“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation”
I like to think of the Gospel for The Third Sunday in Lent as the Gospel of despair. I don’t mean our despair that the winter will ever end and that spring will ever come! The Gospel of despair? Surely that is paradoxical. How can despair be good news?
We live in a world of divided kingdoms, a world of despair and desolation, and in many, many different ways. We don’t want to hear this and we certainly don’t want to think about it. Yet to do so is the one thing necessary. It requires in us something which we mightily resist – a contemplative approach to reality. It demands our paying attention to God.
At the heart of all of the social, economic, environmental and political uncertainties of our world and day is despair, a cynical and skeptical despair of God, of the idea of an infinite and perfect principle that is the cause and truth of all things. We despair of God. To realize this is the good news because it provides a way back to God. It is, we might say, the wisdom of the Scriptures. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” It is, most especially, the deep message of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter. Out of the depths of death and despair awaken hope and life through the triumph of love.
At issue is a question. What does it take for God to get our attention? Last week’s Gospel story of the Canaanite woman may have seemed to be about ‘how do we get God’s attention?’! In a way, that can become the occasion of despair. Not everyone has the strength of character and the depth of humility to hold onto a metaphysical concept and truth like that remarkable woman. We all want God, in one way or another – all our strivings and worries and affairs assume some infinite end and purpose, a yearning and a desire for some semblance of something we call good. And we want it in immediate and tangible ways. And we want it now. This is, I am afraid, all our folly. We expect the finite world of our finite desires to satisfy us infinitely. It can’t.
The best thing that can happen is to discover that we are houses or kingdoms divided against ourselves, caught in the swirling contradictions and confusions of our desires, thinking we want this or that, thinking that this or that programme or project will solve everything. As if there could be practical solutions to theoretical problems! The deeper problem that this Gospel brings out is the problem with ourselves. If it is all about us, then it is not about God.
Despair is one of the ‘diseases’ of our contemporary world precisely because an impossible burden is placed upon our desires and our expectations. We are expected to know what we want and to pursue it and to accomplish it. At the heart of it all is ourselves. The great moral and spiritual insight of the Christian tradition is that despair is really about the sin of pride. It is really all about ourselves, our feelings and moods, our expectations. But that is exactly to be without hope, real hope. Despair locks us into the prison of ourselves. It is precisely a lie. It is the result of a wilful forgetting of who we are.
In the Christian understanding, we are made in the image of God, the God of love and reason, an infinite principle, the absolute upon which everything most radically depends. We have to think this in order to feel it. Our liturgy is precisely about that. One of the tragedies of the Christian churches has been the betrayals of theology by virtue of trying to make the Faith answerable to us rather than our being answerable to God. Liturgy as emotive experience, a kind of sensual rave, is entertainment as the substitute for theological prayer and witness. Such things are only about catering to ourselves.
To discover our despair is the good news because it confronts us with the emptiness of ourselves. It is one of the ways in which God gets our attention: through the discovery of our lack and our insufficiency, even our brokenness. It doesn’t mean doing nothing – as if we were merely passive beings. It doesn’t mean renouncing desire. It is more a question about what we desire and how we desire. It requires another kind of activity, the activity of contemplative thought, something in which we all participate through the liturgy, and each of us in different ways, each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold. There is something in every service for everyone. But it requires our commitment to that demand. It is about our love for God, the desire for God.
I am struck by a common theme in a number of books that I have been reading recently. The common theme is a kind of wariness, actually a skepticism, and even a cynicism about anything metaphysical, let us say, theological, let us say, God. And yet, the arguments for ethical living by inveterate secularists have really a theo-logic to them. One, for instance, much agonized by religious and political disappointment, read despair, is much taken by the idea of committing oneself to an ideal that you know cannot be realized. That is exactly the kind of theological thinking that is aware of a need for a mediator between God and man in whom what is wanted is realized but never entirely here and now in us. Such is the Christian logic of the God/Man, Jesus Christ. We participate in the infinity and the goodness of God but only through the mediated means of grace, through Word and Sacrament, as it were.
The heroics of the human will belong to a tragic vision of life. That idea attracts us too, the idea of someone striving for something which seems right and good and failing to achieve it. And rightly so, but if we see it more in terms of sacrifice, the giving of oneself to something that is greater than oneself, then perhaps we can begin to see our failures in a new light. We can find that we have been lifted out of ourselves and into the presence of God. Such is the hope of God that is the counter to our self-willed delusions. There is nothing more deadly than the idea that everything is up to us. The discovery of our nothingness and our desolation is the beginning of the discovery of who we are in the sight of God and the discovery of his grace for us in our lives.
“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 3, HC 8:00am 2014