by CCW | 19 March 2017 15:00
It is really all about the turning, our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Such are the realities of sin and grace. And yet, as the Psalmist indicates and as today’s disturbing Gospel illustrates, there can be no turning, no healing, no cleansing of our souls simply on our own merit and strength. Not only do “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”, but our attempts lead to greater dangers and, perhaps, to the greatest danger of all, despair. We give up on ourselves because we forget God. We give up on him and then we are in darkness and despair, depressive and depressing, oblivious to others because we are buried in our bitter resentments, worries, fears, and judgments about others.
Lent recalls us to the one who knows us better than we know ourselves and in being turned and turning back to him we find the truth of ourselves. It is the counter, indeed, the only counter to the depressed and depressing nature of our current concerns, our broken world, and our broken selves.
Jesus “himself knew what was in man”, John tells us 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 … saw the signs which he did” when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover. Wonderful lessons, we might think, and ones which might awaken faith. Indeed, “many believed in his name” and yet, “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)
And what is in us? As Lent reminds us, only deceit and dust. Hopeless and helpless. “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, for “vain is the help of man” (Ps.60.11). So what is in us? Not much. In fact, there is nothing of ourselves. Even more, 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.
This is to speak in a kind of contemporary language, the language of existentialism really, 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, it seems to me, its biblical basis in this remarkable and remarkably disturbing gospel story that speaks, on the one hand, so directly to the climate of disillusionment and despair in our contemporary culture, and yet, on the other hand, offers the real and true remedy to our fears and worries.
This is the great mercy of the turning, our turning to God because of God’s turning to us without which we cannot turn to him. We have chosen to forget this in the gnostic nihilism of a culture of despair. Confusion and dismay, anger and bitterness surround us in the world of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post-truth’. Who and what to believe? Good questions but ones which I fear we are not willing to pursue with the intention and intensity required. We have despaired of truth. Our retreat into the little ghettoes of comfort is but an illusion, a strategy of defense, like ostriches with our heads in the sand.
To confront the barren emptiness of our own souls and our own lives is to be awakened to the love and knowledge of God. The absoluteness of God stands in stark contrast to our utter nothingness. This, paradoxically, is the good news.
Jesus knows what is in us. But he also wants us to know. 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 sociological, economic, and political responses and explanations for these things are only the shallow expressions of the deeper heart of darkness that is the spiritual truth of what is in us of 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 puts it, for only so can we be found in Christ.
Jesus addresses the demons that possess our souls. Are we kidding ourselves that there are 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 shatters such illusions.
Jesus casts out demons and in return is accused of being possessed of a demon. He counters by pointing 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 an active will to destroy. This is the dark meaning of the crucifixion, the mad rage of our humanity against the absoluteness of God, the vain attempt to destroy God. Yet 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. On the cross, Christ 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.
The gospel story shows the vanity of our attempts to cleanse our own souls ourselves. As if we could make right again what we have made wrong! 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”, sevenfold.
We contemplate our own follies and realize in the spectacle of the crucified Christ the full meaning and extent of the destructiveness of our own selves. It means to become aware of the utter necessity of attending to the word and will of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures through the ordered life of the Church. For without the grace of God, “the last state of that man is worse than the first”. 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. In place of our despair, we are awakened to “the hearty desires” befitting God’s “humble servants” who seek “the right hand of his Majesty to be our defence against all our enemies”, most importantly, ourselves as the enemies of ourselves.
For centuries, this gospel story was extended to highlight the actual remedy even more explicitly. For just after what you have heard, Luke tells us about a voice from the crowd which cries “Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck” (Lk.11.27) to which 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-imposed misery of ourselves but only if we will hear and act upon what we hear, penitentially and devotionally. Such is the project of Lent. Such is the turning.
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/03/19/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-lent-6/
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