The Vicar continues his weekly exposition of the Catechism, found in the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 845-862.

Q.       What is the great importance of Jesus' suffering and death?

A.       By his obedience, even to suffering and death, Jesus made the offering which we could not make; in him we are freed from the power of sin and reconciled to God.

Atonement is the "offering we could not make." Without atonement, there can be no peace with God. Therefore, we cannot reconcile with God. If reconciliation is to occur, it must be by God's initiative and on God's terms.

This is easy to understand but hard for us to accept, harder still for us to work out all of its implications in our lives and in the communities we build. Salvation is not by works, public or private. However, once we are reconciled to God, we are able to think God's thoughts and will the same things God wills. Since God's thoughts are free and God's will is free, we experience liberation through Jesus' atoning suffering and death.

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Highlights from Henry Chadwick's The Early Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), selected by the Vicar. Chadwick was the sometime Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

"The expansion of the church seemed an extraordinary chain of improbabilities. Nothing could have been less likely to succeed by any ordinary standard of expectation.

"The pagan writer Celsus (probably c. 180) saw it with the cold eye of a hostile external observer. He picked on the close-knit structure and coherence of the Christians as a social group, and saw in this the principal source of Christian strength. But in his view this social coherence was not the consequence of any internal principle but merely the result of being persecuted: 'Their agreement is quite amazing, the more so as it may be shown to rest on no trustworthy foundation. However they have a trustworthy foundation for their unity in social dissidence and the advantage which it brings and in the fear of outsiders — these are factors which strengthen their faith.' The opposition which the Christians provoked may certainly be accounted an important factor in producing their cohesion, though it is certainly too simple to explain their social drive as resulting from some inner compensation for being rejected by society. Celsus was also aware that the Christians worshipped in secret for fear of arrest. Publicity was dangerous, and sometimes the smell of a sip of insufficiently diluted wine at the eucharist might lead to betrayal." (p. 54)

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