by CCW | 3 November 2013 18:00
They are words of ancient wisdom that belong to the Jewish and the Greek and the Roman cultures of antiquity. Respice finem. Look to the end. They challenge our contemporary world, too. There is quite something wonderful and compelling about our readings from the Wisdom Literature[1] of the Jewish Scriptures in tandem with the lesson from Matthew’s Gospel[2], something made even more wonderful and more compelling when they are seen within the context of the Octave of the Feast of All Saints’. They challenge us about how we understand ourselves.
To look to the end is wonderful wisdom if for no other reason than that it implies that there is an end in the sense of purpose and meaning. Wisdom is altogether about purpose and meaning, the idea that ennobles our humanity. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” In a way, T.S. Eliot’s questions simply echo the wisdom of Jesu ben Sirach, the ancient wisdom of Jew, Greek and Roman that are taken up and made part of the wisdom of Christians for every age. A world of bits and bytes of random facts and factlets disengaged from any context is information without knowledge. There is no wisdom in the Internet, only contextless information that can perhaps be shaped and formed into the beginnings of knowledge and wisdom. There is no wisdom in the knowledge that is a bare assemblage of facts and figures or of logical argument if there is no meaning.
I love the story about the meeting between A.J. Ayer and Georges Bataille, the one an Anglo-Analytic philosopher, the other a Continental philosopher. Meeting in a bar in Paris in 1951, the question of the day was “did the sun exist before the existence of human beings?” For Ayer and for many of us the reaction to the question is one of stunned incredulity. It seems utterly nonsensical until you ask yourself what does it mean for anything to be said to exist if there is no knower. For me, the answer to the dilemma is theological. Things exist because God knows and loves them. There doesn’t simply have to be just a human knower if, and it is a big ‘if’ for moderns, we recognize that our knowing is only possible on the basis of God’s knowing and loving of us as rational and spiritual beings, called to wisdom, called to the challenge of living meaningful lives.
This is where the whole pageant of the moral and intellectual virtues come into play. Wisdom Literature has a certain didactic character to it – things presented in a somewhat authoritarian way but not without an argument. They are things which are taught and while the teaching arises out of a profound reflection upon experience, individual and otherwise, it cannot be reduced to the experiential. In short, we are being challenged to think about ourselves, our actions and our relations to one another and to learn that what matters is how we conduct our thoughts, words and deeds.
This is the great ancient insight. “Call no one happy before his death” is a remarkably candid and sobering thought. The writer of Ecclesiasticus does not assume a life hereafter. Your life here matters precisely in terms of the principles that govern your life and not in any way according to your wealth and prosperity, your health and even your feelings. It is all about how you face the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of life. “Good things and bad, life and death, poverty and wealth, come from the Lord.” Wow.
Wisdom matters in and of itself, a wisdom which is not just a quality of the learned, the scholarly ones, as it were. No. Wisdom here is about how we all stand before God. “The gift of the Lord endures for those who are godly.” Respice finem is about looking to God. This challenges all our assumptions about time as history, as if there is nothing more to life than a random sequence of actions and events. If we truly thought that, of course, then there would be no point in fighting for all the petty little entitlements everyone things they deserve. We would be willingly condemned to the flow of events. The paradox is that the entitlement culture itself reveals its need for God. It expresses unknowingly a desire for meaning, for what is transcendent, for what is more than just the flow.
Matthew’s Gospel concentrates the ancient wisdom of Ecclesiasticus on the whole matter of the little ones, upon the whole idea that they matter, and by extension upon the priority of our spiritual lives, “better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.” But our children matter and we matter not because of who and what they and we are in our eyes but in God’s eye. There is a higher and a greater purpose, a greater end than what we can possibly imagine. For Matthew, of course, there is the hope of heaven, the hope that what really matters actually matters for eternity. Not just the eternity of God’s Law, his Word and Will, as it were, but for God’s people defined by the grace of his Word and Will.
The community of the wise, defined simply by the wonderful objectivity and integrity of God’s Word and Wisdom, are made part of a new and wonderful fellowship, the Communion of Saints. The truly wise are the humble, like little children, like those who know that wisdom and life are found together in a communion, the Communion of Saints. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” To look to the end is to look to God and to what God seeks for us. It is captured in this morning’s Epistle reading as well. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul says, “from whence we also look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change this lowly body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.” Just so ancient wisdom becomes truth ever old and ever new. It takes on a whole new complexity of meaning in Christ and opens us out to the way in which our lives have meaning through “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”
Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong
Trinity XXIII in the Octave of All Saints’
November 3rd, 2013
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