenly Bridegroom? The Psalmist, the Prophets, the holy apostles, the God-bearing fathers all tell us: it is His mercy and compassion and love for mankind. For He is the only Lover of Mankind; and He has denied Himself, emptied Himself; He has lost His own divine, uncreated Life for our sake that He might find His Life in our souls that have fallen into the darkness and misery of death so that we can find our life in His Resurrection.

Where the LORD is standing by the sea, then, is an image of Midnight, when the old is constantly trying to pass over into the new but always failing; because the old is our death, and the new it is trying to pass over to is eternal life. But whenever this worldly life bounded by death and corruption comes to that Midnight hour, it succeeds only in passing over into the same dead life it just left; in the great round that the blind call the ‘circle of life,’ 12.01 am is no different from 11.59 pm. There is no circle of life here; it is only the circle of death always circling round back to itself. The Midnight hour simply marks the passing over from the old day bounded by death and corruption to a new day bounded by death and corruption.

So we see in this morning’s Gospel an icon of the Heavenly Bridegroom coming to us at Midnight. Standing where the earth meets the sea, He is found at that spot within us where we long to come out of the darkness of death that surrounds us, like the sea that encircles the earth of our daily life in this world, and into the Boat of Christ’s Holy Church, His Body risen from the dead.

And the crowds are pressing upon Him to hear the WORD of God; they are being drawn to Him there by the Sea, the Gospel image of the LORD God incarnate high and lifted up on the Cross, drawing all men to Himself. For this Jesus alone has the words of Life. His words alone illumine the darkness and heal us of our uncleanness and from the miseries of death.

The words of the LORD’s teaching are living words, they are active, they are sharper than any two-edged sword. For they penetrate to the division of bone and marrow, of soul and spirit. They penetrate all the way into the unseen depths of our secret heart where we are dead in our sins and trespasses, and they discern, they bring to light, all of our secret thoughts, all of our inmost intentions and hidden desires – not to judge us or to condemn us but to illumine us and to cleanse us, and to call us out of our darkness and into His marvelous Light (2 Pt 2.9), and to shine in our hearts with the knowledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ, Our LORD, God and Savior.

He stepped into the boat, it says. If His standing where earth and sea meet is an image of His Cross, then His stepping into the boat must be an image of His being placed in the Tomb. That means, dear ones, that the LORD is found in the brilliance of His Holy Resurrection within us; but that means He is found not in our outward righteousness and beauty, but inside our heart where we are filled with hypocrisy, uncleanness and sin (Mt 23.27-28).

The LORD directs Simon to cast his boat into the deep and let down his nets for a catch. The boat is the Church, the mystery of Christ’s Body risen from the dead. How awesome is it that the LORD has given stewardship of His Body, the Boat of His Church, to men! Take your boat, He says to Simon, take your boat now the Church, united to My Body, take your boat out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.

Simon says, ‘By your word, I will let down our nets.’ From this, we may understand that the nets of Simon and his companions are the words of human language that have now been united to the WORD of the LORD incarnate, so that the words of the Church, given in the languages of the world, because they are united to the WORD of God incarnate, are powerful, saving, life-giving because they are filled with the Spirit of Christ.

Let down your nets for a catch. Proclaim the WORD of the Gospel. Only the WORD of the Gospel is powerful to penetrate to the depths of our soul. This is to say that we do not find the risen LORD Jesus Christ when we satisfy ourselves with the appearance of righteousness. We do not swim into the apostolic net of the Holy Spirit that would draw us up from our uncleanness and raise us up from death to life until we draw near the LORD in sincere confession and conceal nothing from Him.

For when we do acknowledge our sins and confess them, now we are swimming into the net of the LORD’s Holy Spirit and He, through His holy apostles, begins to draw us out of the waters and miseries of death and into the Boat of the Savior’s Church, His own Body that is risen from the dead. Now is when our healing begins. Now is when the renewing of our mind and the transformation of our soul begins; now our dying becomes a voluntary dying in the likeness of Christ’s voluntary death; it becomes a participation in the death of Christ and thereby a participation in His Holy Resurrection. For, in the nets of Christ’s Holy Church, death no longer has dominion over us. We live no more in the death of the world but in the death of Christ; and if we live in the death of Christ, we are living in the Resurrection of Christ. The Seed of His Resurrection begins to sprout and grow in us, and now our death becomes a trampling down of death by our death in our union with Christ in the likeness of His death.

In the vision of this morning’s Gospel icon, then, let us get serious about taking up our cross – the disciplines of prayer and fasting – and let us swim into the net of the Church by centering and anchoring our earthly life no more in the distractions and diversions of the world, filled with darkness and death, but in the rhythm of the Church’s worship filled with the Light and Life of Christ. In this way, we take up our Cross and we follow the LORD to lose our life for His sake in His Tomb, to find our life in His Holy Resurrection. Amen!

Sermon