Sermon for Quinquagesima Sunday
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three:
but the greatest of these is charity.”
These wonderful words we hear on Quinquagesima Sunday, Love Sunday as it is sometimes called because of these words. They are words which catapult us into Lent and which capture the real vocation and character of our life together. Our churches are to be communities of love, the places where we participate in nothing less than the divine love shown to us so paradoxically and profoundly in the way of the Cross, in the pilgrimage of Lent. Charity means love. Lent is really nothing more than the concentration of the Christian life as the pilgrimage of love.
Paradoxically and yet providentially, Ash Wednesday this year falls on February 14th. Whatever one makes of Valentine’s day – and there are a number of different accounts – it has entered into the imaginary of the Western Church and extends into the secular world where it now dominates; in part, as an economic generator for chocolatiers, vintners, florists, and various aspects of the silk industry. It speaks to modern romanticism and eroticism.
These, too, are forms of love which ultimately belong to the deeper and profounder forms of love highlighted in Paul’s great hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13 and signaled in the great Gospel story from St. Luke about our “going up to Jerusalem” with Jesus. That journey instructs us in the lessons of love about which we are blind, like the disciples who hear what Jesus says about the meaning of the journey explicitly in terms of his passion and death but “understood none of these things,” and like the blind man “sitting by the way-side begging” and incessantly calling out to Jesus. What does he want? “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” To know our blindness is the necessary condition for our coming to see. In a way, what drives the Lenten journey, here imaged as “going up to Jerusalem” is desire, itself a kind of love. The point is about our seeking what God seeks for us with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; in short, love.
