by CCW | 5 February 2012 15:31
Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima are the three Sundays of Pre-Lent. They remain only in the Book of Common Prayer; no longer even part of the contemporary ecumenical landscape. And yet, they teach us something quite profound. They recall us to a moral discourse which is part and parcel of the larger life of the Church and which connects us to the traditions of moral philosophy in antiquity which is also part of the heritage of Jews and Muslims.
That moral discourse is about the four cardinal virtues, anciently understood to be the defining elements of human character in the pursuit of excellence. Those four cardinal virtues are temperance, courage, prudence and justice. They are activities of the soul with respect to every aspect of our lives; principles, we might say, that are cultivated within the soul and which guide and govern the whole of our lives. It belongs to the sophisticated wisdom of the ancient Greeks to understand that the inward aspects of our being determine our outward actions; these are the virtues that define the ancient sense of dignity and respect.
Temperance is about self-control, particularly of our appetites and emotions, “subduing the body” as Paul puts it. Courage is about our hearts in the face of each and every challenge and hardship of life. Prudence is about the right exercise of our reason; practical wisdom, as it were. Justice, the greatest of these four is about the right ordering of all the parts of the soul – body, heart and mind.
To ponder the four cardinal virtues themselves would be a wonderful thing but these three ‘Gesima’ Sundays (which are terms of temporal reference pointing us towards Lent and Easter; in short, the weeks of seventy, sixty, fifty days before Easter) are about something more and something greater. They point us to the radical transformation of these worldly or natural virtues of human excellence by God’s grace. In other words, the cultivation of the four classical or cardinal virtues in our souls and in our lives belongs to human redemption, to the ultimate perfection of our humanity as found (to use Augustine’s terms) not in ‘the City of Man’ but in ‘the City of God’ which of course becomes the pattern for our lives in the world. Jesus’s parable is about the kingdom of heaven, imaged as a householder hiring workers for his vineyard. This belongs to the Christian transformation of the ancient moral wisdom. The cardinal virtues all become forms of love; ways in which we participate in God’s love written out for us to read in Jesus Christ.
This is, historically and theologically, really quite astounding. The inwardness of the cardinal virtues – they are virtues of the soul, not physical qualities – is intensified and elevated into the forms of our participation in the life of Christ. They become the forms of Christ’s life in human souls.
The Christian transformation of the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice by love prepares us for the heart-rending journey of Lent, the Christian spiritual pilgrimage par excellence in which we learn of “the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of God’s love in spite of our own sins and failings. In this way, these three Sundays are transitional from Epiphany to Lent. The glory of God is made known to us in the world through the humanity of Jesus Christ; now we see something of the application of those things to our souls and lives. There is this inward turn just before we embark upon the journey of Lent.
And yet, how hard it is. This is one of the hardest gospels, I fear. I have just spoken about a received wisdom that is largely lost from the discourse of the contemporary Church but, I would argue, badly needed. For what stands in its place? Only the dogmatic sentimentality of the therapeutic culture. Depressed? Stressed? Exhausted? Got the winter blues? Take a pill. This is not to be cavalierly dismissed or completely denied but it is more about symptoms than causes and conceals an underlying fatalism and despair that runs absolutely counter to the teaching of these ‘Gesima’ Sundays. Salvation is about more than just coping, more than just getting by. We are defined by more than our pathologies, more than by the passivities of dependency.
You see, these readings challenge us about temperance, courage, prudence and justice which are activities of the soul. How? By showing the nature of their radical incompleteness considered in themselves and by recalling us to a deeper sense of how human lives participate in something beyond ourselves, namely, the life of God. In the Christian understanding that is entirely because of God’s engagement with our humanity in its fullest and most intimate sense in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation is the great game changer. We betray it when we fail to contemplate the difficult but radical transformation of the virtues in Jesus Christ.
I have troubled you with difficult matters. They are the very things that are constantly before us on these Sundays, however, and in ways that totally challenge us. Septuagesima Sunday alludes explicitly to the virtues of temperance and justice; the one is signaled in the Epistle, the other in the Gospel. But how disturbingly! Paul is abundantly clear about the self-discipline of the body, our appetites. Such is temperance. “They” meaning the ancient Greeks et alia, “do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.” That in a nutshell is the Christian theme; not the city of man, corruptible, but the city of God, incorruptible. Somehow our lives can and must be lived for God. The corollary that follows conditions, indeed, radically transforms, the nature of our interactions with one another. Nowhere, perhaps, do we see that more disturbingly than in the Gospel story.
It is a parable about the divine justice that underlies and informs human relationships without being made subject to them. The householder settles on an understanding with the workers, including those whom he has gone and found standing “idle in the market-place”. The commentary is profound. They are “standing idle in the market-place”, the place of the exchange of goods. They are standing idle because they have nothing with which to exchange! They are the unemployed. Work, yes, work, becomes one of the necessary vehicles of our social commerce. You can’t ignore the priority of production and the spiritual significance of work. But what is our work? There are our physical labours, to be sure, but there are our spiritual labours too, namely, the work of prayer and praise, the very substance of our liturgy.
And yet, the Gospel challenges us because it refuses the usual quid pro quo of our ordinary transactions; tit-for-tat, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, kind-of-mentality or the simple finite equation of time and money. No. It resolutely, determinedly and designingly, recalls us to God as Creator and to the idea of the created order as God’s vineyard, not our playground. His purpose and his will, not ours, rules and governs. Is it arbitrary and dogmatic? No. “Whatsoever is right I will give you.” Right here means what is just in an universal and objective sense. But the principle is the justice of God, something more and something greater than human justice and which cannot be reduced to it.
This is the problem, though, and why this Gospel is so hard for us. We want to measure justice in terms of our expectations and not according to God’s will and purpose. One has worked longer, another shorter, to be sure, but what does that really mean? In terms of our relationship to God, nothing could be more despairing; in terms of our relationships with one another, there is the danger of envy, the green-eyed monster that destroys and diminishes us. Grace holds out the possibilities of our being restored to God and to one another. That is the object of human perfection, the meaning of the virtues transformed whether we come to him at the third, the sixth, the ninth or even the eleventh hour of our lives. Time is swallowed up into eternity. Earthly duration is of little consequence. This is, after all, the realm of what comes and goes, the realm of the ceaselessly changing. The paradox is that this parable gives us a whole new way of appreciating all the forms of human labour by seeing them as the forms of our participation in the life of Christ. Such is the grace of Christ which does not destroy our nature but perfects it.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Septuagesima
February 5th, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/02/05/sermon-for-septuagesima-3/
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