Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
admin | 21 February 2021“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered”
Learning through suffering is hardly new. It is a central feature of Homer’s Odyssey, for example. Many people at different times have been graduates of the proverbial school of hard knocks. Necessity is one mother of a teacher. Perhaps, too, this is one of the lessons of the current pandemic in the various forms of suffering that it occasions.
But what is it that is learned through suffering? What is the lesson? For the ancient Greeks, it was to know the order of the cosmos and our place within that order. For modernity, the lessons are more ambiguous, mostly because of the abstract individualism of our age in the forms of autonomy, isolation, and separation from one another, like so many cosmic orphans cast adrift in an empty and indifferent universe. At best, there is the ambiguous quest for meaning but as bound up in the modern sophistic of our solipsistic selves – the idea that the self is the only knowable or existent thing (OED). Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID-19 may serve to awaken us to our care and concern for others and not just our fears for ourselves. Perhaps, just perhaps, it may serve to awaken us to our lives in community and to the limitations of our technocratic world and its assumptions. We make the machines that make or unmake us, after all.
The lessons of Lent go beyond knowing the order of the cosmos and the ambiguities of our contemporary confusions, self-obsessions, and assertions. The Letter to the Hebrews spells out the lesson which Lent illustrates. The lesson is mindful obedience. The illustration is the life of Jesus Christ concentrated into the intensity of forty days. Mindful obedience means obedience to an authority, in this case God as the ultimate author, the root meaning of authority. Somehow suffering belongs to this relation to authority. Not an easy lesson for our contemporary culture where authorities in every sphere, it seems, betray trust often in blatant forms of hypocrisy and arrogance.
“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, “ Hebrews (5.8) tells us in what is one of the lessons for Morning Prayer on Lent I (Year 2). “Although he was a Son” – this is who Jesus is, the Son of the Father. The Son is defined by his relation to the Father. He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father – “there was not when he was not.” He is, therefore, always the Son of the father. His whole being is defined by his love of the Father’s will. Such is obedience. The obedience is not just doing what one is told, blindly and ignorantly. It means doing what he is in his love for the Father. A knowing and loving obedience is the nature of the eternally and only-begotten Son of the Father. As such, this obedience is not learned; it is simply who he is. It is not something acquired. He is what he is; he does what he is; his act is his being. A knowing and loving ‘obedience’ belongs to the act of his essential being.
Yet this only highlights the mystery of human redemption. For what does it mean to say “he learned obedience”? The key is through what he suffered. But how can he who is the obedient Son learn obedience? How can he learn what he already is? Because he has engaged himself with our world and with our life. He has entered into it and identified himself fully and completely with all that belongs to the truth of our humanity. That is to place himself in the finite context of a human life. He wills to put himself in the place of suffering. He wills to learn through suffering. It belongs to his incarnate reality.
I saw a church board recently which stated something to the effect that ‘Jesus doesn’t have COVID; you can come close to him’. I get the sentiment but I think that it misses out on the profound insight about God’s embrace of our broken and wounded humanity such that he identifies with all of the forms of human suffering.
This point is powerfully made in a sonnet by John Donne, “What if this present were the world’s last night?” In the face of death and judgement, it bids us to look into our hearts and recall to mind the image of Christ crucified. It is the idea of remembering something which you have seen or heard; in short, learned. In my view, Donne has in mind an image of Christ on the Cross which shows in his body the afflictions of the Black Plague which resulted in more than half of the population of Europe dying a horrible death within a few years. Donne asks rhetorically whether that countenance, the face of the crucified, can frighten you, or whether his words from the cross can condemn you. The answer is emphatically, “no, no.” No to both. Instead, what seems outwardly horrible is inwardly beautiful and conveys the deeper lesson, the lesson of loving trust. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind,” a mind in need of God’s pity and love. Such are the deeper lessons of love that belong to Lent. Christ embraces us and is with us in our suffering and death. Neither technology nor Jesus can save you from COVID; though Jesus may save you through COVID by awakening us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and, indeed, by our learning through suffering.
Lent begins with the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the way of the cross, the beginning of the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures – it belongs to the truth and good of our being.
To succumb to temptation, on the other hand, belongs to our sinfulness, to our falling away from the conditions of our creaturehood. Its essence is disobedience – a wilful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now can’t do however much we may want to; such is the reality of original sin and its legacy. He learns obedience through suffering the consequences of all our disobedience.
The temptations of Christ illustrate dramatically the lesson of our redemption. Christ is the new Moses who overcomes the acts of Israel’s disobedience and ours. The difference is that Moses can only state what Israel failed to learn. Jesus shows us the doing of it. He is ever the Word in motion, the Word that is and acts. He does so in what belongs to his identity with us, namely, in the soul and body of our humanity. He learns obedience in the being of the creature whose refusal to learn is disobedience.
“Although he was a Son” signals that what he freely is he freely wills to learn in what he has from us, his incarnate reality. It belongs to the mystery of our redemption that “Jesus always receives what he bestows; that he underwent what he redeemed; that he who delivers from death himself died; that he who gives resurrection himself rose from the dead; that he who baptises was himself baptised; that he who saves in temptation was himself tempted. Consequently for us, because of what he is, he causes in us what he himself undergoes” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar).
The temptations of Christ show us the obedience which he learned and which we have failed to learn. But the lesson is shown so that in him we may learn to be what God would have us be – obedient sons who are willing to learn through the suffering which our disobedience occasions. The temptations which Christ undergoes are the temptations of Israel; they are our temptations. They are used to return us to God.
Israel in the wilderness complained to God about bread and water. They tempted God, putting God to the test. In other words, Israel sought to make God serve the demands of our bodily and worldly desires – our appetites. Israel endeavoured to make God subject to our wills – to do for us what would make him acceptable to us. Israel in the wilderness denied the truth of the God who had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. They worshipped an image of their own making – the golden calf. Thus, Israel categorically denied the God who had commanded that “thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Moses fasted forty days in intercession to God for sinful Israel.
The whole story is deliberately recalled, recapitulated and reworked in the person of Jesus Christ. He bears the temptations of Israel in himself and overcomes them. That he does so is not a display of divine power, an effortless banishment of the devil and all the vanity of his show; he does so only through the agony of suffering. “He learned obedience” for our sake so that we might learn obedience by our mindfulness of Christ.
His answers to Satan are the lessons which Moses taught. The answers are always and ever true but, more especially, they are true in him who does what he says and is what he does. What are those answers? “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”; “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”; and, finally, as if to bring all things home to truth itself, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.”
These are the lessons which have always and ever to be learned by those who would be the humanity that God would have us be. Yet they are the lessons which we all have failed to learn. Such are the mysteries of the “man of sin” (Hooker). Christ wills to bear our disobedience in his free-willing obedience to the Father’s will in the body of our humanity. He has done so in what belongs to us. He has done so that he may continue to do so in us, if we will go with him. If we will go with him, then, we, too, will learn the obedience of being the sons of God, but only through him who is the Son of God. We will learn only through our being with him in his being with us in all of the sufferings of our world and day.
“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2021