“Friend, go up higher”
There was a healing done on the Sabbath under the suspicious eyes of hostile intent. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful silence; a parable told to counter our presumption and hypocrisy, our hostility and discontent. Jesus speaks and acts. He teaches. At issue is whether we will be teachable. Only so can we ever hope to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith [we] are called”.
For make no mistake, we are called. There is our common vocation. We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ. It is really the purpose of our being here today, a purpose which must extend into every aspect of our lives. We either stand for something or we fall for everything. And then there is the matter of how we stand – with gracious determination and faithfulness or in resentful distrust and defensiveness? With bitterness or with graciousness?
St. Paul reminds us of the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be, about how we should act: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. These qualities arise from the doctrine – the teaching – which has been given to us and without which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in you all” – things which cannot be compromised or denied by concessions to the pressures of the world and society. For then we betray the vocation. We betray what we have been given to proclaim and who we are called to be.
It is a high calling, to be sure. And it would be utterly impossible, except for this. The means whereby it is accomplished in us is the same as what has been shown to us. Jesus himself is the teaching. He is what he says. In other words, it is really all about grace – about what comes from God to us. Grace goes before us and follows us, as the Collect puts it. “Prevent” in its older and fuller sense does not mean “hinder” but, rather, “a going or a coming before”. Our grace-ordered lives are about the teaching – the doctrine – of Christ living in us.
The phrase,” friend, go up higher,” is not our presumption but our calling. Christ has come to where we are but not to leave us where we are. He wants something better and greater for us. He has come to us and we find our vocation in him, in what he says to us and in what he does for us. Our vocation is about the quality of our being with him. “Friend, go up higher” is about the pattern of thinking which shapes our living.
God not only comes near to us but he enters into the very fabric of our lives. Such is the meaning of the Incarnation. There is often talk about “incarnational theology,” especially among Anglicans. The truth in such talk is that Christ has come in to our midst and so the Church – the body of Christ incarnate – must be in the midst of the world and the culture of our day in all of its confusions and complexities. But we deny the meaning of the Incarnation if we suppose that it means that Christ is simply collapsed into the world and taken captive by the culture. The Incarnation does not mean “embrace your mediocrity”. It means “friend, go up higher”. The danger is the tendency to want to constrain Christ to our expectations and wills; in other words to keep him subject to us, captive to our understanding. In so doing we limit the sovereign freedom of God’s grace and deny ourselves the vocation to which his grace calls us.
A proper incarnational theology must seek to be in the midst of the world’s confusions but with the clarity of Christ’s teaching and in the quiet confidence of the Gospel. Our constant struggle is to be teachable so that teaching may live in us. It isn’t a question of intellectual capacities. Those vary from one person to another for there are varieties of gifts, including different gifts of understanding. What is at issue is our willingness, our willingness to learn each “according to the capacity of the beholder to behold”. What stands in the way of our being teachable is our pride, our hostilities, our envyings and our resentments, our negativity and our despair; in short, our wills. The antidote is humility.
The paradox is that only through humility can we be raised up. The further paradox is that humility, far from being about groveling or putting ourselves down – something which we are very good at doing, by the way – is about the pursuit of excellence. It is, paradoxically, the counter to mediocrity. Humility is about our openness to something more and higher.
Mediocrity begets mediocrity. The challenge for our culture and Church is to throw off the shackles of mere mediocrity and to embrace the challenges and the joys of seeking to be what God wants us to be. Mediocrity is not our vocation; it is, actually, a denial of our vocation. God gives completely of himself for our good and for the perfection of our humanity. He seeks our highest good. What is our response? Should it not be to praise him and serve him “with all our heart and soul, with all our mind and strength” and do so through our lives together in community? We can only do it through Christ, through him being in us and we in him.
We do not come “trusting in our own righteousness,” claiming the chief seats and calling attention to ourselves, but in humility. We look to him to raise us up out of the prisons of selfishness and pretension. God seeks our perfection. How can we be content with mediocrity?
Our liturgy bids us “lift up our hearts”, lifting up in prayer all things to God. We are called into the presence of Christ in the motions of his love to the Father. That is always something higher.
No doubt we stumble and stutter, but what is always wanted is that his grace should triumph in us, that his grace should lift us up out of ourselves and into the vocation to which he has called us. His grace lifts us up. In him we are lifted up and called to something higher.
“Friend, go up higher”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVII, 2011
Christ Church