Christ Church

“Friend, go up higher”

It is, I think, an intriguing text. It’s not about ambition or pretension, or for that matter despair. It’s about the hope of transformation. Better to be called up than to be put down. It conveys the sense that we are called to something more, that we have an end beyond what we know is before us but fear to face, namely, the grave and gate of death. But it requires humility, a kind of honesty about our humanity and about ourselves in the sight of God.

The operative words are “friend” and “go up higher”. We are made friends of Jesus by being called up higher but only through his death and resurrection. That is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us. But humility is the necessary condition of receiving God’s grace. It is not about putting ourselves down so much as not puffing up ourselves and claiming status over others. Humility in this sense is honesty in contrast to both presumption and despair.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29 captures something of the power of love ultimately expressed in Christ’s “sweet love remember’d.”  Consider the poetic force of his sonnet that lifts us up to heaven’s gate and that speaks of the love that overpowers ourselves even when we are in disgrace and despair.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

All love belongs to God and thus this sonnet can, I think, be understood in more ways than simply the romantic, the erotic, or the sentimental. Plato understood that love or eros belongs to something heavenly and divine, namely, the love of the Good itself which gathers up all of the forms of love, incomplete and partial, into what is perfect and eternal. That way of thinking has its highest expression in Christ Jesus. All love belongs to God.

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Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the King’s College Chapel on 23 September 2001, shortly after 9/11.

“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – what a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and apparently arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

We are, of course, greatly disturbed and, no doubt, disquieted about other things than the seemingly arbitrary actions of a Jewish tax-collector over two millennia ago. The events in New York and Washington and elsewhere are deeply disturbing (9/11). Suddenly we realise that the Global Village means that terrorism isn’t just “over there” in some far off remote corner of the world. Suddenly it is very close at hand. There is a crisis, only we may not be quite so sure about the response. Indeed, that may very well be what disturbs and disquiets us most in the aftermath of these terrible acts of terrorism. What kind of response will there be?

Now it is not my place nor my business to offer advice on matters of foreign policy and international affairs whether brilliant or banal, whether wise or foolish. But here is a crisis which should recall us to the spiritual principles which underlie our moral, social, political, and economic lives and which alone enable a respectable dialogue with other spiritual traditions that are different from our own. To recall such things, perhaps in the face of their having been forgotten or denied, is surely the business of the Church. Even an obscure publican who became an Apostle and Evangelist may actually be able to help our thinking.

And if so, then the Global Village will in some sense have become more truly global in the discovery of how the communities of the past belong to our present rather than being cavalierly rejected, ignored or destroyed. “Innovation replaces tradition” after all, is the slogan of globalisation. The position of the defining economists of globalisation, Joseph Schumpeter and Andy Grove, is summed up this way: “the present – or perhaps the future – replaces the past. Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned.” The super fast-track into the cyber future means that there is no here; it is always sliding into a past which is forever being overturned. “Daddy, are we there yet?” takes on a whole new horror of meaning.

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“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Jesus meets us as mourners several times in the Scriptures. In every encounter something happens that speaks to human suffering and to human dignity. As today’s Gospel story illustrates, there is something uniquely human in the very act of burying the dead. It means that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences; a counter to the various reductionisms of ourselves whether it be to genes or hormones, to culture or history, to cosmic or climate forces real or imagined, to class or economics, to social constructs or political agendas; in short, the problems of the ‘natural sciences’ as transposed and magnified in the ‘human sciences’.

These are all things that happen to us, to be sure, but are we reduced to such things? Or does the pathos, the pathétic, of life in its self-affectivity mean that we are more than these reductive externalities? Suffering has its fullest and deepest expression in death and mourning; in short, in the forms of our self-awareness as living beings. Thus these encounters highlight the gathering of all human suffering into the compassion of Christ, and thus to the redemption and restoration of the dignity of our humanity through suffering.

Jesus encounters a funeral procession on their way to a burial. A young man has died and is being carried out of the city of Nain. He is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” as Luke poignantly tells us. We feel her loss, as we commonly say, in an effort to comfort both the grieving and ourselves. But what does that really mean?

I have pondered that question in the realization that there is something profoundly and uniquely human about the burying of the dead precisely at the time in our culture when there is a very real danger of losing this sensibility, and thus losing what it means to be human. Reflecting on this requires looking into what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abyss of time” (Tempest). historically and in literature itself, one of the greatest witnesses to human culture and so to human suffering and dignity.

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