“Rejoice with me”
The parables in today’s gospel are powerful illustrations of the teaching in the epistle: not only does “God resist the proud and give grace to the humble”, but that grace conveys us unto glory, for God “himself shall restore, stablish and strengthen you … after that ye have suffered a while”. God is “the God of all grace” and here is a wonderful illustration of the nature and the immensity of God’s grace.
The parables come as a response to an accusation. Christ is accused of receiving sinners and eating with them, thereby identifying himself with sinners, being made sin himself, as it were. But Christ’s response shows that he does, not so as to be defined by sin, “him who knew no sin”, but for the sake of our redemption “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. He tells three parables, two of which comprise today’s gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin. Beyond them, but as the fulfilling of them, is the parable of the lost son, the so-called prodigal son.
Sheep, coins, sons. There is a progression to these images. The first two which we have this morning stress the priority of divine grace in our restoration. What is emphasized is God’s reaching down to us in the gravity of our sins which separate us from God and from the community of divine love. There is, after all, a kind of passivity to sheep and coins, but this only serves to heighten the priority of God’s grace. Yet the effects of that grace are to be realized in us which is what we are given to see in the parable of the prodigal son. In him we see the motions of God’s grace in us effecting our restoration to grace, our establishment in grace and our being strengthened by grace.
The parable of the prodigal son completes the illustration of the teaching about God’s redemptive grace. It signifies the strong and exultant note of God’s mercy towards us. What, after all, is the recurring theme here except the theme of rejoicing? “I once was lost but now am found.” Here is the illustration of the “amazing grace” of God that “saved a wretch like me.”
God seeks the lost and God accepts the penitent who makes some motion of return to him for that motion is the motion of God’s grace in him. The first two parables make this point unmistakably clear. The sheep and the coins are utterly unable of themselves to move towards God. It is God’s grace which literally picks them up and carries them, gathers them up to himself and to the community which his love alone creates. We are reminded that our joy is to be found in the free gift of God towards us in the giving of his son.
These are communal joys; they are the joys of the Church. They are not solitary pleasures. They embrace heaven and earth, angels and men, neighbours and friends. They embrace the world in its totality.
The note of rejoicing is the meaning of our prayers and praises. It places us upon the foundation of divine grace perfecting our natures at once in principle and in process. The dialectic of sin and grace constitutes the pattern of our lives; indeed our very identity in Christ means the acknowledgement of sin and the greater acknowledgement of God’s grace.
It belongs to the essential Catholicism of our reformed tradition that we are simul justus et peccator, at once justified and sinners, to use Martin Luther’s terms. Our Anglican liturgy gives eloquent testimony to this understanding, an understanding which in no small part derives from these three parables. The pattern of contrition, confession and satisfaction runs throughout the liturgy. It is the dynamic of the dialectic of sin and grace. The creative tension or paradox in the awareness of sin and grace leads us into joy. In no small way, it is the cause of our rejoicing.
We are sinners all who stand in constant need of God’s redeeming grace shaping our lives into holiness. We are lifted up out of the wilderness of our waywardness and out of the dusty forgotten corners of our own spiritual self-neglect. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time.” It is what we are given to see in these parables. Like the lost sheep and the lost coin we are lifted up into the joys of heaven. We are returned into the fellowship of joy. Even more, in the parable of the lost son, we are returned into the joy of the Father’s love. But only through the self-awareness that belongs to humility.
Humility is the key note of the personal witness of Pope Francis and contributes to his recent encyclical, which, like the statements of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at the time of debt crisis of 2008, challenge our complacency and our unease as well as the destructive arrogance of both the corporate and the political world, in which we are, no doubt, complicit in some way or another, but the point is what do we do? The answer, or at least the beginning of an answer, is found in humility. Without humility there can be no rejoicing. For there can be no rejoicing without repentance and there can be no repentance without humility.
Humility connects us, as it must, to the dust of creation out of which we have been formed and to which we return. We are inescapably of the humus, the earth, the ground, and, yet we are the humus into which God has breathed his spirit. This does not free us from the world but to the world. It counters the false dominion of the world through the economics of global capitalism which embodies to a remarkable extent what the French philosopher, Michel Henry, provocatively calls “Galilean technology” which is a way of speaking about a kind of hubris of reason which claims total dominance over nature, what the encyclical calls the “technocratic paradigm” which leads to what I have called “techno-gnosticism.”
The paradox is that this leads, first, to a destruction of nature and, then, to a denial of nature altogether; in short, a denial of creation itself. The current issues of transgender identity, for instance, are in part, it seems to me, about a reaction against the forms of determinism which seem to crush any sense of the individual, in the same way that early feminists reacted against the notion that ‘biology is destiny’. The retreat into consumer culture, too, only creates the breeding ground of jihadis, western forms of active nihilism which mirror the passive nihilism of our culture, including our churches, I fear. Walmart is not heaven.
Humility is the simple recognition of ourselves as sinners and our grateful acknowledgment of God’s redeeming grace given for us and at work in us. It is the condition of our rejoicing. What does it mean? It means to look around you and weep with joy at what you behold and what we have all betrayed – ourselves, our world and our God. How? In not seeing and willing the truth of God and God’s world of which we are so very much a part and yet have so little sense of its grandeur and glory. But it is all around you.
Only in the humility which reminds us of the dust of our being can we sense the glory that is the joy of heaven. Repentance and humility are intimately connected and only so can we rejoice, not in ourselves, but in God. It means too, I think, taking a hold of what belongs to where we are and what we can do even in the face of the facelessness of the global culture that surrounds us. I like to think that is what we are trying to do here. It means reclaiming what Wendell Berry, drawing on E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, calls “an affection for place” which commits one to do good for the land.
We rejoice in the mercies of God “to whom be glory and dominion for ever and ever.” We rejoice with him who has reached down to exalt us into his love. Jesus calls us to rejoice with him in his love for us in his love for the Father, a love which embraces the world and our place in it.
“Rejoice with me”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 3, 2015