“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”
It is, I think, a great comfort. St. John in his epistle-treatise on love seeks to settle us upon “the one thing needful”, our contemplation of the love of God that dwells in us and the necessity of acting out of that love in our love for one another. Yet, while it is comforting in the biblical and theological sense of strengthening, it is also convicting. It challenges and convicts our hearts.
For where are our hearts? Everywhere except with God because of our excuses. The Gospel story from St. Luke illustrates how our hearts condemn us. There is the invitation to love and there are our refusals of that love.
Excuses, excuses. We all make them. What are they about? Simply our capacity to turn away from God. How? By our turning towards the everyday and the practical, so-called, which is always about our own immediate interests; by our turning, quite literally, to the ground rather than to God. The problem here is not with the world, with the everyday realities of our lives, with the practical necessities of life. No. The problem is with our wills. The question is about our attachments. We are too attached to the wrong things or in the wrong way.
This is a function of the disarray of our hearts. The whole project of the Trinity season and, indeed, of the pilgrimage of our lives in faith is about “setting our loves in order”. We all stand convicted by the Epistle and the Gospel of the forms of our disordered souls. The theological insight here is our experiential reality. Just consider.
If I were to ask you, as I sometimes ask the students in Chapel, how many of you have said to a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, or any figure in authority, “I hate you” or, “I kill you” the chances are pretty good that most of you, if you were honest, would have to raise your hands. Even more, if were to ask how many of you have ever thought such things! I argue that we all stand convicted. And what is John telling us? “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” Guess what, at least in thought and often in word, we are all murderers! If looks and words could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers.
Not a pleasant thing to consider, it might seem, and yet the perspective here is that this is both necessary and good. We confront our sinfulness. What makes this good and necessary is that we can really only consider this because there is something more than just “the devices and the desires” of our disordered hearts. That something more is the grace of God; his truth and his eternity stand in stark contrast to our wayward hearts and to our passing world.
John also addresses our ignoring of one another such as we saw last Sunday in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him; how dwelleth the love of God in him?” A powerful message and, yet again, one that convicts us all. Notice that our neglect of one another is equally about our neglect of God.
These things are about our failing in love, a love that has been shown to us so as to be lived in us by Jesus. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his love for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Sacrifice is about our participation in the love of God through the sacrifice of Christ for us.
The imperative to love is really about our abiding in the divine truth of God, letting the Logos, the Word of God in Jesus Christ, live in us. That Word living in us is about our enjoyment of God found in our being with God. The image of that enjoyment in which we find our good and the perfection of our being is “a great supper,” the heavenly banquet of divine love. Our worship is that banquet of love to which Christ invites us.
What stands in the way is our hearts. What is the point of the Gospel parable? To convict our hearts of our own fickleness. We are, as the poet, George Herbert puts it, “guilty of dust and sinne.” We absent ourselves from the banquet of divine love. We turn away. To be aware of our own limitations that make us unworthy – that makes us even murderers of one another actually – is part of the discovery of the divine love that turns to us, speaks to us and takes us by the hand and reminds us that we are his creatures and that our good is found in him.
Confession and contrition are necessary moments in the soul’s discovery of the perfecting love of Christ for us. Our challenge is to let that redeeming and sanctifying love live in us. It is the only and true satisfaction or fulfillment of our souls’ deepest desires. There is the wonderful insight that we can learn this through the contemplation of our own follies and wickednesses. It is all part and parcel of our being brought up “in thy steadfast fear and love,“ becoming aware of the need to see our lives as lived “under the protection of thy good providence.” That doesn’t mean that things will always be easy and pleasant in terms of the everyday and the practical. God’s good providence doesn’t translate into worldly riches and sensual pleasures. Such things are but the passing moments of the passing world. To become attached to them is but pride and vanity and folly; such are our wills in disarray.
“Love bade me welcome,” the poet, George Herbert, writes in a poem that captures so many of the points of these Scriptural lessons. God is love, we are constantly learning, and that love is constantly inviting us. Often we excuse ourselves from the banquet feast that God lays before us in his Word proclaimed and his Word celebrated. Sometimes, though, our heart condemns us out of our own sense of the distance between the quality of our lives and the truth and majesty of God. “Yet my soul drew back,” the poet suggests, “guiltie of dust and sinne.” “But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/From my first entrance in,/Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/If I lack’d any thing.” As John puts it, “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things.” What is wanted is for us to enter into God’s own knowing and loving of us through our hearts and minds as turned back to him. God’s turning to us and seeing us is the condition for our being turned in our hearts and minds back to him. It means confession and contrition as the poem makes clear.
“A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:/Love said, You shall be he.” The desire is granted immediately. Why? Because it is simply about wanting what God wants for us and what he provides for us. This is the mystery of love. Confronted by that mystery, the soul is also confronted with its own sinfulness, its own deep sense of unworthiness. It is a wonderful moment. “I the unkinde, ungrateful?” the soul says to Love, “Ah my deare,/I cannot look on thee.” The soul confesses its unworthiness – unkinde, ungrateful. This is the hatefulness, the indifference, the thoughtlessness that belongs to the man of sin, to you and me, dear friends.
“Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?” We are recalled to God as the Creator of our humanity. Can there be anything more beautiful than the divine smile? Yet, the soul, awakened to the depths of its own depravity, persists in its self-condemnation, even demanding the justice of God. “Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame/Go where it doth deserve.” Hell, as we saw last week, is of our own making. It is about our distance from God through self-will and indifference. God will not save us without our wills, only through our wills willing what God wills for us. And that is what Love reminds us by recalling us to the “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” of Christ’s redeeming love.
“And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?” How can we know that? Only through our attention to the truth and the majesty of the eternal God in his Word. Here Love reminds us of the lessons of love written out in the story of Jesus, love crucified who “laid down his life for us” as John puts it. Clarity is achieved for the soul in the light of the divine charity. “My deare,” the soul then says to Love, “then I will serve.” It is John’s point, too, We know love through the one who laid down his life for us, therefore, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” That is to say, our lives are to be lives of loving and sacrificial service to God through our regard and care for one another. True. But God wants something more for us. It is our participation in the banquet of divine love. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat.”
“O taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” What is wanted is that we should enjoy the divine love that “moves the sun and the stars.” “Come for all things are ready.” God will have his house filled. Here is all that we need. “So I did sit and eat.” Love compels us, if we will let it, to sit and eat. It is really all about the love of God dwelling in us.
“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity II, 2011
Christ Church & St. Thomas’