New Year Advice for Clergy

Five Helps for the New Year were given one year by Bishop Michael Ramsey to his clergy. They do not seem to have been published. The Rev'd Dr Ross Fishburn reports that while he was doing doctoral research Bishop Grant passed on a file to him which contained a sheet with these notes:

1. Thank God. Often and always. Thank him carefully and wonderingly for your continuing privileges and for every experience of his goodness. Thankfulness is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.

2. Take care about confession of your sins. As time passes the habit of being critical about people and things grows more than each of us realize. ...[He then gently commends the practice of sacramental confession].

3. Be ready to accept humiliations. They can hurt terribly but they can help to keep you humble. [Whether trivial or big, accept them he says.] All these can be so many chances to be a little nearer to our Lord. There is nothing to fear, if you are near to the Lord and in his hands.

4. Do not worry about status. There is only one status that Our Lord bids us be concerned with, and that is our proximity to Him. "If a man serve me, let him follow me, and where I am there also shall my servant be". (John 12:26) That is our status; to be near our Lord wherever He may ask us to go with him.

5. Use your sense of humour. Laugh at things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh at yourself.

Through the year people will thank God for you. And let the reason for their thankfulness be not just that you were a person whom they liked or loved but because you made God real to them.

Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration

Did Moses and Elijah appear at the transfiguration to represent Law and Prophecy?

"Moses is more than the lawgiver; for he is also prophet prefiguring Him to whom the people will hearken (Deut. xviii, 15), and he is one whose converse with God was mouth to mouth (Num. xii, 8) and face to face (Deut. xxxiv, 10). Elijah is more than the prophet: he is the final precursor of the Messiah, with a unique mission of restoration. Thus by appearing together Moses and Elijah sum up the entire drama of the old order from its beginning to its end: the one is the predecessor, the other is the precursor of the Messiah...But 'mere representativeness is not enough', as Miss Maisie Spens has said. Moses and Elijah were men alive unto God; they had conversed with Him on a mountain; they had served Him and suffered with Him on a mountain; they had served Him and suffered for Him in history, and they had not ceased to be His servants. So now 'they come not as dumb apparitions, but are with Jesus in living intercourse and speak with Him; their presence shews His communion with the heavenly world' (Schlatter)."

Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949; Eugene: Wipf & Stock reprint), pages 114-115.

Later on (pages 130-131) Ramsey points out that a "constantly recurring theme" in patristic homilies and expositions is "the unity of the scriptures."

The Gospel of Transfiguration

Excerpts from chapter xiv of Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949; Eugene: Wipf & Stock reprint):

“The Transfiguration does not belong to the central core of the Gospel. The apostolic Kerygma did not, so far as we know, include it; and it would be hard for Christians to claim that the salvation of mankind could not be wrought without it. But it stands as a gateway, to the saving events of the Gospel, and is as a mirror in which the Christian mystery is seen in its unity. Here we perceive that the living and the dead are one in Christ, that the old covenant and the new are inseparable, that the Cross and the glory are of one, that the age to come is already here, that our human nature has a destiny of a glory, that in Christ the final word is uttered and in Him alone the Father is well pleased. Here the diverse elements in the theology of the New Testament meet.” (144)

"So great is the impact of theology upon language that the word 'transfigure', drawn from a Biblical story to which scant attention has often been paid, has entered into the practical vocabulary of the Christian life: 

1.To The Christian suffering is transfigured...

2.To The Christian knowledge is transfigured...

3.To The Christian the world is transfigured..." (145)

"Analysing the possibilities open to those who are aware that they are live in a 'declining civilization' Dr. Toynbee distinguishes four principles: archaism, futurism, detachment, transfiguration. Archaism is the yearning for a past golden age; futurism  is a phantasy of a new age utterly unrelated to that which now exists, and the quest of it is often pursued by violent means; detachment (for which 'escapism' would be a better word, since Christians know detachment in a good sense) is an escape into contemplation; but transfiguration is a faith whereby 'we bring the total situation, as we ourselves participate in it, into a larger context which gives it a new meaning.' Of such a faith, so the contention of this book has been, the Biblical doctrine of the GLORY provides the pattern and the event of the Transfiguration provides the symbol." (146)

 

"Confronted as he is with a universe more than ever terrible in the blindness and the destructiveness of its potentialities, mankind must be led to the Christian faith, not as a panacea of progress nor as an other-worldly solution unrelated to history, but as a Gospel of Transfiguration. Such a Gospel both transcends the world and speaks directly to the immediate here-and-now. He who is transfigured is the Son of Man; and, as He discloses on mount Hermon another world, He reveals that no part of created things, and no moment of created time lies outside the power of the Spirit, who is Lord, to change it from glory to glory.” (147)

Glory, Humiliation and the Christian Faith

Quotes and excerpts from chapter xviii: "The Glory and the Christian Faith" of Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949; Eugene: Wipf & Stock reprint):

"The conception of glory illuminates every part of the structure of the Christian faith." (83)

"To glorify God is both to rejoice in His works, and to own their absolute dependence upon the Creator." (83)

"It is...in the revelation of the Son and in the gift of the Spirit that the Father's glory is fully disclosed...The obedience of Jesus to the Father in His life and death and the vindication of Jesus by the Father in the Resurrection are the disclosure within time of a glory of self-giving love which belongs to God from all eternity." (84)

"It was in humiliation that the glory was revealed on earth." (84) - the humiliation of the eternal Word in the incarnation, the humiliation involved in the 'messianic secret', and the humiliation in the completion of His mission in suffering and death.

"This paradox of the Incarnation is apparent in the Johannine language. On the one hand the Son retains on earth the glory which He ever had with the Father: 'the heavenly Word proceeding forth, yet leaving not the Father;'s side' On the other hand the Son prays that the Father will bestow glory upon Him in the Passion and in the exaltation which will follow. There has been no abandonment of glory: yet the Son prays for glory and awaits the day when He will receive it. The right solution...seems to be that it is in His human nature that the Son receives glory from the Father, and He asks that through Passion and the Resurrection the human nature may be exalted into the eternal glory of the Godhead." (85)

"It is by the humiliation of the Son's winning of glory in the toils of history that the eternal glory of the divine self-giving is most signally disclosed." (86)

"Primarily and obviously glory suggests that aspect of the Atonement which is described in the phrase Christus Victor... But the Christus Victor doctrine does not stand alone: it includes, in the Fourth Gospel, the doctrine of a godward offering whereby sin is expiated...the glory of Christ's self-giving breaks the power of men's sinful glory of self-esteem." (86-87)

The meaning of the Church lies in "the mystery of the participation  of men and women in the glory which is Christ's." (87)

Two apostolic warnings: "the glory in the church is an invisible  glory...hidden from the eyes of the unbelieving world" (88) and it is "but a foretaste of the glory that is to come, and therefore the Church's sense of possession is mingled with the Church's sense of incompleteness." (89)

"The Christian hope is...far more than the salvaging of human souls into a spiritual salvation: it is the re-creation of the world, through the power of the Resurrection of Christ.
        Thus the hope of the beatific vision is crossed by the hope of the vindication of the divine design not only in man but in all things." (90)