“Set love in order in me”
It is a wonderful phrase from that great love-song of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs. It serves as a governing principle for the season of Lent. Today is Quinquagesima Sunday. We have already had occasion to talk about these curious names which adorn the three Sundays before Lent. Quinquagesima Sunday, is also commonly known as Love Sunday. It brings us to the very threshold of the season of Lent, to that concentration of the pilgrimage of our lives into the space of forty days. Lent, above all else, is the pilgrimage of love. Love’s journeying ways shape us in love and bring us to love’s end, to the peace and joy and blessedness of Jerusalem redeemed.
Quinquagesima is called Love Sunday principally because of today’s Epistle reading at Communion. It is St. Paul’s great love-song: “If I have not love I am nothing worth…and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”, love. The theme is captured wonderfully in the Collect, but its profounder meaning is presented in the Eucharistic Gospel in the words of Jesus to the disciples that “we go up to Jerusalem.”
This day illustrates the business of Lent; the business, if you will, of setting love in order in us, both individually and collectively. All the readings on this day illuminate the path of our Lenten journey. It is the pilgrimage of love.
“I will show you a yet more excellent way”, St. Paul says, at the end of our second lesson. That more excellent way is his love-song. The image of our lives together as a body encompassing diverse gifts and distinct parts where each works for the good of the whole has its ultimate perfection only through the activity of love, the perfecting virtue. Charity is love, love in its profoundest sense, love as “setting in order” and bringing to perfection each and every part of the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other body, both individually and collectively, finds its place and voice.
Love is motion towards another. It does not arise simply from ourselves. For in ourselves our love towards one another is always suspect and self-serving; in short, selfish and blind. It is always less than what it should be, even less than what we want it to be. The poverty of our own loves convicts us. In ourselves, our loves, our desires are incomplete, dangerous, destructive and even quite deadly.
We have to learn this in one way or another. Christian love is not about comfort and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without the love of God – so clearly and strongly indicated on this day – there could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. What that really means is death. Without love we are dead.
Somehow we have to come to know this. At Morning Prayer from Sexagesima Sunday through to the Fourth Sunday in Lent, we read the story of Jacob, one of the great narrative stories of the Book of Genesis. The story of Jacob is about a vision and a struggle, a vision and a struggle in which Jacob becomes Israel. This morning we have the story of his vision.
It is a vision of the angels of God ascending and descending on a ladder stretching between heaven and earth, a vision in which God bestows on Jacob the promise that he had made to Abraham and Isaac. The vision is about the promise passed on. “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land.” God’s words of promise are strong. “I will not leave you.” The impact on Jacob is great and it carries over to us. About the place of this vision he says, “this is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven.” This passage is, of course, written on the walls of our Church.
Our churches are precisely the places of meeting between God and man through the proclamation of the Word of God and through the celebration of the Sacraments. Forget that and one has forgotten everything. But it is a struggle, a struggle to see and know.
“Behold we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells us. Christ speaks of his passion. He speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” We understand so little. It was hid from them and from us. In a way, we can’t understand except through the journey of Lent. We have to go with Christ. We journey with love so that love can set us right. Such is the pilgrimage of Lent.
The problem is that we are blind. We both cannot and will not see what is set before us and what is proclaimed in our midst. There is the ignorance and the arrogance of our self-righteousness; there is the pettiness of our envyings and resentments; there are the posturings of our self-assurances and vanity, and so on. We are blind to ourselves and to God. We do not understand.
Yet to know our blindness is to begin to see and to understand. At the very least, it might signal an openness to the healing mercy and love of God. Christ does not simply pass us by. He comes to be with us. As God says to Jacob, “I will not leave you,” so Jesus says to us, I am with you. He would have us journey with him so that we might indeed see and hear and understand.
Jesus wants us to see and understand. He wants us to enter into his project of redeeming and perfecting love. It means the pilgrimage of Lent with its disciplines and devotions. They teach us about an understanding of love. For love is not blind, at least, not the love of God, and that is the love which makes all other loves lovely without which they are not only blind but deadly.
Lent is the pilgrimage of love. It is the season of mercy. We are called to repentance without which we cannot turn to God. Socrates, Plato tells us, once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Perhaps, we might add, “the unrepentant life is not worth saving.” Through repentance and prayer, through discipline and devotion, we enter into the perfecting ways of love. We live in the mercies of God’s love towards us. The love of God is made visible to us in the drama of Christ’s going up to Jerusalem. He goes up to set our lives in order. Will we go with him? Or will we persist in our blindness and folly?
“Set love in order in me”
Fr. David Curry
10:30am Morning Prayer
Quinquagesima, 2010