Month: February 2017

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne. /But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/ Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” So begins the last poem by George Herbert entitled Love (III) which concludes his collection of poems known as The Temple. This Sunday, too, is about an invitation, an invitation to a journey. The poem in its three stanzas references three basic features of our Anglican liturgy: contrition – our sorrow for our sins; confession – our explicit acknowledgment of sin; and satisfaction – what restores us to wholeness. And yet the poem alludes as well to the essential character of the Christian journey as a pilgrimage of the soul by way of purgation, illumination and union. We are invited to a journey, to the pilgrimage of love. That is the character of our Christian journey concentrated for us in Lent.

There are of course different kinds of journeys, both ancient and modern. Some are flights from the world, a fleeing from all the attachments which belong to ordinary human lives and which are seen as ultimately illusory and nothing. We escape from them into a kind of emptiness, a nirvana of the spirit, if you will. All of the great religions of the world speak to the problem of our attachments though each in their own way.

Some are journeys of discovery, like Homer’s Odyssey. For Odysseus, the journey is about learning the order of things, the order of the cosmos and the place of our humanity in it. The way is through suffering, the suffering of ignorance and presumption in which truth is learned, at least by the hero. But the end is emphatically not union with God; at best there is a likeness, a commonality between the hero and the gods. He achieves his homeland, Ithaca, to be sure. And like his wife, the patient and wise Penelope, his journey weaves a story of virtue and understanding which delights the gods and men. But beyond Ithaca, his end is with all men in the land of the shades, in the indeterminancy and emptiness of Hades. There is even the sense that what belonged to his glory must also be forgotten; his last journey is to a land where his oars are mistaken for winnowing fans. Something is learned, but there is no abiding in the accomplishment, no end for man with the blessed ones. The end lies, instead, in the virtue of the striving, in what is learned through the suffering and in what is sung in the song afterwards.

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“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

“I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches.” It is one of the greatest of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus with predicates – metaphors which have to do with God’s relation to us through the divine self-relation. In this case, the metaphor is that of the vine and the branches that belong to the idea of indwelling, our dwelling in God and God in us. As one of the “I am” sayings it points us to the divine revelation of God to Moses through the Burning Bush, “I am who I am.” It is a strong endorsement of the essential divinity of Christ and a powerful image about our life in and with God sacramentally. It is significant that this is the Gospel chosen for the commemoration of St. Matthias.

Why? Because of the interrelation of the two concepts of substitution and indwelling or incorporation into the body of Christ. Matthias is the disciple chosen by lot and by prayer to take the place of the traitor Judas. As the Collect reminds us, we cannot think about Matthias without recalling Judas’ betrayal. He is chosen to take Judas’ place not as a betrayer but as a faithful apostle. He is chosen to be an essential part of the apostolic fellowship which lives and can only live from Christ. The imagery of vine and branches is something organic and dynamic. The life-blood of the Church as the body of Christ is Christ’s life in us sacramentally.

The Gospel and the Lesson are most instructive. The Lesson from Acts focuses on the act of choosing, implicitly confirming the origins of ecclesiastical polity but as based upon a theological insight. What is that insight? The form of our indwelling God through the Word made flesh and the way in which that truth is made known to us.

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The parable of the sower and the seed focuses our attention on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. It recalls the story of the Fall. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God. The ground of creation becomes the place of alienation from God. Our labour, as we saw last week, is based upon this sense of separation yet becomes a part of the work of redemption. We are returned to God but only through our awareness of our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation.

Recall the story from Genesis. In a lovely image, God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence. Why? Our fear is the beginning of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe – the problem is not with the dust of nature – but in the disobedience of man. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to man – and only to man – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

Alone of all creation, the Adam – our humanity – is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator. The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.

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