by CCW | 28 February 2016 15:00
Jesus “himself knew what was in man,” John tells us. It is a perplexing and yet an illuminating comment. It comes in John’s Gospel just after the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, just after the casting out of the money changers in the temple at Jerusalem, just after the prediction of his death and resurrection imaged in terms of the destruction of the temple and its being raised up in three days, just after “many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did” when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast. About those “many [who] believed in his name,” John tells us, “Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2. 24,25). Wow.
“He himself knew what was in man.” And what is in us? As the context reveals, what is in us is the spectacle of deceit and distrust. “O put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them” (Ps. 146.2), the psalmist observes and reminds us, too, that “vain is the help of man” (Ps.60.11). So what is in us? Not much. Even more, there is nothing. And even more than nothing, there is the will to nothingness in us that is a disillusioning and destructive spirit. There is nothing in and of ourselves but the will to nothingness. It is really nihilism.
This is to speak in a kind of contemporary language, the language of a kind of existentialism, the language of the despair of reason and knowledge, the language of the triumph of the will to power over the will to truth, the language of atheism. But, such a way of speaking has its biblical basis, it seems to me, in the rather dark and bleak readings for The Third Sunday in Lent upon which Jesus’ word from John provides such an important commentary. Jesus “himself knew what was in man;” it is not a pretty picture.
The remarkable epistle reading from Ephesians and remarkably even more disturbing gospel story from St. Luke speak directly to the climate of disillusionment and despair in our contemporary culture, and yet offer the real and true remedy to our fears and worries; in short, they provide the counter to the culture of nihilism. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” as Paul puts it.
It belongs to the project of Lent to confront the barren emptiness and the disturbing darkness of our own souls and our own lives. Most of us run from such considerations and take refuge in our own attempts at self-justification. ‘This have I done and this,’ we assert. ‘How great I am’ or, at least more modestly, ‘I am not so bad and surely better than most’, so we boast, don’t we? ‘I am owed, at the very least, recognition and praise for being me and, perhaps, you are, too, for being you,’ we claim. ‘Come let us drink to one another about one another.’ ‘Here’s to us! To me being me and you being you!’
Well, think again. Which song do you really want to sing? ‘How great I am?’ or “How great thou art!” Oh, I know, for some it is the great crooner’s song “I did it my way”. All folly exposed to view by this gospel. But consider yourself saved from the folly of yourself precisely by the power and the truth of this gospel. How? By being confronted with the nothingness in ourselves without which we cannot be awakened to the love and knowledge of God. The absoluteness of God stands in stark contrast to our utter nothingness. “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; / it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves” (Ps. 100.2).
Jesus knows what is in us. But he also wants us to know. We have to come to terms with our own nothingness, our own darkness. Only then can we be open to the truth and wonder of God in whom we are something and something worth and without which we are a spectacle of despair and destructive rage and deceit. Darkness or light? Which will it be?
Our humanity in its disorder and disarray is a dangerous beast. Do we really need to kid ourselves about that? Are we incapable of learning anything from the horrors upon horrors of the century past, not to mention the mindless violence and pain of our present world, the endless spectacles of terrorism and abuse, of misery and destruction? The sociological, economic and political responses and explanations for these things are but the shallow expressions of the deeper heart of darkness that is the spiritual truth of what is in us of ourselves; the truth that Jesus knows about ourselves. To know that “I am desolate and in misery” moves us to prayer, “turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me”(Ps. 25.16), as the gradual psalm this morning makes clear.
Here in today’s rather bleak Gospel, Jesus addresses the demons that possess our souls. Are we kidding ourselves that there aren’t such demons in a culture of addiction and obsessive and destructive behaviours? Ours is the culture of scattered minds and shattered souls, in part because we will not face the nothingness of ourselves and so remain the prisoners of our own disillusionments. This gospel story shatters such illusions.
Here Jesus casts out demons and in return is accused of being possessed of a demon! He points out the logical contradiction of such accusations; calling what is good not–good is the on-going reality of the story of the Fall in each of us. But in the Gospel, there is an heightened understanding of this reality. It means also an active will to destroy.
This, ultimately, is the meaning of the crucifixion, the mad rage of our humanity against the absoluteness of God, the vain attempt to destroy God. God wills to place himself in our hands so that we might have our way with him. Only so we might learn our own nothingness and how, without him and without the charity of God, all our doings and all our lives are, indeed, nothing worth. On the cross, Christ even voices the radical meaning of our self-willed desolations, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Out of the destructive nothingness of sin, there is the heart-wrenching prayer to God that illumines our nihilism and counters it.
The gospel story goes on to relate the vanity of our attempts to cleanse our own souls ourselves. As if we could make right again what we have made wrong! There is the obvious danger of denying that something has happened which putting things right cannot ignore. To pretend that things are otherwise than what they are is to will a lie. We deceive ourselves and “the last state is worse than the first,” indeed seven times more worse.
We cannot fix what we have broken, namely ourselves in our relation to God and to one another. Only God can restore us to himself and to our true fellowship with one another. It means repentance and a steadfast commitment to the things of the gospel. It means willing or at least wanting to will the absolute goodness of God. It counters our nihilistic despair. Such is the radical meaning of redemption.
For centuries, this gospel reading was even longer and provided more explicitly the actual remedy. It concluded with the remarkable encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman who cries out from the crowd, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck” (Lk.11.27). Jesus replies, wonderfully, I think, by at once acknowledging the statement and then applying it to all of us, “yea, rather blessed are they”, he says, “that hear the word of God and keep it”(Lk.11.28). It is our blessedness to be delivered from the self-inflicted misery of ourselves but only if we will hear and act upon what we hear penitentially and devotionally. Such is the project of Lent. Our self-knowledge returns us to the loving mercy of God in Jesus Christ. His knowing love for us is our redemption but only if we “hear the word of God and keep it.”
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/02/28/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-lent-5/
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