“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”
Storms and sports seem to define our Canadian winter but let’s hope they don’t define our souls!
These three ‘gesima’ Sundays provide us with some important moral lessons that prepare us for the journey of Lent, the journey of the soul to God. They involve the transformation of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This Sunday, Sexagesima Sunday, shows us the virtues of courage and prudence as transformed into love by the love of God.
God’s love seeks the perfection of our humanity. The virtues are the activities of the soul which seek human perfection. But the classical virtues, if left to themselves, can become, as Augustine argues, splendid vices. They are activities for we are not essentially passive creatures defined by what we have or simply by what we receive through our experiences for, then, we are not free. The cardinal virtues teach us something about the character and nature of our souls and the activity of our souls. But the activity seems to be from our side, the side of human seeking, human knowing and doing, as if we could perfect ourselves, as if we could attain to God on the strength and wisdom of our own. Therein lies the problem.
Does that mean that the virtues should be extinguished in us? No. Because, once again, we are not essentially passive beings. There needs to be our engagement with what comes to us; it is not just about what comes from us. That is where the transformation of the virtues by grace comes into play; the virtues become forms of love, forms of our participation in God’s love. Transitional between Epiphany and Lent, these ‘gesima’ Sundays remind us of the love of God manifest in Jesus and indicate how that love is to live in us.
Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, shows us the transformation that courage or fortitude (strength of character, we might say) undergoes. He speaks, even boasts, it might seem, of all the struggles and hardships that he has endured in his life and witness as a minister of Christ. He makes it clear that these endeavours are not about himself but about his “care for the churches”, a care that is borne out of his witness to Christ. It is not his courage or strength that matters but the grace of Christ in him overcoming all the weaknesses that belong to our fallen humanity, sin-wracked and wounded as we are. It is not I but Christ in me that enables the witness and the mission, he is saying.
The theological virtues do not extinguish the natural virtues but perfect them. The transformation of the virtues into forms of love belongs to the redemption of our humanity. Left to our own devices, however good our intentions, we can only discover, sometimes with a fall of our hearts, that we hurt others and even ourselves. We do not know clearly what we should know or what we should do. Our reason and our will are incomplete and disordered. We need what comes from God to us – the grace that does not destroy our nature but perfects it.
The Gospel shows us prudence as transformed by love in the parable of the sower and the seed. In the parable we are the ground; at issue is what kind of ground? The ground of the wayside, the rocky ground, the thorn-infested ground or the good ground? Prudence is about being “the good ground” but what is that good ground? “They which in an honest and good heart having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.” It is all about our taking hold of God’s word, the seed planted in the ground of our souls. But to be the good ground requires our recognition of the good order of creation and the good of our humanity within that order. Once again, it will not do to be passive. We are called to be active.
Luke gives us the parable and the interpretation. Why? Precisely so that we can actively take hold of the radical meaning of the teaching here. “The seed is the word of God,” we are told but what are we? The ground in which the word is sown. But what kind of ground are we, the parable asks and explains the different possibilities of our activities. Are we shallow and superficial, the ground of the way-side, or are we hard-hearted, like the rocky ground, or are we distracted and preoccupied with ourselves and the world, like the thorn-infested ground, or are we the good ground which is about our hearts? The teaching challenges us to think about what we seek and who we are.
The image of the ground recalls us to creation itself. Only by the grace of God can God’s word take root in us and bring forth fruit. That requires our activity. That activity is not simply on the strength of our own wisdom, our own power of knowing, prudence, as it were, but only through our wisdom being ordered and governed to our end in God. That requires our openness to what comes from God to us; our working with all that God gives to us; our souls as the ground in which he sows the seed of his word so that word can grow in us in all wisdom and truth.
There is nothing static about Christian life. It is all about the grace of God at work in us. Left to ourselves, as Paul suggests, we can really only discover our shortcomings, our weaknesses and vices. “If I must needs glory,” he says, he will “glory in those things which concern [his] infirmities”, his weaknesses, knowing the perfecting power of God’s love, the love which seeks our good in his truth. For without that love all our doings are nothing worth.
“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima 2014
8:00am HC