In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, the reader of the epistle this morning was quite correct. It is the conclusion of 1 Corinthians. We won’t read it again until 46 more weeks, something like that. It’s also our last reading for this year for a gospel reading from Matthew, for a Sunday reading from Matthew. Next Sunday we start the cycle of the Holy Cross. We’ll spend two weeks on the Holy Cross. Then we start the next cycle on September 24, with the reading from the gospel, or first reading from the gospel of Luke, working through it this year. Thus the parable of the vineyard is our last Sunday gospel story before we begin the cycle of the Holy Cross. Now that is not accidental!

The last gospel reading before the cycle of the Holy Cross is the story of the parable and the death of God’s beloved Son. Today’s gospel is about the death and the resurrection of Christ, isn’t it? They threw him out of the vineyard and kill him, but the stone which the builders rejected—Psalm 118, or 117 in the Greek—the stone which the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone: great text of Pascha. In fact, the great text of the resurrection. The psalm which was our central psalm this morning, wasn’t it, in matins? Now, this is as it should be, as much as this parable is an interpretation of the cross: the rejection of God’s Son by the people. He came to his own; his own received him not, but the raising up of God’s Son because he was pleasing to God.

Now more than any other parable this morning, it’s autobiographical. Indeed, it is hard to see how it could have any other meaning. This parable is so personal to Christ that no effort of interpretive imagination can give it any other or more general meaning. That’s true of all the parables, but this is the parable that proves it.

I want to consider with you this morning, beloved, the question of the Christian claim—that’s the Gospel, the Christian claim. I will do this in three points, addressing ourselves to one question: “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth wasn’t even a one-horse town. They had a few donkeys, I think, but no horses.

Can any good come out of Nazareth? First answer: It is not probable. It is improbable that any good could come out of Nazareth. At the beginning of his indispensable book, The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton says that the worst place to consider the Christian faith is by being close to it. You’re either in it, or it’s best to see it from a distance. I think that’s the appeal, by the way, that a lot of people have in this country to Hindu philosophy and Chinese philosophy and Tibetan philosophy, is that it’s so far away that people can take it seriously. The philosophy up close, not so much.

Chesterton says most of us have forgotten how absolutely improbable the Gospel is, at least most Christians seem that way. The Christian claim about the exclusive significance of a Jewish Messiah—that by itself!—a universal, exclusive significance of a Jewish Messiah, simply from the perspective of probability, can only be rejected out of hand. There [is] no way any good bookmakers are going to give that good odds! It’s just not probable! And indeed, it’s very common for people to make this rejection. After all, the majority of the human race is not at Divine Liturgy this morning.

Now, what should we Christians say about the improbability of our religion? The big problem, it seems to me, is that Christians so much take it for granted that they fail to be surprised by it. As soon as surprise is gone from your life, I don’t know why life is interesting any more. We should point out, and indeed we should emphasize, that a judgment of probability is the weakest form of argument. Nothing more misleading than statistics. You see, an argument from probability is entirely inductive. Therefore it is never more than a guess. Even though statistics use mathematical arguments, it’s not really a mathematical argument. Statistics don’t yield the kind of knowledge of clarity that a geometric theorem does.

I stress this point because a good deal of contemporary Christian apologetics misses the mark here. You see, prior ages of the faith was Christians who were well aware of the improbability of the Christian message. Sometimes, in fact, they gloried in that aspect of the faith. The most famous of these is surely Tertullian, back at the end of the second, beginning of the third century, in his famous dictum, Credo quia absurdum est: I believe in it because it’s absurd! Now, that’s an ironical way of putting it. You see, probability precludes surprise. The book I can recommend to you in this respect is C.S. Lewis’s book, Surprised by Joy. Surprised by Joy and The Everlasting Man I believe are the two apologetic texts of the 20th century.

Can you imagine, if I tried to, the sense of surprise that overtook the minds of ancient Greeks and Romans when they found themselves suddenly confessing—not only confessing but basing their lives on—the proposition that some obscure Jew, actually killed as a criminal, was risen from the dead? I mean, what are the chances of that? These early believers hardly knew what to make of themselves, believing something so manifestly absurd. They discovered, however, that everything else in life suddenly fell into place, and their battle cry, at least one of them, was: Kyrios o Iesus, Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is Lord: this was the improbable emergence of this figure, a humble working man from Galilee, in a village called Nazareth, and has now become the figure, they found, that dominated their minds. And that’s dominance, I mean, in the case of dominus, kyrios. That this Jesus totally transformed their entire experience of reality. An ancient hymnic text—I believe it’s hymnic—Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat! Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ rules! That tripodic confession about a Jewish carpenter from a village named Nazareth.

You see, this was so terribly unexpected, so utterly unforeseen, that the figure of this dominating Christ reshaped both conscience and culture. As soon as that was confessed, a bunch of things happened. The renewal of philosophy, the renewal of architecture, the renewal of art and music—this all came from that confession. So much for probability!

Second possible answer: Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Answer: If so, it has to be clear. You see, the Christian claim has this about it, that it is clear; it is not murky. It is clear because it is true. We forget that clarity is a quality of truth. Clarity is not a subjective experience. We hope that one subjectively experiences it, but clarity is the thing in se, something clear in itself. It’s the quality of truth, what the medieval Scholastics called the fulger veritatis, the brightness of truth. Fulger even suggests something of a lightning bolt. Fulger veritatis.

Now, it’s important to say this, I believe, because of a common misunderstanding about the apophatic aspect of truth. I gave a lecture on this at Rose Hill back in the mid-‘90s, long before it was ever thought I would be coming here to Chicago—in fact, that lecture has now been printed three times, in three different publications, and I have the assurance that if I ever publish a volume of my essays it can be published a fourth time—where I talked about the apophatic quality of truth. Because that’s a common and popular idea people have of the Orthodox Church: they believe that our thinking is very murky. Simply because we believe that truth cannot be adequately contained in a concept, they think we’re against concepts! Anybody who believes that has obviously never met somebody like Maximus the Confessor or Gregory the Theologian, that were against clear thought.

But if the revealed truth is so completely unspeakable, dare we say anything about it? Because if we don’t dare say anything about it, there’s no evangelism. It’s hard to share something if you have no clear idea of what it means, which is one of the reasons why it’s necessary nowadays that we actually have systematic critical study of the Bible, and strongly based biblical sermons. There are Orthodox Christians who believe you get enough Bible just from attending the liturgy. That’s perfectly nonsense! It’s utterly nonsense! You won’t. You’ll get the Bible in the form of prayer, the form of worship, doxology, but the Bible is a text to be taken seriously and examined seriously.

I liken this phenomenon to the history of art. Let’s take impressionism. What I’m going to say right now does not pertain to real impressionists; I mean the canonical impressionists. I give them full authority. We’re not talking about the canonical impressionists. But many art critics—indeed, quite a number of artists—seem to think that the loss of focus was the secret to impressionism. A number of untalented painters imagined that if they let their eyes go out of focus and then painted what they saw, it would be an impressionist painting. There are theologians who do that sort of thing, too: refuse to think clearly, because if you’re thinking clearly it can’t be apophatic.

But you see, beloved, the Christian faith is not murky, and anything that impedes the processes of thought is the enemy of the Gospel. The Gospel has its own clarity. That clarity can only be obscured by those who preach the Gospel and those who hear the Gospel. We cannot bring every thought into subjection to Christ unless we actually have thoughts. A thoughtless Christianity is no Christianity at all. I gave you the parable of the sown seed. I don’t suppose I need to review that for you; you know about the seed falling on various sorts of soil.

This past week, 16 professors, at what appeared to be the most improbable of campuses, that is to say, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—16 professors issued what they called “Advice to Our Students.” I guess they had to name it that: “Advice to Our Students.” What was so surprising about this: it was very good advice! [Laughter] I mean, that’s what shocked me. I mean, my question would be: Can any good come out of New England? That would be my… [Laughter] Yes, Joseph; you get it. Obviously, he’s the answer in the affirmative, right there! By the way, if you want to look this up, read the text—it’s only about a half a page—you can’t give good advice to students anyway unless you summarize it very carefully—you’ll find it online at jmp.princeton.edu. The JMP stands for James Madison Program, the head of which was the man who organized this signing, a man by the name of Robert George, a senior editor of Touchstone magazine, and a professor at Princeton.

This document speaks about the vice of conformism. I do believe that that is more infectious in high school than it is in college. As far as I can see, the people who’ve lost the faith since I have been here the last 20 years, have lost it in high school; they didn’t lose it in college. By and large, that seems to be true. Nonetheless, it’s still documented that people lose their faith when they go to college. The document quotes John Stuart Mill, who speaks of “the tyranny of public opinion.” The tyranny of public opinion—and that’s very common these days. That certain things are declared by “experts” to be so true that you can’t possibly question them without being considered a crank, an obscuritist, or an idiot, because they’re so true and everybody knows. As soon as somebody begins a sentence: “Everybody knows…” I think you can safely walk away, because it’s going to be either groupthink or cliché or something of that sort.

Then I looked at those who signed this document: they are the most improbable of people! Across a great range of political ideas, a great range of scholastic backgrounds, subjects taught: it was really a quite impressive list. It included such names as Jacqueline Rivers, Jon Levenson, Martha Himmelfarb, Mary Ann Glendon, and of course our own Robby George. Philosophers, historians, linguists signing this. It was so encouraging to find 16 professors in the Ivy League still interested in the pursuit of truth. It refreshed my week, actually.

Third: Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Third answer: “Come and see.” And that’s the original answer, isn’t it? Come and see. But you have to come, and you have to see. One of the last times I spoke to Thomas Merton before he made his trip, his final trip to Bangkok in the Far East where he died, Merton was wearing a great big badge. This sort of thing was part of ‘60s culture; you had to be there to know what it means, but people wore badges. Any of you remember that? Okay. This one said, “God is watching; give him a good show!” Well, I want to change that; I want to change that a little bit: “The world is watching; give ‘em a good show!” Because the claims of the Gospel are chiefly validated in the lives of those who claim to believe it. That’s how chiefly validated: Come and see.

And here’s where evangelism, I think, is most likely to break down. What do people see when they look at those who claim to be Christians? Beloved, any time we put anything in our lives in a place that only God should occupy, we thereby weaken the claims of the Gospel. Ask yourselves these questions, if you don’t mind. Are you making any decisions in your home that even faintly suggest that God gets second place? Your children will know. Your children will know. Is God ever treated in your family as a runner-up? Let me switch the metaphor. Is the Mother of God reduced to Miss Congeniality: nice, but not the winner?

This coming month, in October, Touchstone magazine is going to be putting on a conference on martyrdom, and I’m sort of preparing for the opening lecture of that right now. I’m the last person in the world who should be giving that opening lecture. I can’t think of anybody who’s more fearful of pain, more uncomfortable in sacrifice. It’s very ironical that I should be speaking at this thing at all.

Why is Touchstone doing this? Simply because, right now, martyrdom is on the increase. The 20th century was a century absolutely filled with martyrdom. There were more Christian martyrs for the faith in the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined. Take you one further: in the 20th century, there were more martyrs in Russia than all of Christian history, everywhere in the whole world, combined. If certain political things happen, things that seem to be favored by our State Department, the Christians in the Middle East will be absolutely annihilated. The only thing that’s keeping Christians going in the Middle East right now are governments favorable to Christianity, and our government is currently trying to topple one of those. These are very trying times.

In these trying times, when we address the question, “Does any good come out of Nazareth?” let me give you a cliché—I happen to think this one’s right. Are we to play it safe, or should we play for keeps? Amen.