“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”
In the narthex of the Church, in the entrance porch above the second set of doors, there is inscribed the following: “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”. I wonder how many of you have ever noticed it or have ever wondered what it means. It comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical book of the Old Testament, a book which belongs to a form of ancient literature known as Wisdom Literature.
There are, of course, many things that escape our attention and many things that puzzle and confuse us. They are often things which are set before us for our reflective consideration. It belongs to our wisdom, collectively and individually, to ponder them. Not every thing is simple and self-evident.
November is the grey month of our remembering. There is the remembering of All Saints’, signaling our vocation in the perfection and unity of our humanity in the Trinity of God. There is the remembering of All Souls’ in our common passing, the mortality which confronts us all. There is the secular or civil remembering of all those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the 20th century, a bloody and terrible century, for the sake of the rational freedoms of our political and social life, if indeed we are worthy of such things.
These remembrances have in them an inescapably contemplative quality. In one way or another, we contemplate our end; our end, that is to say, in the sense of purpose. What are we here for, individually and collectively? This sense of end or purpose appears in the Scripture readings at this time of the year which have a contemplative quality to them. We are reading from books, either within or without the canonical Scriptures, which are generally known as Wisdom Literature.
What is “Wisdom Literature”? The Bible is, of course, a great library of books embracing many different kinds of literature all held together by the idea of God in the unity of his Being and Truth. One of those kinds of literature is Wisdom literature. In relation to the Scriptures, Wisdom literature is a kind of prayerful reflection upon the pageant of Revelation unfolded in the books of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings of the Jewish Scriptures; in short, the Old Testament.
Between the Old Testament and the New Testament, there is another collection of books known as The Apocrypha. Anglicans read them “for example of life and instruction of manners,” but not “to establish any doctrine,” any matter of essential Faith, though these books help us to think about the great matters of the Faith. Some of the books of the Apocrypha belong to the category of Wisdom literature, such books as The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek about the 1st century BC, from which our first lesson was taken.
It bids us consider our purpose, the reason for our being. “Respice ad finem” – “Look to the end” – is an ancient maxim. Ecclesiastes, too, would raise the question about the purpose and the meaning of life, pointing us in the direction of an answer though without really providing one. But without the question, no answer can make much sense.
What about the Ecclesiastes’ quote over the door? “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.” What can it mean? Watch your step? Yes, but in much more than a literal sense. Watch your step spiritually, think about God’s purpose for human life in general and your life in particular. In other words, attend to the purpose of this place in entering into this place.
There is great wisdom in these words, a wisdom that belongs to worship. We look to our end in God and with God. The quote is further illuminated by what follows in the text: “be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil”. To a biblically literate generation, the first line would trigger the understanding about being ready to hear.
This morning’s first lesson [1] forms a kind of commentary upon that entire text. It presents us with the evil of our foolishness when we suppose that there is no end or purpose to life. In the face of such a prospect, the best that one can do is “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die,” as Isaiah puts it, the philosophy of hedonism, so prevalent in our own age and day. “There is no return from our death… therefore let us enjoy the good things that exist.” Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. It seems so innocent, so seductive, so plausible and so persuasive. And yet, there lies within it a great and destructive lie. You see, it signals really a kind of despair, the despair that is the denial of God and the denial of human desire, our desire for something more. Wisdom speaks directly to the materialist and sensualist assumptions of contemporary culture. It speaks to us about God and our immortal souls – an ancient understanding, I might add.
This comes out in the lesson very clearly. To enjoy ourselves in the face of the empty meaninglessness of life, if I can put it in modern existentialist terms, means a denial of the realities of suffering which leads inescapably to more suffering. Our enjoyments are at the expense of others. They lead to oppression, to the idea that might makes right, my right to enjoy myself. “Let our might be our law of right”; as if law were merely a subjective and personal determination and not something universal, objective and binding on all.
The Law of the Old Testament, specifically the Ten Commandments, is universal. It is for all peoples. The Ten Commandments signal the moral code of our humanity. Hedonism rejects every one of them in the face of the pursuit of sensual pleasure.
From such a standpoint, the person who lives for the law of God, the righteous man in the lesson, is a threat; “he is inconvenient to us” simply because in calling attention to a higher standard and to an objective principle of truth and righteousness, he exposes our evil: our self-indulgent, self-serving blindness in living for the moment, in living for ourselves. We go so quickly and so easily from sensual self-indulgence to violence and destruction. In a way, the text is a perfect commentary on the distresses of our world and day.
The contemplative remembrances of grey November call us to live for one another. We can only live for one another when we live for God. In ourselves we are in contradiction. There is an evil in our folly; even in the simple pleasures of our foolishness there lurks the potential for evil. In our age, nihilism and narcissism are the names for that evil. We see their practical consequences daily, in the despair, the anxiety and the fear that runs through our culture.
The lesson reminds us that at the heart of it is a greater forgetfulness, the great forgetfulness of God in whom and with whom we find the purpose of our being. The Wisdom of Solomon puts it wonderfully: “for God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of his own eternity.” These are the very things that the materialist and the sensualist culture deny.
The fuller meaning of these words is realised in Jesus Christ. He enters into the sufferings and deaths of our humanity to bring us to something more. In Christ we learn the true meaning of sacrifice, not the sacrifice of fools, but the sacrifice which is our living for one another in our living to God. In the face of our foolish ignorance he prays, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Christ is the ultimate righteous man, the ultimate “inconvenient one” against whom we “lie in wait” to “test him with insult and torture.” We make “trial of his forbearance” in our selfishness with all its destructive consequences. We “condemn him to a shameful death,” even the cross.
But God makes something even out of our willful nothingness. The meaning of Christ’s sacrifice lies in the fundamental orientation of his whole being to the Father by which the whole of humanity is recalled to its end in God. This is the wisdom which we need to hear, if we are ready to hear, “keeping thy foot when thou goest to the house of God,” as Ecclesiastes puts it. We draw near to hear and to participate in what we are given to contemplate; our end in and with God.
“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”.
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XXI,
November 13th, 2011