by CCW | 27 September 2015 16:49
It is one of those wonderful biblical phrases that can act like a maxim, an ordering principle, for how we proceed with our lives. Here Jesus wants the very best for us and he expects the very best from us. And Paul also shows what this means in his strong exhortation to us to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” Against the easy complacency and acceptance of mediocrity in our world and day stands this challenging statement; “Friend, go up higher”. Even more there is the whole matter of our awareness and acceptance that we have a God given vocation.
We may not like to be challenged. We may not like the implications of such a call. It means recognizing that things are not altogether excellent, right or good with us in our lives. We may prefer instead to expect God to take us as we are, “to bless our mess,” as it were, and to leave us where we are and to make no demands of us. But that is not the Christian religion. Neither true mercy nor genuine charity. It is fundamentally false. It denies the transforming power of God’s grace in human lives.
If we are hostile and resentful about this teaching, then we are exactly like those before whom Jesus speaks and acts. There was a healing done on the Sabbath under the watchful eyes of hostility. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful silence; a parable told to counter our arrogance and our hypocrisy, a parable told to challenge us. Jesus speaks and acts. He teaches. At issue, then and now, is whether we will be teachable. Only so can we ever hope to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith [we] are called”.
We are called. There is the inescapable and challenging fact of our common vocation. We have heard the Gospel. We may be in some doubt or uncertainty about how to understand certain things and how exactly to act in certain circumstances but for the most part there is little ambiguity about the call to love and service in Jesus’ name, little ambiguity about the loving worship of God with the whole of our being. Our uncertainties often mask something much more serious, namely, our willing unwillingness; in short, our despair, our denial and our disobedience. The problem really isn’t that we don’t know better. The problem is about our willingness to press on with the upward call of our faith.
We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ. We cannot just be Sunday Christians. Nor can we pretend that we are Christians in our week-day lives if we are not worshipping God in his Church on Sundays. The struggle is to be faithful to Christ in all aspects of our lives. That means the constant struggle to “go up higher,” to seek our perfection in the grace of Christ with humility and in charity, without presuming ourselves to be better than others or, and, this is our contemporary problem, without yielding to the tyranny of mediocrity, as if to say, that the second-rate and the left-over is good enough.
St. Paul reminds us to the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be, about how we should act, namely “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forebearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. These qualities arise from the doctrine, the teaching, which has been given to us and without which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in you all”.
It is a high calling, to be sure. And it would be impossible except for this. The means whereby it is accomplished in us is the same as what has been shown to us. Jesus himself is the teaching. He is what he says. In other words, it is grace – what comes from God to us. Grace goes before us and follows after us, as the Collect puts it. “Prevent” in its older and fuller sense does not mean hinder but a “going” or a “coming before”. Our grace-ordered lives are about the teaching, the doctrine, of Christ living in us. Our being teachable is about whether we will allow the teaching to live in us.
“Friend, go up higher” is not about our presumption but our calling. Christ has come to where we are but not to leave us there. He wants something better for us. He has come to us and we find our vocation in him, in what he says to us and in what he does for us. Our vocation is about the quality of our being with him.
Christ is not simply the visitor who comes in and out of our lives. He is the Ultimate Other who has become the intimate neighbour to communicate to us his abiding love for us. We live in that love. As love it is not something static and unmoving. It is dynamic and challenging. It calls us always to something more. “Friend, go up higher” signals the dynamic and transforming quality of the grace of Christ in our lives. We are on a journey, a pilgrimage in which there is to be a deepening of our understanding of the faith.
By his incarnate presence he encounters us in all and every place and aspect of our humanity to bring us into his abiding love, the love in which we find our highest good and the perfection of our being. The story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain which we heard last week, for instance, shows us that God not only comes near to us in Jesus Christ, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, but that he enters into the very fabric of our lives. Such is the Incarnation. Jesus is the Father’s Word and Son who has identified himself with us as “the Word made flesh”. He has come down to us so as to raise us up into higher understanding of God and ourselves. He has identified himself with us only so as to bring us into his essential identity as the Son of the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit, the communion of the Trinity. Such is his grace. We are raised up by the love of God and into the love of God. “Friend, go up higher”.
Christ is not simply collapsed into the world to be taken captive by the culture, to become another casualty on the highway of life, another mediocrity. Such is not the meaning of the Incarnation. A proper incarnational theology challenges us to be in the midst of the world’s confusions but with the clarity of Christ’s teaching and in the quiet confidence of the Gospel of compassion. Our constant struggle is to be teachable so as to let that teaching live in us. It isn’t a question of our intellectual capacities. Those vary from one person to another, for there are varieties of gifts, including different gifts of understanding. No. What is at issue is always our willingness, our willingness to learn each “according to the capacity of the beholder to behold”. What stands in the way is our pride, our hostilities, our envyings and our resentments; in short, our wills. Indeed, the endless cries of ‘the poor-me’s’ and ‘I can’t do that’ are but the protestations of pride. The antidote is humility.
Humility is not about putting ourselves down but neither is it about self-promotion! Rather, it is about our being open to God raising us up. It is about our being open to the motions of God’s grace in our lives, to what, in fact, is proclaimed and set before us here in our liturgy and service.
That call is present here in our liturgy. “Lift up your hearts” so that the whole of your life can be lifted up into the presence of Christ. No doubt we shall stumble and stutter but what we seek is always the triumph of his grace in our lives, the triumph of grace that lifts us up out of ourselves and into the vocation to which he has called us. In him we are lifted up, if we will be teachable.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVII, 2015
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