“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart,
and knoweth all things”
What does this signify? Only that God knows us better than we do ourselves, however much we deceive ourselves. In a way, the Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a pretty strong encouragement to enter into what has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. Or to put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing worth when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God.
Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship simply has priority. It is as simple as that. And yet to say it misses the greater point. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our love of God. In the long end of the day, if we don’t want to be here we shouldn’t be here because we have missed the whole point of being here. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.
But you can and have to proclaim the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into a life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable about our excuses is the proclamation: “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” It is, to be sure, a blessing and not a right. The refusal of the invitation is a refusal of the blessing.
What is Jesus saying by way of a parable about our threefold refusal of the invitation? He is convicting our hearts about our indifference to the things of God and about the distractions in our lives. He is reminding us of the priority of God’s grace and the importance of entering into what God provides for us. We can only be moved by our hearts and minds. The parable convicts our hearts and our minds about our neglect of the things of God because of our indifference and because of our preoccupation with land, property, and personal affairs. I have bought a piece of ground; I have bought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife.
Interesting and provocative excuses, actually. Does the third one imply that wives are like ground to be seen, or oxen to be proved? But then again, is there not an even deeper critique that is implied in the ownership of land and the use of domestic animals? Is the land really ours? Are the oxen simply there for our use and pleasure? And, then, by extension, are we here simply to be used by one another, and then, to be cast off like a sucked orange, as one old friend of mine used to say? In a way, these excuses open us out to a larger view of the spiritual nature of our everyday lives. They convict us about turning away from God and turning to the ground, as it were.
As such Jesus is not saying that these things don’t matter; it is just that they are by definition secondary to what does matter. What matters is grace. Grace is what comes from God to us. It is objectively signaled and present in the sacramental and worshipping life of the Church. It is the moving principle in all our works of love and service. Loving one another, as John emphasizes, is what Jesus has commanded. In responding to that commandment we find our blessedness. It is found in him and in our lives lived as pleasing in his sight. And that carries over into and shapes our relation to the land and to the other creatures of the land and with one another.
The point is that we are more than our doings as Gerard Manley Hopkins has reminded us. “The just man justices/ Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” How do we come to that understanding? By what we are given to see and hear and, then, act and do. By the proclamation of the Gospel in Word and Deed. That element of proclamation is about you and me. It is about our faithful witness and commitment. But above all it is about our love. That is John’s whole point. We can only love one another out of our love for God. We are not fully ourselves simply in what we do. We are more in Christ whose grace “keeps all [our] goings graces.”
We betray that love so easily with our rather paltry excuses. There is no point in saying a whole lot about the examples that are given. The point is ever so clear. Our excuses are about our failure to act upon what we have given to see and do. The Scriptures and the Church, too, for that matter, don’t simply give us a blueprint for action. They give us the principles instead and challenge us to apply them. Perhaps that seems too much.
There are those who insist on rules and regulations, the natterings and mutterings of bishops and synods presuming to the same status of the Great Creeds and Councils that defined the Faith. There are those who rebel against anything that might constrain their immediate self-interest, antinomian in their insistence on feeling and experience. Both deny the deeper point about the relation between Scripture and Creedal doctrine. What matters are the spiritual principles thoughtfully articulated out of the Scriptures by way of theological reasoning upon them. It is about a way of thinking that in turn leads to way of being and living. Creeds and deeds. But if we are not alive to God, then we are dead in ourselves and far removed from the banquet of heavenly love to which we are invited.
What Luke is saying here is how easily we deceive ourselves even as John is reminding us of something greater than our wayward hearts. God is greater than our hearts – by definition – and greater, too, than our hearts of condemnation! And that’s the good news! The good news is about the radical nature of God’s grace, itself the motions of God love towards us, the grace that graces us.
The Gospel convicts our hearts and the Epistle convinces us of God’s love which is greater than all that we can desire or deserve. We can only love. “Love God and do what you will,” as Augustine put it, for if you love God then you will want to do what pleases him! It is in his love that we find true blessedness. His love is greater than our wayward hearts, to be sure, but our hearts are made right only through the gentleness of his love for us. God seeks to move our hearts by love. That is the great and good news.
“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart,
and knoweth all things”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity II, 2012