Month: June 2009

“A certain man made a great supper, and bade many”

There is more to the Christian religion that mere good manners. And yet good manners have in them more, perhaps, than we realize. More than just an aspect of civilization in the form of considerate behaviour, “manners maketh the man” and reveal something of our intrinsic character and nature; in other words, there is something of the charity of Christ at work in our dealings with one another.

And that is, of course, a central theme in the Trinity season. To put it bluntly, we participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as we heard last week from this same Epistle of St. John. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. St. John, in the Epistle reading for today, drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards even our brother towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that is quite unlovely, even hateful.

What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God as we are, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, or howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. That can be quite destructive; self-condemnation leading to despair. In relation to that, there is the strong teaching that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive.

It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our quotidian lives. This Sunday, like last Sunday, we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”

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“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

We are confronted with a challenge and a refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard last Sunday. It is a door, not a window, a door through which we are invited to enter. We are invited into the vision so that the charity of God may shape our lives into holiness.

But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the very presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. What has he to do with us? we may think. But in so neglecting Lazarus, we are really neglecting God. We deny the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ. In denying the poor man at our feet, we deny the God in whose image we are all made.

The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision.

And so the Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration about our relationship to the vision of God revealed as Trinity. The Epistle is St. John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is St. Luke’s powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who “became poor for [our] sakes” and who “came into our midst”. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we filled with hatred and wrath for hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or perceived, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to ourselves. To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and, by extension, the stranger far away. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. We create the abyss that separates us from God and from one another.

The problem is not that we don’t know better. The problem is that we do not act upon what we do know. (more…)

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