by CCW | 14 June 2015 14:53
The readings in these early days of the Trinity Season offer a kind of holy seminar about the necessary connection between seeing and doing, thinking and acting. There is a kind of interplay between the readings taken from the writings of John and Luke which shows us this. On Trinity Sunday we had not only the reading from John’s Gospel but also a reading from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. And last Sunday and today we have epistle readings from 1 John and gospel readings, two parables, from Luke’s Gospel.
These readings underscore a basic feature of the Christian faith: namely, the necessity to act out of what we have been given to see through the life of God opened to view through Jesus Christ. It means that there is an inescapable doctrinal character to the living out of the Christian Faith. There has to be that constant attention to the primacy of doctrine which informs our practical activities in lives of service and sacrifice. John is constantly making this point in one way or another even as Luke is constantly providing us with examples and illustrations of just what it looks like on the ground, as it were.
“Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” These are strong words. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God,” we heard on The First Sunday after Trinity and then we were given to see how absolutely necessary it is to attend to the teachings of the Scripture and to act out of what we have been given to see in the story of Lazarus and Dives. Our indifference to one another arises out of our indifference to the things which really matter, the things of God. Today, John again emphasizes the conditions of our love in the face of the world’s animosities and hatreds and even our own failings, pointing out that love is not simply about us but, more fundamentally, it is about Christ’s transforming love in us. “This is his commandment,” John tells us, “That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another,” emphasizing the main point that “he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him.” Luke indicates how we refuse that love through our excuses which are all about a refusal to think the things of God that have been revealed to us. We turn to the ground of our everyday affairs, a thinking downwards that denies what has been opened to view in our thinking upwards.
The point is not that we don’t have property to tend, oxen to prove and wives to … well, what does one say? Probably best not to say very much! My point is that we have obligations, joys and delights, responsibilities and duties that have to do with our everyday life but those things do not excuse us from the banquet of heavenly love; rather they have to be seen as belonging to the lessons of love, lessons which we cannot realize in our lives unless we are open to the teachings of Christ and endeavour through grace to realize them in our everyday lives. It is not possible without paying attention to the heavenly things which shape our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. The truth which we have been given to see has to be lived on the ground, in the places and in the circumstances where we find ourselves. There is an inescapable practicality to Christian Faith but one which belongs precisely to what is believed.
We cannot live with Christ if we are in flight from the world or in flight from God, for then we betray his very embrace of the world in its particularity. Such is the Incarnation. It opens us out to the highest things of God in the places where we live our lives. Such is the Trinity. We live our lives on the ground but with a view to God. Nor can we live with Christ if we are in flight from both the world and God in the narcissism and the nihilism of contemporary culture, clinging to empty illusions of the self.
The essential character of Christian life revealed in these readings challenges at once cultural Christians who accept, perhaps grudgingly, certain parts of Christian teaching, especially if it conforms to the ideologies of the world, but have no time for the Church and ghetto Christians who having despaired, too, of thinking the Christian Faith huddle behind the closed doors of our churches, unable to engage the world in the confidence of the Gospel. What they both have in common is a kind of atheism – either actions utterly divorced from faith and understanding or claims to faith and understanding utterly devoid of living expression. Love in word and tongue without love in deed and in truth is empty and false; it is no love. Our readings open us out the reality of divine love.
The Trinity is the heavenly community of divine love. That love is something which is ever active, ever-renewing, and always perfecting all that belongs to our humanity and our human loves. By the grace of revelation and the grace of redemption, we participate in the community of heavenly love. There is the constant struggle and challenge to act and live out of what we have been given to see and receive. Our excuses, yes, our excuses from worship, too, are nothing less than our refusals of the divine love which we have been allowed to glimpse and see. “A door was opened in heaven,” but we have turned to the ground.
Such is the meaning of Christ’s being in our midst and being in our midst through the witness of the Scriptures. We ignore what is proclaimed in the ordered life of the Church at our peril. “All things are now ready” but “they all with one consent began to make excuse,” we hear in today’s Gospel. In such excuses, we turn our backs on Christ and his sacrifice, on the love of God which seeks our perfection. That love seeks our good by convicting our consciences. We are being challenged to act upon and not refuse the love that has been shown to us. It has to be real and be alive in us, “in deed, and in truth.” It is indeed as “little children” that we have constantly something to grow up into. This is what God wants for us which is why John reminds us that it is his commandment. He will have his house filled; his will done on earth as in heaven. There are no excuses “for if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Such is the divine love which draws us into love and to love “in deed, and in truth.”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity II, 2015
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