by CCW | 16 October 2016 15:00
“Faith cometh by hearing”, Paul famously tells us, adding “and hearing by the Word of God”. It is a challenging and important concept especially in our rather visually fixated age where so much emphasis is placed on images seen on screens, on what is curiously called ‘virtual reality’ which already suggests something not entirely real, something not fully actual. It is commonly said that ‘seeing is believing’ and yet we are only too aware of the ambiguities and the distortions about what is claimed for as being seen. Is it actual or merely a simulacrum of reality; indeed, something merely photo-shopped?
But then isn’t there a similar ambiguity and uncertainty about what is said and heard? Especially in the current culture where truth seems to have flown completely away, at least if the American presidential election campaigns are anything to go by. We confront a world, it seems, where fear and negativity and lies that are known as lies triumph over truth and honour, over considered belief and honesty, what Rex Murphy has called, with due apologies to Tom Wolfe, “the bonfire of the inanities”. But the world wants, it seems, something good to come out of America. Perhaps that explains the awarding of the Nobel prize for literature to Bob Dylan, one last paean of praise to the sixties and its siren calls to a kind of peace and truth, to a kind of innocence in contrast to hypocrisy and deceit, for “Where preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits/Can lead to hundred-dollar plates/Goodness hides behind its gates/But even the president of this United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Not exactly a pleasing mental image in the current situation, to be sure. Yet the idea that “Goodness hides behind its gates” is a powerful thought and, perhaps, just perhaps, it is in the context of that awareness that this gospel can begin to speak to us.
It is really a question about the resonance of God’s word in us, about our being alive to truth over and against the lies and the deceits of our own hearts. Here in this powerful gospel story what is heard and seen stands in stark contrast to what is wanted, even demanded and required to be seen. Jesus addresses this directly. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”. He speaks, it seems to me, to an almost universal feature of our humanity – the desire for signs and wonders. Jesus names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present – immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were – faith has no meaning. The Word has, literally, no resonance in us.
In the Gospel, the demand is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective: “Come down ere my child die”. Something divine in Jesus is at once acknowledged and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires, there the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word and not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such acknowledgement is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.
The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” that we pray in the Lord’s Prayer and my will, your will, our will, only as found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will, but only in the captivity of our understanding to the divine Word – to the resonance of that Word in us, to that Word taking shape in us according to its own sovereign freedom.
In the Gospel, Jesus, who says “except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,” tells the man, who besought him to come down and heal his son, “Go your way, your son lives”. We are told by John – and this is the interest of his gospel here – that “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way”. His believing is his acting upon what he has heard. He gives his understanding over to the Word and places his desire under the power of that Word. It is an explicit acknowledgment of the truth, a commitment to truth itself, we might say.
“Go your way”, Jesus says. He does not say, “I am subject to your way”, to your demands and expectations. No. “Go your way, your son lives” is what he says. The statement “your son lives” stands upon the condition of the priority of God having his way, as it were, with us. God, of course, will not have his way with us simply against our will but only through our wills; our wills finding their place in God’s will through the play of his Word upon our understanding. The man’s desire for the healing of his son, with all its poignant intensity, is simply placed with God.
That “faith cometh by hearing” means that faith cannot be primarily a sensual or emotive experience. This is one of the great dangers of contemporary religion – perhaps one of the legacies of the sixties. Priority is given to an emotive and sensual experience over and against the understanding. Yet it is the understanding in captivity to the Word which alone can shape our desires and bring them to fulfillment in God.
The resonance of that Word in us means a boldness of faith and a quiet confidence of faith precisely in the face of a world which incessantly demands signs and wonders and yet confronts cynicism and untruth. It also means a deepening of the understanding in the Word – an increase of faith in us. The captivity of the understanding is no imprisonment of the mind to a dungeon of dogma. Rather, it is its freedom for inquiry in the Word, for the form of living doctrine in the soul. Thus, in going his way the man hears – he does not see – that his son is alive and “he inquired of them the hour when his son began to amend”. The inquiry is not an external testing of God’s Word, putting God to the test, as it were. No; it is rather the resonance of that Word in the man who, having heard Jesus’ word, went his way. The captivity of the understanding opens out a way of understanding in which our desires properly find their place.
We come to God in prayer, not to bend his will to ours, but to allow his Word to capture our understanding and to shape our wills to his. For such is the sovereign freedom of God’s Word in us and such, too, is what it means to “put on the whole armour of God” that alone allows us “to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand,” confident, alert and alive to the truth of God and its power in our lives. Such is the actual resonance of God’s Word in us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/10/16/sermon-for-the-twenty-first-sunday-after-trinity-3/
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