by CCW | 15 October 2017 15:00
Pumpkins, pucks, and parades seem to define Windsor, particularly on this post-thanksgiving weekend! How they relate to the matter of love is another question. For here today love constrains us to speak of love. It might not seem all that remarkable a thing to say but I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts and so, too, in the midst of all of our current confusions and uncertainties within and without the Church. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” Can that be said of us?
Two things are extraordinary here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing, partly because they are so familiar. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.
To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is the fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God whose grace defines us against “the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the Collect puts it, reminding us of our baptismal identity in Christ, a far, far different thing that pumpkins, pucks, and parades!
God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing. What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love?
“The cause of every good that comes to us is God and his love” (Aquinas). To love is to seek the good of another, to seek their true and objective character in short, to seek the perfection of the beloved. Do we seek God’s good in loving God? Not as if he lacked any good but as seeking and desiring the perfection of his will in us. It is the kind of yearning for holiness that the scribe in the Gospel seems to seek, so much so that in recognizing the power of Jesus’ Summary of the Law here, Jesus says to him that “Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God.”
Jesus response silences the others, for “after that no one dared to ask him any question.” The scene is a kind of testing of Jesus by the learned scribes of Israel. Jesus 1, Scribes 0, we might say!
The fuller implications of this first extraordinary thing appear in the second. Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, even as he is himself the union of God and man. And out of a myriad of Levitical Laws in the Torah, Christ takes hold of the love of neighbour as “the second like unto the first”. This couplet of love literally sums up the entire Old Testament. Here it is summed up in Christ himself. The perfection of Christian life – soul, mind and body – consists in the charity of Christ. The love of God embraces the love of neighbour. St. Luke gives us a picture of that love in the story of the Good Samaritan; Mark shows us the real thing: Christ on the road to Calvary. The divine commandment to love finds its ultimate fulfillment and truest expression in the cross of Christ.
But, of course, you will have noticed that I haven’t said anything about the final debate and controversy in this remarkable Gospel. You see, it is really all about Jesus’ teaching. “How say the scribes that the Christ is the son of David? This reveals something of the religious climate of the day, the yearning for a Messiah as based upon a certain reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. But what kind of Messiah? He will be “the son of David,” the scribes say, someone from the line and house of David but one who will be a political saviour; in short, a human leader who will restore the fortunes of Israel and deliver them from their current political oppression under the thumb of Roman authority. But that is to forget the limitations and the short-comings of each and every form of human authority and leadership, including the kingship of David as the story of David makes only too clear. This is something which we would do well to remember, perhaps, in the age of Trump and Trudeau.
Jesus opens us out to the beginnings of an understanding about true Messiahship; it is rooted in the life of God, in his essential divinity. I can’t put it more bluntly than that. Jesus reminds us of David’s loving submission to God as Lord. The Messiah cannot be just human. He must be who and what Jesus is, namely, God and man. This requires a deeper grasp of the logic of mediation. The scribes have only got one part of the equation right – Jesus, humanly speaking, will be of the line of David, true, but that won’t square with all of the texts of Scripture to which they appeal. The Messiah must be God, fully divine as well. Jesus 2, Scribes 0, it seems!
As with the thoughtful scribe, Jesus’ response is grasped by the common people who get the point. Salvation is and must be of God even though it is for us and for our humanity. The two loves meet in Jesus and are one in him. And therein lies our joy and gladness, too. They are met and found in Christ; he in us and we in him as our liturgy celebrates. It is what defines us.
Such are the extraordinary things contained in the familiar and the common. We find here the two extraordinary hands of God’s love: the commandment to love God and the fulfillment of love in the sacrifice of Christ, for “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son”. Such is the love which defines us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 18, 2017
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