Today’s Readings:
Dominum autem Christum sanctificate in cordibus vestris, parati semper ad satisfactionem omni poscenti vos rationem de ea, quæ in vobis est, spe. Sed cum modestia, et timore, conscientiam habentes bonam.
Sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you. But with modesty and fear, having a good conscience.
1 Peter 3:15-16a
Whenever this verse was quoted to me, it was always part “B”: “being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you” but you can’t be ready always without part “A”, that “Sanctify the Lord Christ” portion. I’m not sure why the KJV says “Sanctify the Lord God” when the Greek says “Sanctify the Lord Christ” but a number of more recent translations seem to hearken back to the nearly-arian reading of the KJV. No: Peter tells us to sanctify Christ. That’s important. Now, forgive me a little of what, in my deep Protestant past, used to be called a “Word Study”.
That word “Sanctify” at the beginning of verse 15 has an interesting context for Judaism. It references a practice in Hebrew Liturgy, “to Sanctify the Name” and it goes back to a prayer in Aramaic (still in the Synagogue liturgy) called the “Kaddish”. That this word in the Greek NT is that same Kaddish (at least in the mind of a Jewish writer – St Peter – to other Jews) is easy to trace through the OT, using the LXX. In Greek the word is ἁγιάζω and we find it all over the LXX, including in the book of Sirach 36:3 (LXX) or 36:4 (in the Vulgate and translations that follow it) we find it in a text called “The Canticle of Sirach”. ἁγιάζω is rendered into the same Latin word sanctificate/sanctificatus
Sicut enim in conspectu eorum sanctificatus es in nobis, sic in conspectu nostro magnificaberis in eis:
For as thou hast been sanctified in us in their sight, so thou shalt be magnified among them in our presence…
The “Sanctification of the Name” in our Hearts, the Aramaic prayer begins:
So: how do we Sanctify the Lord Christ in our Hearts? And how does this get us to having a good answer for those who ask us about our faith? It’s right there in the Gospel:
If you love me, you will keep my commandments… Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.
We sanctify Jesus in our hearts by the keeping of his commandments. Which are only love. My failures in this area arise always when I forget that I am not the first person to Love God. The function of the Church is to draw the boundaries of love as surely as our vows draw the boundaries of marriage. I imagine that I can love Christ in the abstract – that his body is not the Church, that his voice is private and not corporate, that I am the first person he’s ever spoken to and so I can feel my way through to new things, new ideas, discarding ones that don’t feel good, “to me”.
That’s not sanctifying Jesus in my heart.
The secret to the Gospel and nearly all of the Epistles is to read them in – as written in the Greek – in the Second Person plural. I cannot – I must not – read the Gospel this way:
If Huw loves me, Huw will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father,
and he will give Huw another Advocate to be with Huw always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept,
because it neither sees nor knows him.
But Huw knows him, because he remains with Huw,
and will be in Huw.
(My name rhymes really well there – but put you’re name in instead!)
The real text is this:
If y’all love me, all y’all will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father,
and he will give y’all another Advocate to be with y’all always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept,
because it neither sees nor knows him.
But y’all know him, because he remains with y’all,
and will be in all y’all.
It’s not me. It’s us. It’s not “my feelings”, it’s The Church – Christ himself. In playing within the bounds described by the Church for 2,000 years we sanctify Christ in our hearts.
Modern Culture wants us to practice a sort of Cafeteria Consumption of everything. We get to pick and choose. The problem, of course, is that picking a bit from here and a bit from there, some of my feelings, some random bits of CHinese mysticism, some Marxist political theory, and some new junk invented in a “Consciousness Raising” coffee klach, c. 1967, only gives us an incoherent pile of junk. The Church’s teaching, God’s revelation, is a seamless garment, a unified whole. We cannot give an answer for the “hope that’s in us” (if we have any) if we insist on using a Toss Salad to embody our “logic”.
We sanctify Christ in our hearts when we limit our diet, and exercise custody of our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds. And, when we have grown strong on that diet, we can begin to see the other patterns in the world, not as true in themselves, but because they reflect Christ – the only Truth there is. We can give an answer for the hope that is in us using the language of the culture around us, only then: when Christ becomes the filter through which we view everything. When the Spirit opens our eyes, we see Christ the Logos – the logic God has woven into everything. Then we can show him to others.
Doxos 