Sermon for Quinquagesima
“I will show you a yet more excellent way”
That more excellent way is Paul’s great love-song. The image of our lives together as a body encompassing diverse gifts and distinct parts where each works for the good of the whole has its ultimate perfection only through the activity of love, the perfecting virtue. Without love, we are nothing, he says, but “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, lives that are “full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing” as Shakespeare puts it in MacBeth. Charity is love, love in its profoundest sense, love as “setting love in order” and bringing to perfection each and every part of the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other body, both individually and collectively, finds its place and voice.
Love is motion towards another. It does not arise simply from ourselves. For in ourselves our love towards one another is always suspect and self-serving; in short, selfish. It is always less than what it should be, even less than what we want it to be. The poverty of our own loves convicts us. In ourselves, our loves, our desires are incomplete, dangerous, destructive and even quite deadly. “We see in a glass darkly”, incompletely and confusedly, especially about our loves, it seems.
We have to learn this in one way or another. At the same time, we have to learn the greater lesson of the perfecting grace of Christ. Christian love is not about comfort and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without the love of God – so clearly and strongly indicated on this day – there could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. Without love we are dead.
