“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”
The Gospel is Christ’s parable about the kingdom of God being likened to a great supper to which those who were invited all made excuse. The Epistle speaks about our hearts in relation to the truth of God revealed.
We are the ones who are invited to a great supper. Our churches stand as the banquet halls of the kingdom of God. “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God,” we may say, as, indeed, did “one of them that sat at meat with Jesus.” Why, then, does Jesus tell this parable to one who was at meat with him about a great supper to which many were invited and yet no one who was bidden came? To make him and all of us realize the nature of our blessedness. It is found in our being with Jesus.
The point of the parable is clear. “Come, for all things are now ready,” we hear. God provides so much and more for us. But, more often than not, it is we who are unready and all because of our excuses. We turn to our own ways, to the ground, quite literally, and to the ways of dust and death. We ignore the vision and refuse the invitation.
The consequence would seem to mean “no feast” and all because of our refusals of God’s inviting grace, as if our convenience and self-interest were to take priority over God’s will. But our preoccupations and our indifference are simply the forms of our atheism, our denial of the will of God for us. No feast for us because there is no God for us. We are unaware of the wonder of grace.
It might seem that our excuses would frustrate God’s will. But that cannot be so. We only frustrate ourselves. We are the losers. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready – bringing them in who could not come on their own: the poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind. In other words, the banquet signifies the restoration of our wounded and broken humanity. Here we are being made whole. And even more, going out into the highways and the hedges of our humanity and compelling others to come in. In other words, the invitation is open to all. For everyone is to be found in the truth of God. It is a standing invitation. Such are the Churches in our land, the standing invitations to the banquet feast with God.
Those whom God invites are those whom he would have come willingly and freely – out of love – those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” To refuse the invitation is to deny that love. To be sure, our refusals of God’s grace are also the freedoms of our will. But to be freed to our own pre-occupations is to be enslaved to ourselves – to the misery of our self-will, to the condemnation of our hearts about ourselves. It is neither what God wants for us nor what he wants for us to want. To have turned to the ground is to turn to what ultimately cannot satisfy and to have turned away from the true blessedness of our spiritual fellowship.
The purpose of the parable is to convict our hearts of our folly and foolishness but only so that we will be thrown back more fully and more freely upon the goodness of God. The Epistle signals the further extension of the theme of forgiveness and sacrificial love into our lives: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” God is neither indifferent to our predicaments nor is he captive to our concerns.
Thomas Cranmer puts it wonderfully: “He that keepeth the words of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the Blessed Trinity.” But where shall we hear the words of Christ that we may keep them except in these holy places where the word is truly proclaimed and the sacraments duly celebrated? For “there,” as Luther says, “is the Church.” It is not confined to a special geographical local. We are not to make idols of our churches. They are not ends in themselves. They exist for a purpose that always at once points beyond themselves and provides for our participation in the mystery of God revealed. Without that they are nothing. Our churches are the holy temples where the heavenly Jerusalem, the kingdom of God, is opened to view.
In a way, these early Sundays after Trinity offer a kind of extended commentary on the great lessons of Trinity Sunday from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine and from John’s Gospel about Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John’s Revelation tells us even as Nicodemus learns the radical meaning of being “born anew,” born from above, born into the mystery of God revealed, we might say. We are given a glimpse and a foretaste of the heavenly worship; it is the vocation of our humanity. The whole of creation finds its truth and meaning in its loving adoration of God the Blessed Trinity. This is actually the truth of our lives, here and now, not just in some mystical hereafter. Our liturgy is precisely about our participation in the heavenly worship. “This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven,” words written on the very walls of this holy place. Here we are invited to participate in the heavenly mysteries of God’s redemptive will for our humanity.
And yet how hard it is. Why? Because we are too much with ourselves, to put it bluntly. Oh, I know, it is so easy to point fingers of blame at this or that problem with the institutional churches, to be sure, “have mercy upon us, O Lord, for we have synod against thee.” Perhaps, but even so we excuse ourselves from the task at hand which is to be the credible witnesses to the love and charity of God. In a way, the invitation is itself the outstanding witness to divine love and charity which ceaselessly seeks our good and our salvation. Everything is in the invitation. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet George Herbert so simply puts it, “yet my soul drew back, guiltie of dust and sinne.” To be sure, yet God’s grace reaches out constantly to bring us to himself that we might “sit and eat.” We are more in God’s sight than just our “dust and sinne,” more than our guilt and remorse.
It is the strong sign of God’s grace. God invites us. The refusals are only and all our own. To respond to the invitation is to will what God wills for us and to do so full heartedly. It is to let his grace have its way within us. That is the great marvel and message of this day. There is, in principle, nothing that need stand in our way of accepting the invitation, not even our hearts. That is the deep message and teaching of the Epistle. “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart,” a passage which also compels our charity and forbearance of one another rather than our judgmentalism and dismissive indifference of one another. We are with Lazarus, too, not as beggars at the gate, but at the banquet of God.
Here our blessedness is found in the eating of the bread and in the hearing of the word. In the body broken and the blood outpoured, in the word proclaimed and celebrated, we are reminded of the steadfast love of the God who is greater than our hearts. And that, that is the mercy.
“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity II, 2013