Day: November 13, 2011

“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”

In the narthex of the Church, in the entrance porch above the second set of doors, there is inscribed the following: “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”. I wonder how many of you have ever noticed it or have ever wondered what it means. It comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical book of the Old Testament, a book which belongs to a form of ancient literature known as Wisdom Literature.

There are, of course, many things that escape our attention and many things that puzzle and confuse us. They are often things which are set before us for our reflective consideration. It belongs to our wisdom, collectively and individually, to ponder them. Not every thing is simple and self-evident.

November is the grey month of our remembering. There is the remembering of All Saints’, signaling our vocation in the perfection and unity of our humanity in the Trinity of God. There is the remembering of All Souls’ in our common passing, the mortality which confronts us all. There is the secular or civil remembering of all those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the 20th century, a bloody and terrible century, for the sake of the rational freedoms of our political and social life, if indeed we are worthy of such things.

These remembrances have in them an inescapably contemplative quality. In one way or another, we contemplate our end; our end, that is to say, in the sense of purpose. What are we here for, individually and collectively? This sense of end or purpose appears in the Scripture readings at this time of the year which have a contemplative quality to them. We are reading from books, either within or without the canonical Scriptures, which are generally known as Wisdom Literature.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

Seeing is believing, it is commonly said, but here is the story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again – all without seeing. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us since “faith cometh by hearing,” except that what is heard and believed stands in such stark contrast to what is wanted to be seen. “Except ye see signs and wonders,” Jesus says, “ye will not believe.” He names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present, immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were, faith has no meaning. The Word has no resonance in us.

In the Gospel, the demand is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective: “Come down ere my child die.” Something divine in Jesus is at once acknowledged and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires, there the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word means that our understanding is made captive to the Word and not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such acknowledgement is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.

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