Year: 2014

“Apart from me ye can do nothing.”

“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me,” Jesus says, in what is known as the last of his famous “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. For “apart from me ye can do nothing.” The truth and meaning of who we are is found in our being in Christ, our lives enfolded and engrafted into his living word and truth. This second lesson speaks profoundly and provocatively about the nature of our abiding in Christ. In some ways, the image is the greatest of the images of our incorporation into the divine life through the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. We live in him and he in us.

But how? Only by attending to his word. It may be, as Peter points out to Jesus in the remarkable Eucharistic gospel for Trinity V, that “we have toiled all the night long and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.” “At thy word” is the note of saving grace, the note of the means of our abiding in Christ. His word lives in us if we will let it.

The trouble is that we often refuse to hear. We reject the word and truth of God. What that means is shown in the first lesson from The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah, a prophet whose word and presence is unwelcome to King Jehoiakim, has dictated to Baruch, his scribe, “all the words of the Lord which he had spoken to him.” He has written them on a scroll, presumably of papyrus. Then Baruch reads the words of Jeremiah first “in the hearing of all the people,” then, before the court officials, and then, before the princes. Clearly deeply troubled by what they hear, the princes bid Baruch and Jeremiah go into hiding. Finally, the scroll is read before the King. Is he moved to listen to the word of the Lord from the prophet Jeremiah? Not in the least.

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“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net”

Just another fishing story, it might seem. Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret first teaches “the people who pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” using a ship as his pulpit, it seems, and then bids Simon Peter to “launch out into the deep and let down your net.” Peter’s response captures an essential aspect of human experience. “Master,” he says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.”

More than just another fishing story, the miracle here is not just in the amazing catch of fishes that broke their net and almost sank their ships. Neither is it just about the call of Simon Peter and James and John to catch men for God. No. This gospel story also speaks to the fears of our contemporary culture in profound and wonderful ways. It addresses the very modern concept of the empty meaninglessness of life.

Sometimes our fears define us and our world and culture. As the philosopher and Christian Peter Kreeft notes, the fear of the ancient world was the fear of death, the fear of the Medieval world, the fear of Hell, but the fear of the modern world is the fear of meaninglessness. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” There is nothing and we are nothing, it seems and this has been a feature of modern literature as, for instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, which is about facing the empty nothingness of life.

It is all nada. “Nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” – Nothing and nothing then nothing and nothing and then nothing – as the older waiter observes, thinking about an old man in the café, perhaps a survivor of World War I and its atrocities in the face of which there is no answer, no meaning just the utter meaninglessness of war and destruction, of death and despair, and in the old man’s case, an attempted suicide. Has anything really changed? we might ask, as a passenger plane is shot down in the Ukraine, as girls from a boarding school are abducted and remain in captivity in Nigeria, as humanitarian disaster after humanitarian disaster unfolds for countless millions of people displaced by wars and conflicts beyond their control. Hemingway’s short story marks the first time the Spanish word nada which means nothing was used in English.

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“We…groan within ourselves”

Groaning is not the same thing as whining. We are rather good at whining and complaining. So what is our groaning? They are our prayers, the deep, heartfelt yearnings of our souls that far outrace the explicit thoughts of our minds. And yet, without a commitment to the articulation of the yearnings of our hearts and the stirrings of the thoughts in our minds, we remain in the uncertainty and the folly of ourselves, subject to a host of arbitrary and incoherent moods and fancies. Increasingly, it seems, our lives are but some celluloid or cyberborg fantasy. We live in the fiction of ourselves, the makers of our own unmaking. As the poet, philosopher, and Kentucky Farmer, Wendell Berry remarks, “the next great division of the world [may well] be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The note of suffering and groaning confronts the tendencies of our age and culture directly. Neither are welcome concepts to a culture caught in its illusions. But do we have the capacity to see our own illusions? Or are we more quick to point out the deficiencies in others? In other words, “pull[ing] out the mote”, the insignificant speck that is in another’s eye while being blind to “the beam”, the great log, that is in our own eye. Hypocrisy is where we are and where we begin. The blind leading the blind is not just about the clergy, though you could be forgiven for thinking that.

The Gospel for today complements the Epistle. It illumines an interesting feature of the Epistles and Gospels in the Trinity season. The Gospels function as illustrations of the Epistles. In this case, we are given a powerful image of hypocrisy in the proverbial parable of “the blind leading the blind.”  And what is that parable largely about? The blindness of our judgments and the wonder of God’s mercy. “Judge not” but “forgive and be forgiven.”

How is that even remotely possible?  Only by the mercy of God. How do we know that?

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“For God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”

Humility is not only the counter to pride; it is the condition of our access to God’s grace, the necessary condition of our being raised up or exalted, albeit “in due time” and not without “hav[ing] suffered a while.” Grace is what truly and rightly defines and dignifies our humanity. The Epistle and Gospel for today speak profoundly to lessons which have ever to be learned and relearned, again and again, and certainly for us in our world and day.

Just recently, The Economist magazine included an insert from its sister magazine, Intelligent Life. The first article asked the question “What is the deadliest sin?” and provided a series of very thoughtful reflections by a number of notable writers and thinkers on envy, pride, ingratitude, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust. Not bad. Six out of the classical and traditional seven deadly sins! Though ingratitude is a serious problem it is not one of the seven deadly sins classically speaking. It is wrath that is the one sin that was curiously omitted. I say ‘curiously’ since wrath is such a dominant feature in the destructive nihilism of contemporary culture and so it seems odd that it should have been left out. There are no end of examples of wrath in our contemporary world, after all. But what is more remarkable is that the very idea and language of sin and of the seven deadly sins should be the subject of a sophisticated contemporary journal.

It suggests at the very least that the moral discourse about sin which is part and parcel of the Christian faith is very much needed in our present times and is there to be recovered and reclaimed. Pride, as the novelist Will Self points out, “is so much a part of every one of us that we can’t see how deadly it is – it inheres in our very self-consciousness, and has metastasized through the body politic.” That is a profoundly theological view. He goes on to argue that “pride is paramount” in the modern economy, in what he calls “the commoditisation of pride,” the sense that we think we deserve what we want “because we are worth it.” Even more, he shows how pride “is the three-personed god we have made of ourselves,” which he describes wonderfully as “the Big-I-Am; King Baby, Me-Me-Me,” what he calls “the true trinity of the modern psyche.” Utterly remarkable. The descriptive force of this is undeniable but what is the prescription? Humility.

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