by CCW | 5 November 2017 15:00
“Faith cometh by hearing”, St. Paul remarks, setting up an interesting contrast between the two most intellectual of the senses, hearing and seeing. It is interesting to see how that contrast plays out in the Scriptures and, then, in the various forms of cultural expression. The ancient Greek world, as Alberto Manguel observes, largely expresses itself in monuments, statues and buildings, think of the Parthenon, the Venus de Milo, and Greek amphitheaters. Jewish or Hebrew culture, on the other hand, expresses itself more through words spoken and then written down, the Scriptures. Later one might contrast Catholic and Protestant Europe and its successors in terms of the prominence given to the visual – things seen – in Roman Catholic Churches as distinct from the emphasis given to things audible – words and music – in Protestant churches. These are, I hasten to add, primarily differences of emphasis and not categories of exclusion one way or the other. At issue are the respective forms of balance between the Word visible and the Word audible such as in our own liturgy in terms of Word and Sacrament.
Such things speak to the forms of our understanding about matters spiritual. In today’s gospel a certain priority is given to hearing in the story of the healing of the nobleman’s son. The nobleman having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again and all without seeing. This happens in the context of Jesus’ general remark and critical observation that challenges the empirical aspects of our own culture. What is heard and believed actually stands in complete contrast to what apparently is wanted to be seen. As Jesus notes, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” It is a critical comment that hints at a problem, namely the idea of demanding that things be literally visible and sensible as distinct from intelligible. God, of course, by definition cannot be seen and his grace made manifest in human lives is not really something that can be empirically grasped and measured, put into a test-tube or particle accelerator or somehow quantitatively known. The deeper question is more about how God’s grace lives and moves in us, how God’s word has its resonance in us, literally, how it is echoed in us. The catechism, for instance, means an instruction but the actual word is about what is being echoed in us.
We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvellous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland of the spirit, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, reminding us, too, of the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and culture.
They remind us of what we are so often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness. The theologian David Bentley Hart has identified this emptiness as “metaphysical boredom”, the modern disease of secular society when the deepest questions of meaning, which are inescapably religious and philosophical, are banished from public life and thought or mocked and derided as in the intellectually embarrassing recent remarks of our latest Governor-General.
In the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are about the resonance of God’s Word in human lives. Without that our churches are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”
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 concerns. 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. 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 which contributes to the radical instability of the self in our disturbing times, we are being shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” and my will only as found in God’s will, but only through the resonance of that Word in us, that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom.
In the Gospel, Jesus, simply tells the man, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” John tells us, he “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 himself under the power of that Word. That is what defines the Saints and the Communion of Saints.
“Thy son liveth” 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 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. Such is the meaning of prayer.
That faith “cometh by hearing” and in the captivity of the understanding to the Word means that faith cannot be primarily a sensual or emotive experience. Only the understanding as captive to the Word can shape our desires and bring them to fulfillment in God in the face of each and every tribulation.
The resonance of that Word in us means a boldness of faith and a quiet confidence of faith in the face of a world which incessantly demands signs and wonders, on the one hand, and despairs of God, on the other hand. It also means a deepening of the understanding of the Word, an increase of faith, in us. The fourteenth century mystic, Julien of Norwich, remarks that “the greatest honour we can ever do unto Almighty God is to live gladly in the knowledge of his love.”
Such is the power of doctrine living in us. In going his way the man hears – he does not see – that his son lives 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 further 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 we properly find our place, our place, ultimately, in that Communion of Saints which signals the vocation of our lives, namely, to let God’s Word have its resonance in us; in short, “to live gladly in the knowledge of his love.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI
(In the Octave of All Saints)
November 5th, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/11/05/sermon-for-the-twenty-first-sunday-after-trinity-4/
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