“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking”
What powerful and provocative readings! They serve as a kind of wake-up call to the serious nature of the Christian faith. They recall us to the frightening realities of human sin, to our emptiness and despair when we refuse the light and truth of God. That we can do so is testament, paradoxically, to the love of God. For love cannot be forced. At most we can be persuaded.
Moral and intellectual persuasion is the only means the Christian Church has at its disposal. We cannot rely on the patterns of social and political life, the habits and customs of a more-or-less comfortable past. We are thrown back upon the stark and serious realities of the Gospel message, a message that speaks at once of our darkness and despair and of its overcoming. Nowhere is that more starkly presented than on The Third Sunday in Lent.
The great Eucharistic Gospel for this day gives us a true picture of sin. We are “a house divided against ourselves” and, of course, we cannot stand. We reject the goodness of God; we call what is good, evil. We despair of the idea of the absolute without which our lives are empty and meaningless despite all our efforts. The emptiness possesses us and “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” We “were sometimes darkness,” Paul notes in the epistle reading, and exhorts us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,” an exhortation which can have no meaning unless we are indeed capable of embracing such a fellowship, choosing darkness over light and forgetting, forgetting wilfully, that the light is always greater than the darkness. Yet that is the problem: our wilful forgetting, our choosing darkness rather than light.
We forget the absolute power of the goodness of God, the God who chooses out of his love to reconcile himself with us in our sinfulness. This is the burden of these Morning Prayer lessons. They are strong arguments about the power and nature of reconciliation. The lesson from Genesis is the story of Jacob’s reconciliation with his brother Esau, the brother whom he tricked and deceived. In a marvelous image of magnanimity, they are able to meet each other graciously. Why and how? “Because”, as Jacob says to Esau, “God has dealt graciously with me.” The passage follows immediately upon the famous scene of Jacob wrestling with God and becoming Israel, meaning “one who strives with God,” and therefore one who is no longer defined by the strife between brothers.
The Letter to the Hebrews expands upon the theme of reconciliation theologically and in ways that speak to the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls. We “have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” the writer says, “and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”
The counter to the empty despair and self-willed contradictions in our lives is found in Jesus, in the reconciling love of God for us. We are called to strive with God, not against him and not against one another, and that is only possible because Jesus is “the mediator of the new covenant” whose “sprinkled blood speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”
The reference is to the first murder, to Cain slaying Abel, and to the powerful words in that story which awaken us to sin but even more to the possibilities of grace and forgiveness, the very things proclaimed in Christ. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says to Cain. They are haunting and convicting words that instantly tell us that nothing can be hidden from God but then what? Are we to be left simply with our separation from God, with the blood-guilt upon our souls? Forever cut off in the Hell of our own choosing?
It is a necessary and wholesome feature of the Lenten journey that we feel the force of sin. To take it seriously is to take even more seriously the love of God. That love is meaningless if we persist in our delusions and our insouciance, our ignorance and our indifference, our refusals and our denials, as if to shrug and say, ‘nothing matters,’ when what matters are our immortal souls. For then we refuse the one who is speaking and the one who is speaking is not me but God’s Word and Son. In every way, sin is about our despair of the absolute goodness of God. It is folly but folly can be deadly. It is the folly of ourselves when there is only ourselves. God would save us from ourselves.
This is the serious business of the journey of Lent. “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” Even more, we come “to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.” It makes all of the difference provided that we do not refuse him who is speaking, the one who seeks our good in his reconciling love for us.
“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 3, MP, 2014