Year: 2013

“Behold, something greater than Jonah is here”

The Penitential Service for Use on Ash Wednesday and at Other Times, found in the Canadian BCP (p. 611ff.) calls us “in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” Locating the disciplines of Lent within the tradition of the Church and in its relation to Scripture, it provides a clear and concise explanation for the meaning of Lent. It is a challenge, to be sure.

Lent, in a way, concentrates the Christian journey of Faith into the span of forty days, forty days of a certain kind of focus and rigour, a focus and rigour that by definition belongs to the essence of the Christian Faith. We participate in nothing less than the Passion of Christ. And that is nothing less than the pageant of human redemption.

One of the prayers of the Penitential Service recalls The Book of Jonah, the story of the most reluctant prophet, no, let’s be clearer, the most recalcitrant prophet of all times! God says, ‘go to Nineveh,’ and Jonah jumps on a boat heading to Tarshish, trying to get as far away from God as possible and as far away from Nineveh, as well. Utter folly of course, as The Book of Jonah is at pains to teach us. What kind of God would God be, after all, if you could run and hide from him? Adam and Eve already tried that trick in the Garden of Eden, having hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God. “Where art thou?” God asked, knowing full well where they were but highlighting their sin and mistake. Nothing can be hidden from the sight of God. Our attempt to do so only proves our sin. Such is our predicament.

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“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 1^st 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.

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“We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did
and were destroyed by serpents.”

Serpents in the wilderness; the serpent in the garden. Dust and death. And yet something redemptive and healing. The story of the Fall is a story told in the form of myth let conveying great truth. O felix culpa! O blessed fault! as the theological tradition puts it. And as for snakes and serpents, they, too, serve an arresting and symbolic purpose. I am always amazed at the cultural cross-overs and coincidences of images. The staff of Ascelpius is the symbol of the medical profession to this day. It is a serpent entwined about a rough wooden branch. The serpent as a sign of healing.

And in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a serpent figures there, too. Gilgamesh, having learned that there is no permanence from Utnapishtim, returns to Uruk, wiser to be sure. He has been allowed to return however with the plant of rejuvenation called “the old men are young again,” an ancient form of Viagra, I suppose. On the way homeward, he stops at a refreshing spring to go for a swim, leaving the plant on the bank where its odour attracts a snake who immediately eats it. A just-so story, told to explain the phenomena of snakes shedding their skin and growing a new one, it also illustrates the fatalism of that ancient culture. Gilgamesh loses a gift for his city simply through a kind of accident and not through any fault of his own.

How much more different is the biblical account of the serpent in The Book of Genesis! The serpent is said to be “more subtle than any other wild creature.” And what does that serpent do? It asks questions. Such is a feature of human rationality. The serpent is a symbol of an aspect of our humanity, for good and for ill. What kind of questions?

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” Good ground and a good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought forth with patience. How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of spring time and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! How wonderful to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be?

The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all this is a world of talking heads and talk, as is so often said, is cheap. Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, relates to two things in today’s Gospel: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart. There can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds but only because that Word has been planted and sown within us.

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