Sermon for Septuagesima
“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”
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.
