Month: September 2017

“There was war in heaven”

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives; it is particularly a feature of our life as students and teachers and as priest and people. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak as well, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The Angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good. We are part of a larger spiritual community, the community of Angels and humans. “The services of Angels and men”, the Collect notes, are “ordained and constituted” by God “in a wonderful order.” We pray to God that “they may succor and defend us on earth”.

Angels? But you can’t see them! True. You can only think them. That, of course, is exactly the point. We can only think them and we can only think with them. We can even learn from them. The outstanding theologian, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, asked the question, “Can a man be taught by an Angel?” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q.11, art. Iii). The Angels can teach us, he shows, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the forms of violence and abuse, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Perhaps we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know.

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“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”

Paul’s words in today’s Epistle stand in stark contrast, it might seem, to the spirit of the Gospel which seems to suggest that we should not worry about the things of the body – “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” After all, “is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Jesus recalls us to the primary and necessary consideration of Providence. “Behold,” he says, “Consider,” he says, and above all, “Seek,” he says.

It is not that the things of the body and of the world don’t matter. They do. At issue is in what way and to what extent. Jesus in the Gospel puts his finger on a perennial issue in the human story and one which is even more pronounced and even more of a problem in our modern dsytopia. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Anxiety is a relatively modern word, largely derived from the German “angst” and freighted with a whole lot of baggage from the psycho-philosophical traditions of Nietzsche and Freud. It captures a certain unease about the world in which we find ourselves. Since the twentieth century it has displaced the word which Tyndale and the Translators of the King James Version of the Bible used in this passage from Matthew. The English word was “carefull” – be not so full of cares or encumbered, burdened with cares. In a way that describes our world a bit better and in a more concrete way than the various therapeutic descriptors that are part of our contemporary landscape, literally littered by a plethora of conditions and symptoms. We miss, I fear, the deeper spiritual understanding which today’s readings offer.

Suffering is real and the forms of suffering are endlessly diverse and individual. Today’s readings belong, I think, to important questions about good and evil, about suffering and redemption that need to be explored more deeply, especially by the Church. Why? Because of the essential question about ‘redemptive suffering’.

Jesus is not saying that there won’t be hardships and suffering. There will be. And that is the point of connection to the Epistle. To bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus” is to bear the marks of redemptive suffering. It is to bear the marks of the profoundest form of the Providence of God imaginable.

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“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

It is a story of conversion but without anything of the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Yet the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why then the association with sin?

There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome, perhaps, was the first imperial power to outsource tax collecting! Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities.

The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to every one of us. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.

At issue is the relationship between the forms of our spiritual identity and the forms of economic life. What is overlooked in all forms of economic determinism is sin and evil, in the form of our “covetous desires” and “inordinate love of riches” and the willful destructiveness born out of deep hatred and animosity. What is overlooked is how all forms of economic determinism are essentially materialistic and atheistic.

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