by CCW | 19 October 2014 15:17
The context is controversy. It almost always is when it is a matter of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides. Yet a deeper unity may sometimes be only found through the divisions of our hearts, when our hearts are broken and opened to view. For then, and only then, perhaps, we discover what it is that we believe, what it is that we stand for, if anything at all. Sometimes it takes controversy.
But what does it mean to stand for something? Is it simply a matter of assertion, a matter of self-definition which demands recognition upon no other basis than our subjective desires and opinions? Is the truth just what we make it? Or do we stand for something objective and received, truth that defines us even in our untruth?Sometimes we learn through controversy. Sometimes through controversy something of the truth of God is at once communicated and received. What is to be looked for is some deeper understanding of truth, “tam antiquo, tam novo”, “truth so ancient and so new,” as Augustine puts it. Jesus is engaged in religious disputation. “Which is the first commandment of all?” he is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes, the writers of words which are like pictures into which we may step if we choose. We shall never be the same for truth always confronts and convicts us. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God” perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” and so is led to ask the overwhelming question, “which is the first commandment of all?” He is, we might say, compelled by the truth itself in the context of controversy and even intellectual animosity where power seems more at issue than truth. But “Jesus had answered them well”. And he continues to do so in his magisterial “Summary of the Law”. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour, no “commandment greater than these”. Powerful stuff. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” as our liturgy notes. And yet, profoundly provocative and controversial. Why? Because of its clarity. It cuts through all the clutter and confusion of history and experience. It crystallizes the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. It is a kind of distillation of its teachings, almost, we might say, a kind of Old Testament Creed, and certainly one which challenges many perspectives about that remarkable collection of books and stories and poems. Is it really all about love? How can law be love? Because the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and, if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, then it does so only to recall us to truth. Such is repentance and prayer.
There are two forms of turning back to God, the one is in thanksgiving, the other in repentance. Both are an acknowledgment of the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around; both are a kind of redire ad principe, a return to a principle. That measure redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “all loving [is] mere folly”.
Jesus responds to the scribe’s recognition of the truth of his words saying “thou art not far from the kingdom of God”. And “after that”, we are told, “no one dared to ask him any questions”. But Jesus goes on to challenge certain contemporary ideas about the Messiah, pointing out that the Messiah of Israel is more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage, and more than a political saviour, because he has a more transcendent, indeed, eternal origin, namely, God; ultimately, as we say creedally, He is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God”. Jesus is the Messiah who is God with us, true God and true Man. In this lies the heart of the Creeds. The focus is on the utter uniqueness of Christ as one with the Lord God of the Old Testament to whom David, Shepherd and King, Poet and Warrior, is also subject. “Jesus is Lord”, after all, is the earliest form of creedal statement that we have in the New Testament; a statement which we can only say “by the Spirit”.
The Old Testament is summed up by Jesus and, even more, the commandment of twofold love is realized in Jesus himself. Something of the transcendent truth of God is being made known even in the midst of controversy and it is made known through scriptural interpretation, itself proto-credal in shape and substance.
We return to the Creeds and to the Scriptures creedally understood, that is to say, understood through the primacy of the categories of creation, redemption and sanctification, and even more through the primacy of the love of God revealed as Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. In the primacy of these categories and in the embrace of the Trinity, we find the objective determinants of our humanity, and not otherwise. And in the Creeds, too, we find the principle of approach to all questions of morality, namely, the doctrine of “the forgiveness of sins”.There is no new truth that stands over and against the words of Jesus. There can be, at best, a deepening of the understanding about our humanity, though at the same time, it has to be admitted, there can be equally a loss of understanding. This gospel would have us defined by the redemption of our desires, calling us into the love of God and the love of one another in honesty and truth. We need the clarity of the gospel to discover the charity of God without which we are nothing and nothing worth, especially in the folly of our self-assertions. There is one who has answered well.
Fr. David Curry, Trinity XVIII
October 19th, 2014
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