“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”
Quinquagesima Sunday signals the near approach of Lent. It is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and in so many ways, it teaches us about the very meaning of Lent. It is a journey, a going up to Jerusalem, as Jesus puts it in Luke’s Gospel. It is a journey in love and by love as Paul’s wonderful and profound hymn of love in 1st Corinthians puts it.
Jerusalem. Love. These are two of the key ingredients to the understanding of Lent. For what is it all about? Simply this. Lent captures in the span of forty days the entire meaning of Christian faith and love. What!? Surely that seems a bit much to claim. But no. Lent, a word derived from Old English that refers to the lengthening of the days that bring us to the joys of nature’s spring, recalls us to the journey of our souls into that greater light and life that is the Resurrection. But only through the disciplines of penitential adoration.
That is the key theme that recognizes the human problem of sin which separates us, individually and collectively, from all that belongs to the true good and happiness of our humanity. In the Christian understanding, that can only be found by our being in Christ and Christ being in us. Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol of the communion of saints and the community of blessedness which is the deep truth of all our desiring.
What do we want? In all of the confusions of our world and day, in all of the confusions of our churches and communities, in all of the confusions of our hearts and minds, we desire happiness and goodness, light and life, and, if truth be known, we desire to attain to such things everlastingly. Mistaken though we may be (and are) about the desires of our hearts and minds, the truth of what we desire is captured in the image of Jerusalem and in the deep meaning of charity or love. We seek nothing less than the love of God which is the truth of all that exists as its originating principle and as its end.
Jerusalem evokes a whole tangled skein of memories and associations. For Christians, I have to say, the crusades notwithstanding, Jerusalem has more of a symbolic significance and force than anything political and geographical. There is the great paradox, as it seems to me, of Bernard of Cluny’s great hymn, “Jerusalem the Golden,” written and composed in 1145, even as the Second Crusade was getting underway, the crusade which was inspired by another Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux, the father-founder of the Cistercian order, a reform of Benedictine monasticism with its charter called, wonderfully enough, “the charter of love.” At issue was the Islamic conquest of the so-called Holy Land and the Christian response, and yet, as Bernard of Cluny’s hymn reminds us, Jerusalem is actually far more than the historical place.
It has taken on a far greater symbolic meaning as the City of God, the city of our humanity, redeemed and sanctified by God in Christ Jesus, the community that is the Communion of Saints. That, of course, plays into the historical and cultural significance of Jerusalem but, at the same time, it alters the register and meaning of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, significantly, can never be, at least for Christians, primarily or entirely a city on a map. There is the further paradox, too, that Jerusalem is not mentioned literally at all in the Qur’an; the idea of the famous or infamous night-journey of Mohammed to “the farthest mosque” (Al-Aqsa) as referring to Jerusalem is a later interpretation found in the Hadiths, collections of sayings in Islam.
“O what their joy and their glory must be,” as Peter Abelard’s great 12th century hymn puts it, “those endless Sabbaths the blessèd ones see.” And Bernard’s great hymn, too, explores something of the range of symbolic reference to Jerusalem: it is referred to as “those halls of Sion,/ all jubilant with song”; it is “the throne of David”; it is that “sweet and blessed country,/ the home of God’s elect.” This extends the range and meaning of Jerusalem. It becomes the symbol of heaven, the image of the direction and orientation of our lives, the image of pilgrimage which always requires a destination and place. Jerusalem, for all its worldly associations, has become profoundly spiritualized as an image for the City of God, the city of our redeemed humanity, the image of the Communion of Saints.
Both the Epistle and Gospel readings remind us of another important feature of the Lenten journey. Along with the purifying of our hearts there is the enlightening of our minds. Paul is emphatic in his praise of love that what belongs together with charity is clarity of truth. “For now we see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Luke’s Gospel story about Christ going up to Jerusalem concludes with the encounter with the blind beggar sitting by the wayside near Jericho, the city that is symbolic of the earthly city, by the way, and crying out to “Jesus, thou Son of David.” His request, drawn out of him by Jesus, is to receive his sight. Upon receiving his sight, he followed Jesus, we are told, “glorifying God: and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God.” We learn and see that we might praise and rejoice.
In a way, it is what belongs to the deep wisdom of the Christian faith concentrated for us in the span of forty days. It is about sight and understanding as well as love and service. Neither are possible simply on our own terms. They have very much to do with the quality of our lives with God in love and service. Lent opens us out to the deep truths of our hearts, both the darkness of our hearts and the joy of man’s desiring.
Seeing no longer in a class darkly is a great image about the Lenten journey of our lives and about its significant features. We are meant to journey into a greater and greater understanding of the realities of human sin and of the divine compassion that seeks the healing of our sight and our souls. The purpose of the journey is to see and know more fully and so praise and love more deeply. Charity and clarity belong to the symbolic significance of Jerusalem.
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima, 2013