“For now we see in a glass darkly.”
Love without truth is empty sentimentality while truth without love is simply death. Love is not simply an emotion or a feeling. In Paul’s great hymn of love we enter into a tradition of reflection about love which reaches back to Plato and ahead to the theology of amor which shapes Christian culture in its medieval and modern expressions. In a way, Paul’s 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians is the Christian manifesto about love as the foundational principle of the Christian religion. What he identifies here are the great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity or love. These three, the greatest of which, he says, is love.
They are the trinity of virtues, you might say, that signal God’s grace as the moving force and principle that seeks our good. They are the virtues which belong to the spiritual perfection of our humanity, the virtues that are about our life in Christ. Why is love the greatest of these? Because love joins faith and hope, uniting what is known with what is hoped for.
In a way, love is about our participation now, however imperfectly, in the realities of God’s life of love, the community of the Trinity. That is the truth of our fellowship. Without it we are nothing. “If I have not love,” Paul says, “I am nothing.” The Collect reminds us that this is Jesus’ teaching. “All our doings without charity are nothing worth,” and that charity or love is “the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee.” There is such a thing as being dead right; in other words, right but dead, because love is missing.
For “we see in a glass darkly,” meaning imperfectly and unclearly. Our vision and our understanding is limited; human love, too, on its own terms, is limited and incomplete. Where there is no clarity, there is no charity, too. The challenge of our lives is to see more clearly and to love more dearly. It takes a journey. It is the journey of our souls into the heart of God.
It is only possible because God goes with us on the journey to him. Such is the radical meaning of Lent. Such is the radical meaning of this amazing Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells the twelve disciples. That journey is really the path of love, the way of divine love. Jesus tells the disciples exactly what that journey will mean. What it will mean is the encounter in its most extreme form between God’s love and our loves. And here is the hard, hard truth. Our loves are unlovely. We are unlovely.
Jesus tells the disciples about our unloveliness. It is the fullest possible illustration of the human capacity to reject God and his truth. It is the fullest possible illustration of the rage to destroy that belongs to our hearts and minds in our disarray, our confusion, our self-certainties, not to mention our nastiness and meanness, our misunderstandings and biases. Such things are what the psalmist calls “the plottings of men.” We shall do our very worse: “he shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge him, and put him to death.” Hardly a pretty picture. Nothing lovely about us at all in any of that. As a recent review of a New York production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice notes, “disharmony is the condition of fallen humanity, and even the noblest and most loving hearts are deeply flawed” (NYT, C. Isherwood, Mar. 4th).
The point is that it is our unloveliness and it is all unleashed on Jesus. And yet, there is something more and something more. “And the third day he shall rise again.” God’s grace triumphs over human sin and evil.
“They understood none of these things.” We see but in a glass darkly. How will we understand? Only by wanting to see and by acting upon what we are given to see. That is, it seems to me, the point of “a certain blind man [sitting] by the wayside begging.”
We are to see ourselves in the blind man sitting by the wayside. He calls out for mercy, insistently and incessantly. “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me,” he says repeatedly. He, literally, won’t shut up! What does this mean? Are we to shout and stamp our feet until we get our way? Is this about the assertion of our agendas and programmes? No. It is about the clarification of our loves. What do you want from me? Jesus, in effect, says to him. He wants to see. Ultimately, to see is to know. But you have to want it. We have to learn to love the truth. We have to want to see if ever we are to love.
For Christians, that truth is proclaimed in Jesus Christ. Our love is really about the love of Jesus and about the quality of his love in us. That is the constant struggle. It means coming to terms with our own unloveliness and our own blindness but without giving up on the struggle to know and to love. It takes compassion and forbearance, humility and perseverance. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind… seeketh not her own … beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”
Love and truth go together. The man receives his sight and follows Jesus, “glorifying God,” Luke tells us, and becomes a witness to the love of God for all the people who “gave praise unto God” because of what God had done for him. Notice that. God enlightens our understanding by way of what he does for others. What happens to one is for all.
“Love God and do what you will,” Augustine famously said long ago, his point being that that the love of God drives us to do what belongs to the perfection of our wills. It is not license for folly but the continuing quest for the truth of God in Jesus Christ.
That quest now lies before us in the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. We shall discover, perhaps, something of our blindness, something about the nature of our darkened sight. But that will be all to our good and to God’s glory. For it shall open us out to the truth of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. In him, and only in him shall we find our loveliness.
“For now we see in a glass darkly.”
Fr. David Curry,
Christ Church,
Quinquagesima, 2011