by CCW | 11 February 2018 15:00
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.
The love which defines us arises from our desire and the knowledge of our shortcomings but even more from God, from the divine love which has made us and has made us for himself that we “might lovely be.” The problem is that love is often hidden and unknown to us. It is ‘love unknown’ as the poet Samuel Crossman puts it in a lovely and moving hymn: “My song is Love Unknown”(# 596). The hymn surveys the pageant of God’s love for us in the story of Christ, “love to the loveless shown, / that they might lovely be.” It recounts all the forms of our unloveliness in contrast to the divine love. “He came from his blest throne,/ Salvation to bestow;/ But men made strange, and none/ the long-for Christ would know.” The hymn reminds us of the intensity of Holy Week, of our “rage and spite” against the goodness of God in Christ, of the contradictions in our being, our shouts of “Hosanna” so quickly turning to “Crucify”. The hymn confronts us with our sins and failings but in the greater light of the divine love, compelling us to “stay and sing,/ no story so divine,” and recalling the interplay of grief and love that belong to the divine friendship which Christ’s sacrifice reveals. This is the deep love of God in which “we live and move and have our being,” the love which invites us to himself and makes us partakers of the divine.
“Love bade me welcome,” the 17th century Anglican poet and divine, George Herbert, begins the last poem of his great work of poetic erudition called “The Temple”. Love invites us, it seems, “yet my soul drew back,/ guiltie of dust and sinne.” There is an awareness of our own shortcomings and failings. There is, in short, contrition, sorrow for our sins. “Dust and sinne” remind us of the liturgy of The Imposition of Ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, a symbol of our recognition of ourselves as sinners but also a sign of repentance. “But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ from my first entrance in,/ drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ if I lack’d any thing.” God, personified and named as Love here, not only invites us but comes to us and questions us. This is itself wonderful. The questioning underscores that we are primarily intellectual and spiritual creatures for whom knowing and loving are interdependent activities of our souls.
The second stanza reveals the dialogue between the contrite soul and Love. Contrition now becomes confession, the open acknowledgment of our faults and failings. The soul responds to Love’s first question with the words, “a guest, I answer’d, worth to be here.” This signals an awareness of its own unworthiness, echoing The Prayer of Humble Access where we say that “we do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness.” This marks a profound check, too, upon all the forms of presumption in our disordered world. But it also signals a desire, the desire to be made worthy.
Love’s response is gracious and accommodating. “Love said, You shall be he,” a guest made worthy to be here. But how are we made worthy given our awareness of unworthiness. “I, the unkinde, ungratefull?” The soul confesses in a nutshell what all our sins and failings come down to, namely, our unkindness and our lack of gratitude to God in his love for us. Our unkindness and ungratefulness arise from our blindness; we are not open to God’s love and so it is unknown to us.
Christians in a way are simply those who know the love of God, sinners who know God’s love for us while we were yet sinners. This and this alone changes everything and shapes our thoughts, words, and deeds even in the face of our cultural confusions and its assertions and demands. Here the soul confesses that because of unkindness and ingratitude, “I cannot look on thee.” All too true yet not entirely true because that is to forget that “God is greater than our hearts” of unkindness and ingratitude. In an absolutely exquisite and touching phrase, the poem gives us Love’s response to our confession. “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/ Who made the eyes but I?”
It is all there in the smile, the smile of divine compassion, the smile of the God who reminds us of who we truly are, namely, the creatures whom he has made for himself, echoing the words of the Psalmist:. it is “he who has made us and not we ourselves.” When we forget this, then we are most deadly and destructive to ourselves, to others, and to our world.
The soul in the poem shows us true contrition and confession and in the third stanza compels Love to talk about redemption, about satisfaction. “Truth, Lord,” the soul says about the God who has made us, “but I have marr’d them,” meaning the eyes which God has made, “Let my shame/ go where it doth deserve.” This is an intense self-acknowledgment of the true nature of all sin. Notice that it does not presume that sin can be simply ignored or overlooked. “And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” Love is explicit about the passion and death of Christ who bears our sins that we may be freed from sin. This is the principle of satisfaction in Christ’s overcoming of our sin. It is all about the divine love, the love which compels our loving service.
“My deare, then I will serve,” the soul says in reply, suggesting that at best we are merely the servants of love. This, too, is only partly true because there is something more that God wants us to know. Our service of Christ in our lives with one another is also about our participation in the divine love, a love which has an incredible intensity and intimacy about it captured in the last words of the poem. It suggests that we are more than simply servants; Christ has made us his friends. We are drawn into the divine life itself. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat,” a reference at once to the Holy Eucharist and to the heavenly banquet, to our eschatological end with God. The response is concise and simple; “so I did sit and eat.” The satisfaction of the needs of our soul, our very being, and of the justice of God is found and can only be found in the God who is Love.
God’s love of his own nature and goodness seeks our good, a good which is found in fellowship with God and with one another. Our life as a Parish is about being a community of love; quietly and patiently, sweetly and strongly. It is always about faith and hope, about our knowing and our longing, but even more it is about love. Ubi est caritas et amor, ibi est Deo. “Where there is charity and love, there is God.” We go up to Jerusalem learning the lessons of love.
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima Sunday
February 11th, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/02/11/sermon-for-quinquagesima-sunday/
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