Year: 2011

“I will recount the steadfast love of the Lord”

The great poet of Anglican spirituality, George Herbert, observes that:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:

In a way, it is a concise summary of natural, moral, political and metaphysical philosophy. But he immediately goes on to say that “there are two vast, spacious things” that are more necessary to measure or know and, “yet few there are,” he says “that sound them,” echoing, I think, the insight of the great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, about the need for another science, a divine science.

Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.

So there is the need for the science of theology or Sacred Doctrine. What are these “two vast, spacious things” to which Herbert refers? They are “Sinne and Love.”

Something of the vast spaciousness of sin and love are before us in the remarkable readings for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Isaiah sings of “the steadfast love of God,” recounting in the strong words of poetry the story of God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journeys in the wilderness wastes of the Sinai desert, but he also sings of Israel’s faithlessness and rebellion; in short, our sinfulness. “They rebelled and grieved his holy Spirit.” St. Paul, in the concluding chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians, reminds us that we are in a cosmic struggle “against the wiles of the devil,” “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Strong stuff, indeed, and a struggle in which we are only “able to withstand” and “having done all, to stand” by virtue of “put[ting] on the whole armour of God.”

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“Speak the word only”

The miracles of the Epiphany season are the miracles of the Divine Word. God is the poet-maker of all creation; the poet-maker, too, of our redemption. The Greek verb “to make” is ποιεω  from which we get the words poet and poetry.

God speaks the world into being. “Speak the word only”, says the Centurion to Jesus in one of the great Epiphany gospels. “Speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” And he is.

The Gospel story for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, read several weeks ago, opens us out to the miracle of God’s Word spoken and proclaimed. It is the Word which effects what it signifies. To grasp that, as the Centurion does, is itself a wonder, a miracle, which Jesus acknowledges. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.”

Unlike those about whom it is said, “they hear and do not hear, they see and they do not see,” the Centurion hears and sees. The Word of Christ has its echoing resonance in him and that is a miracle, too. It is, we might say, an epiphany of the understanding in him and for us. “Speak the word only,” we might say, is the miracle of the Epiphany season.

We have lost, perhaps, our faith and confidence in words. We know only too well how words can be used to cheapen and betray and to hurt and destroy. We know only too well, perhaps, the limits and the shortcomings of words. We are skeptical and uncertain about the power of words to convey truth and understanding, about the power of words to create and redeem.

“Human speech”, as Gustave Flaubert avers, “is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.” That view may or may not be exactly what Choir Directors and choristers want to hear, though it may be what they sometimes fear! Our words fall far short of our hopes and aspirations. We have, perhaps, despaired of the power of words to shape communities, especially communities of learning, “Worlds made by Words,” as the scholar, Anthony Grafton, puts it. It is to have despaired of God and his creative and redemptive Word. It is to have forgotten that the real miracle is God’s Word spoken and received.

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“Forbearing one another and forgiving one another”

Paul’s words speak to the quality of our life together in the body of Christ. He reminds us of the necessity of our mutual forebearance and forgiveness of one another. Not exactly himself the easiest person to get along with, Paul understands only too well how hard we can all be to get along with and how hard, too, we can be on ourselves. We are often our own worst enemies.

Today’s Epistle complements and illustrates the Gospel. Wheat and tares, meaning weeds, grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? Which is the weed and which is the wheat? This is to recognize the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest”, says the Sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean the suspension of our judgment in the abdication of responsibilities. We have the moral obligation to try to discern right from wrong and, and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in a world of wheat and tares. But it does mean a check upon our judgmentalism. “Forbearing one another and forgiving one another” is the counter to our judgmentalism. Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. Yet, in our judgmentalism, we would put ourselves in the place of God as judge. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly.” To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. It is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

We confront the limits of human judgment both with respect to ourselves and to one another. But is all this simply a cautionary tale? Are we being exhorted merely to a posture of skepticism? To a suspension of belief about the possibilities of knowing anything and, therefore, about doing anything? Quite the opposite. What we are presented with counters the cynical and false skepticism of our age which would deny any objective view about what is good and true while asserting as absolute its own relativism. And what we are presented with equally counters the religion of sentimentalism and self-righteousness which makes the Church such a parody of itself and of contemporary culture.

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