“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”
The Epistle reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians complements wonderfully the Gospel story from St. Luke; in a way, the Gospel illustrates the teaching of the Epistle. We are shown something of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”
But what does that mean? Does it mean that love is unknowable or even irrational? The love that is shown to us here and elsewhere in the Gospels is the love of God which by definition goes beyond human knowing because it is a divine knowing, the knowing love of Christ for our humanity which always exceeds the limitations of all and every form of human knowing. What is known is something which goes beyond what we can produce by our knowing. In short, something is known; it is just not something which we produce as knowledge.
Faith, too, is about something known but known as beyond us, as something divine and as such something which is always beyond our finite comprehension. We are being raised up by God to learn and know what belongs to our life with God. It is the idea of being raised up that is key, our being raised up by God and to God. Such is the power of the Gospel story. It illustrates wonderfully the love of God in Christ.
The poet, Dante, in a wonderful phrase, designates Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ (De Monarchia I, xvi). The Gospel story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain is one of those stories which reminds me of that description. It shows the gentleness of Christ and illustrates the nature of the divine love which seeks our good. We are raised up out of our falleness, out of sin and death, out of grief and sorrow. Here is a kind of resurrection story which shows us something about what God seeks for our humanity. It the love which “passeth knowledge” because it goes beyond what we could imagine or do for ourselves or for one another.
It teaches us about what it might mean to be “rooted and grounded in love.” To be rooted and grounded in love is about being raised up into that divine love by “comprehending”, itself a verb about knowing or understanding, “with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of that love, the love “which passeth knowledge.” It is not a knowing which comes from us but from God to us. How that is shown is the wonder and the marvel of the Gospel.
In a very moving scene, Jesus and his disciples encounter a funeral procession coming out of a small city called Nain. The dead man being carried out is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” Luke tells us simply yet eloquently. We get the point immediately. Here is someone who is suffering a great loss. There has been the loss of her husband, now the loss of her son. She is the main mourner but the city is united in her grief; “much people of the city was with her,” we are told. She is not alone in her grief; there is a company of grief. But is that what completely defines us: grief and sorrow and loss? What happens in the encounter with Jesus?
In a wonderful phrase, Luke tells us that “when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion. It is a very strong and intriguing word that refers to the inmost being of a person, their heart or liver or bowels, the guts of deep feeling, as it were. It opens us out to “the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of the divine love, it seems to me, as spatial metaphors that reveal the spiritual reality of the Trinity.
None of this is immediately self-evident. We only learn it through a struggle in which we encounter the limits of our knowing and the limits of our assumptions. This is seen in the odd and rather disturbing words of Christ to the widow. He says to her, “weep not.” How could she not weep, we must be thinking? After all she has lost her husband and now her son. How can she not be bereaved, devastated, lost in sorrow and grief? Isn’t that only human?
Macduff, in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, learns about the murder of his wife and children at the instigation of Macbeth. Malcolm encourages him to seek revenge. But Macduff wonderfully replies that first,“I must feel it like a man,” meaning feel grief and loss for that is part of what it means to be human. His response to the news of his loss stands in stark contrast to Macbeth when he learns about Lady Macbeth’s death. Macbeth is utterly without emotion, completely indifferent and dead within.
She should have died hereafter [later on];
There would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
His ambition has killed all possibilities of compassion in him. He is dead to everything and can feel nothing. There is only the sense of the utter meaninglessness and emptiness of life.
In complete contrast, Christ’s words are not unfeeling. He is actually saying, ‘don’t keep on weeping,’ or ‘don’t always be weeping’; in short, don’t be defined by the sense of loss, of death, of utter nothingness. Why? Because of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” Jesus is not just another mourner in the company of mourners. His presence is grace and life. His compassion is “rooted and grounded” in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit into which love he gathers us in our griefs and sorrows. There is more to who we are in the sight of God than our losses. There is the love of Christ who raises us up out of our griefs and sorrows even as he bids the young man to“arise” and, then, “delivered him to his mother”.
“There came a fear on all”, Luke tells us. That fear is the awe and wonder of God awakened in our hearts and minds at the presence of something greater than ourselves. We are raised up into the love of God in Christ, the love which by definition “passeth knowledge.” Such is his compassion. Such is his gentleness. Such is his love.
“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16, 2018