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Sermon for Quinquagesima

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne. /But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/ Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” So begins the last poem by George Herbert entitled Love (III) which concludes his collection of poems known as The Temple. This Sunday, too, is about an invitation, an invitation to a journey. The poem in its three stanzas references three basic features of our Anglican liturgy: contrition – our sorrow for our sins; confession – our explicit acknowledgment of sin; and satisfaction – what restores us to wholeness. And yet the poem alludes as well to the essential character of the Christian journey as a pilgrimage of the soul by way of purgation, illumination and union. We are invited to a journey, to the pilgrimage of love. That is the character of our Christian journey concentrated for us in Lent.

There are of course different kinds of journeys, both ancient and modern. Some are flights from the world, a fleeing from all the attachments which belong to ordinary human lives and which are seen as ultimately illusory and nothing. We escape from them into a kind of emptiness, a nirvana of the spirit, if you will. All of the great religions of the world speak to the problem of our attachments though each in their own way.

Some are journeys of discovery, like Homer’s Odyssey. For Odysseus, the journey is about learning the order of things, the order of the cosmos and the place of our humanity in it. The way is through suffering, the suffering of ignorance and presumption in which truth is learned, at least by the hero. But the end is emphatically not union with God; at best there is a likeness, a commonality between the hero and the gods. He achieves his homeland, Ithaca, to be sure. And like his wife, the patient and wise Penelope, his journey weaves a story of virtue and understanding which delights the gods and men. But beyond Ithaca, his end is with all men in the land of the shades, in the indeterminancy and emptiness of Hades. There is even the sense that what belonged to his glory must also be forgotten; his last journey is to a land where his oars are mistaken for winnowing fans. Something is learned, but there is no abiding in the accomplishment, no end for man with the blessed ones. The end lies, instead, in the virtue of the striving, in what is learned through the suffering and in what is sung in the song afterwards.

The Christian journey draws upon a number of these ancient themes but gives them a new orientation. The journey is the pilgrimage of the soul to God and it is a pilgrimage with God. The end is union with God and God makes our way to him with us. We are apt to forget how remarkable this really is. There is our human desiring, our quest for God, the odyssey of the human soul, as it were, but there is as well, the divine desiring, God’s will for us. The biblical sense of journey sets our human desiring upon a divine foundation. God sets us upon our way. But what is that way? Is it the way of denial, the way of forsaking all that we hold dear? Only so as to find everything in the will of God.

The journey is the way of sacrifice, to be sure, but it portends the greater accomplishment, the building up of the household of God in which none of the parts is lost but each finds their place in the whole. Such is the body of Christ, as St. Paul teaches in the chapter which immediately precedes this morning’s epistle. What has to be forsaken is our frequent tendency to mistake the part for the whole. Such are the disorders of sin which effect the consequences of suffering and death.

Yet, the biblical journey does not deny the realities of sin and suffering but makes the way of pilgrimage through them. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Ps. 23.4). Why not? “For thou are with me.” And for what end? That we may “dwell in the house of the Lord forever”. Such is the biblical promise in the face of whatever the hardships. The journey of learning through suffering undergoes a change. As another psalm suggests, “blessed are [those] whose strength is in thee,/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways;/ Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well” (Ps. 84. 5,6), a well of blessings. The journey is the way of suffering and sacrifice in which something good is learned and everything is redeemed.

But why the way of suffering? Because our way to God must pass through the ways of our rejection of God through our awareness of our being “guiltie of dust and sinne”, even of our unworthiness. Because our way to God is the way of redemptive suffering in which our disordered loves are set in order. The disciplines of Lent are altogether about this. They don’t involve a flight from the world and the extinguishing of our desires so much as setting love in order. They embrace the three essential characteristics of the Christian pilgrimage: the way of purgation; the way of illumination; and the way of union.

The way of purgation intends the removal of all that stands between ourselves and God, the removal of sin and wickedness. His will is not to destroy but to restore and begin again. And so, too, with Christian baptism. It sets us upon our way with God; the way of purgation is a fundamental part of that way. God’s will to be reconciled with us has to be realized in our lives, in the pattern of death and resurrection, the baptismal pattern, for “baptism represents unto us our Christian profession”(BCP). There has to be the constant recalling of that divine will for us, the continual renewal of our souls in love, and our perseverance in this pattern of life.

The season of Lent was traditionally the time when persons were prepared for baptism. It remains for us as the time when we are reminded of our baptismal profession, when we are reminded of our covenant with God.

The way of illumination intends our greater understanding of the will of God, the opening of our eyes to see the workings of God’s will. Lent reminds us of the importance of the reading and study of God’s Word, for “thy word is a light unto my path.” Like the blind man in today’s Gospel, we have to want to see. “Lord,” he says, “that I may receive my sight.”

The way of union reminds us that our end is with God and that God is with us in the way of our journeying. The perfecting of our wills is accomplished in the union of our wills with God’s will. He goes the way of suffering for us and with us. We go up with Christ.

The gospel focuses our attention upon the cross of Christ. It is there that the ways of purgation, illumination and union meet. It is the condition of our journeying. As Bonaventure puts it in his treatise The Journey of the Mind to God, “There is no path but through that most burning love for the crucified.”

“All things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished”, Jesus says. What are all those things? They are the things of sin and salvation. Jesus tells us but we don’t understand at first, it seems. These things are hidden from our eyes in just his telling us of them. Somehow we have to go through them, somehow we have to see them in the form of the crucified Christ. But it is wanted that we should understand and that our love should be set afire by what we are given to understand through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He goes this way for us but he bids us journey with him. Why? That we might learn about love.

“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three,” St. Paul tells us. Faith as a form of knowing – seeing but as “through a glass darkly” – speaks to our minds. Hope as longing and desiring speaks to our wills. But charity is the greatest of these. Why? Because it is the union and perfection of faith and hope and all the other virtues. Charity is the knowing love of God in our souls by which we are joined to God.

We go up.” Jesus want us to go with him in the way of his sacrifice for us, the way at once of purgation, illumination, and union. They are the essential elements of our Christian pilgrimage. It is the way to God but only through the burning love of the Crucified, the love which purges, illumines and unites. Love bids us welcome.

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima 2017