“Above all, take the shield of faith”.
The scriptural images before us today have a wonderful cogency and power; they at once disquiet us, I suspect, as well as comfort us. We may indeed be inclined to prefer the gospel story of the healing of the son of a nobleman, not a poor man, we note, but one who is presumably well off; that alone, of course, might give us cause to pause. Yet, it is the story about something which is done by Jesus for us and so it suits the predilection of this age of entitlement to suppose that God should heal us and provide for us whatever we think we want. After all, ‘He owes us’, we might secretly think. We are happy to be on the receiving end, takers all and givers none. Of course, the gospel story itself will allow none of that kind of nonsense.
The challenge of the gospel is the wonderful openness to the grace of God by the nobleman who “believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him”. He did not insist that Jesus make a house call. Jesus’ word was enough. That is the wonder and the effect of the grace of Christ at work in human lives. It illustrates what it means to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might” that St. Paul talks about in his Letter to the Ephesians, the strength and the might to work with what is conveyed to us by the Word of God. We are not just passive receivers, the couch potatoes of spiritual blessings, as it were; no, we are called to be actively engaged with what the Word of God opens out to us.
If comforted by the gospel, at first glance, then, I am sure we are equally made uncomfortable about the images in the epistle reading from Ephesians. The images are, in their sustained rigour, unmistakably military. They suggest an aggressiveness, even a kind of bellicosity that surely makes us pause, if not shudder uncomfortably.
“Put on the armour of God,” Paul tells us and he continues to tell us through the language of image and metaphor that we contend “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places”. Strong stuff. I wonder if we can hear it even in the approach to Remembrance Day and at a time when we confront the forms of active nihilism even here in Canada which arise out of our communities and ghettoes of passive nihilism, out of our spiritual emptiness; the nothingness of evil which breeds a destructive nothingness.
The real issues, even the so-called “root causes” of our global discontents with respect to Iraq and the turmoil in so many parts of our world, are profoundly spiritual. There are deep and profoundly spiritual questions struggling to be born. But at the heart of the matter is the reality of knowing that we contend against spiritual principles of darkness within our own hearts.
We forget this at our peril. The real problem of evil lies within. It takes strong armour “to withstand in the evil day and, having done all, to stand”.
We wrestle against spiritual powers of wickedness. But we are not without the means of withstanding and indeed, of standing victorious. “Put on the armour of God,” St. Paul tells us, but “above all take the shield of faith,” drawing upon a number of passages in the Jewish Scriptures. Abram, even before he is renamed Abraham by God, heard the voice of God in a vision, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield,” your protective force, in other words, come what may in the journey of your life, the journey which I, God, have set you upon that “through you all nations may call themselves blessed”.
That sense of trust in the truth of God allows for the expression of joy and for singing God’s praises. It is part and parcel of what we do here in this service. We take hold of “the shield of faith”. It signifies something about who we are in our essential Christian identity.
Shields are more than the artifacts of war; they also serve as icons of identity, capturing some understanding of who we are as a community and a culture. The Shield of Achilles, for instance, conveys artistically and symbolically the entire world view of the Ancient Greeks. As Homer sees it, that world is a cosmos, an ordered whole within which the whole array of human actions find their place. Achilles’ shield includes the images of a city at peace and a city at war.
Paul uses the symbolism of the accoutrements of war to express the spiritual understanding of the Christian life. It is a kind of warfare in which we contend against spiritual principles, against all that opposes the will of God, and which appears, not only within the human community as a whole, but also within ourselves, making us less than ourselves. But “taking the shield of faith,” the strong reminder of our identity in Christ, we have the wherewithal to “be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked”. The shield of faith is an image of our identity with God in Christ who has overcome all the animosities of our souls; we have only to will that same reconciling love in our own lives. Therein lies the struggle.
To embrace that struggle with grace and dignity means to be open to the radical truth of God, like that certain nobleman who cared enough for his son “to believe the word that Jesus had spoken unto him” and to go down to his house in peace. To do so is both a mighty victory of grace against ourselves and a work of grace within ourselves. We have to will what is made known to us by the grace of God’s Word.
For it is grace. The Scriptures reveal things which we could not know otherwise, things about the truth and the majesty of God, and things about ourselves, both the good and the bad. They are only bearable in the mercies of Christ.
“Above all, take the shield of faith”.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI, 2014, 8:00am