by CCW | 7 February 2016 15:30
We meet in the bleak mid-winter on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday that points us to Lent and to its proper meaning. And we meet, too, in the sweet afterglow of Candlemas[1], the feast that marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. Central to that feast is the idea of sacrifice, of love in motion that seeks the greater good of our humanity. It is a feast at once of Christ, his presentation in the Temple, and of Mary, her purification and thanksgiving for birth. “This child”, Simeon says, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel” and then to Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through your own soul also.” And why? “That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Such is the meaning, too, of Lent! “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face,”as St. Paul puts it, that we may know even as we are known in the love of God. Candlemas marks the first time the Incarnate Christ is in Jerusalem and points us to his final journey to Jerusalem about which today’s Gospel speaks. In that lies the whole meaning of his Incarnation. There is a wonderful correspondence between Candlemas and Quinquagesima in the transition from Christmas to Lent and Easter.
Our secular culture celebrates February 2nd as Groundhog Day and with a certain curious anxiety about the winter weather. But why February 2nd? Why not February 1st? Because it draws upon the far more ancient and far profounder Christian festival of Candlemas, a feast of light signifying life through sacrifice. You have a choice, I suppose, between celebrating a rodent to whom, somehow, we attribute self-consciousness in terms of seeing or not seeing his shadow and skills in weather prognostications (not a little unlike reading the entrails of birds!), and the feast of Candlemas which this year brings us to this Sunday which portends the near approach of Lent.
Lent is about our going up to Jerusalem with Jesus in his final journey to Jerusalem. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus tells us. He has something in mind that is greater than death. In that going up he would teach us and he would heal us. He would set our love aright. We do not really know what we want. We do not really know what is truly good for us. We do not really know what is rightly to be wanted except through the perfecting path of his love. In the Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem with them.
He speaks of terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short; Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order. It portends the greater triumph of light over darkness, of life over death, of good over evil.
Christ speaks of his passion. He speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us. “But they understood none of these things.” We understand so little. It was hid from them and it is hid from us. In a way, we can’t understand except through the journey of Lent. We have to go with Christ. We have to journey with love so that love can set us right. It is a life-long journey. It is simply concentrated for us in the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the way of the cross.
The problem is that we are blind, perhaps not altogether unlike the groundhog – not the most perceptive of creatures. We both cannot and will not see what is set before us and what is proclaimed in our midst. There is the ignorance and the arrogance of our self-righteousness; there is the pettiness of our envyings and resentments; there are the posturings of our self-assurances and vanity; there is death and destruction of which we are the authors. We are blind to ourselves and to God. We do not understand.
Yet to know our blindness is to begin to see and to begin to understand. At the very least, it might signal an openness to the healing mercy and love of God. Christ comes to be with us. He would have us journey with him so that we might indeed see and hear and understand. That, too, is part of the Gospel on this day. And like Mary, to go on this path will mean that our hearts too shall be pierced at once in sorrow and in love.
We are blind, to be sure, but perhaps we will be like that “certain blind man” who called out ever so persistently: “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.” Lent teaches us to avail ourselves of the only mercy there is, the mercy of God towards us. Lent is about that mercy, one long kyrie eleison, and depends upon our awareness of our need for it.
There can be no love apart from the love of God. Jesus wants us to see and understand exactly this. He wants us to enter into his project of redeeming and perfecting love. It means the pilgrimage of Lent with its disciplines and devotions. For such things are the lessons of love. They teach us an understanding of love. For love is not blind – at least, not the love of God – and that is the love which makes all other loves lovely without which they are not only blind but deadly.
Lent is the pilgrimage of love. It is the season of mercy. We are called to repentance for without that we cannot turn to God. Through repentance and prayer, through discipline and devotion, we enter into the perfecting ways of love. We live in the mercies of God’s love towards us. The love of God is made visible to us in the drama of Christ’s going up to Jerusalem. He goes up to set our lives in order. Will we go with him? Or will we persist in our blindness and folly?
“I will show you a yet more excellent way”, St. Paul says. That more excellent way is his love-song. Charity is love in its profoundest sense, love as “sett[ing] love in order,” bringing to perfection each and every part of the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other body finds its place and voice. Our own loves are always suspect and self-serving, always less that what they should be, less than what we ourselves want them to be. They are even in themselves perfectly deadly which is why we need the love of God proclaimed in Jesus Christ.
Love does not arise simply from ourselves. Christian love is not about comfort and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without the love of God – so clearly and strongly indicated on this day – there could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. Without love we are dead. We go with Jesus to learn that “yet more excellent way,” the way of light and life and love.
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/02/07/sermon-for-quinquagesima-6/
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