Blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.
Blessings!? Where do we see any blessings in this rather dark and dismal Gospel, a Gospel story which I am tempted to call the Gospel of despair? But then, to call it a Gospel is to say that it is, indeed, a blessing, that it is, indeed, good news. So what is the good news in this troubling and challenging Gospel story? The blessing is in what we are given to see about ourselves in our disorder and disarray, ourselves in contradiction with ourselves and God, ourselves in our presumption and pride which separate us utterly from God and ourselves.
“I awoke,” Dante says in the opening and introductory canto to the Divine Comedy, “to find myself in a dark wood,” a selva selvaggio, a wild wilderness, “where the right way was lost and gone,” and yet he says, “there I found a great good.” This is the essential insight of Lent that brings us to the cross of Christ, the paradox that through evil we may learn the good, the insight that God and God alone can bring good out of evil. This, too, it seems to me, lies at the heart of our Lenten considerations about ‘The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation.’ In other words, we are being opened out to the radical nature of the goodness of God which is greater than all and any evil in our hearts. To learn that means confronting the darkness of our hearts. That is the great good of this difficult Gospel story.
But should we want a clearer and more direct affirmation of blessedness, it can also be found in the longer rendition of this Gospel story. Already a rather long Gospel, it was for centuries upon centuries even longer by way of what follows upon the rather cryptic and gnomic ending that we heard this morning that “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” What follows immediately upon those words is Jesus’ encounter with a woman in the crowd who blesses Jesus by way of reference to Mary, his mother, with the words, “blessed be the womb that bear thee and the paps that gave thee suck.” Jesus replies “blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.”
It is worth noting that this Gospel passage both in its present form and in its longer form does not appear in the Revised Common Lectionary used in many of the contemporary liturgies; perhaps because it is just too difficult and dark, too challenging. And yet the words of Christ to the woman in the crowd illumine the deeper meaning of the Gospel and the Lenten project. It is about our hanging upon the words of Christ and learning more and more about ourselves even in the darkness of our sins. But that means learning about the light and life of Christ who alone overcomes our darkness and conquers our death. Our blessing is found not in ourselves, certainly not in the forms of self-contradiction, and certainly not in terms of our presumption and pride.
It is simply about hearing the word of God and keeping it. Paradoxically, that is to be exactly like Mary: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” Here that word reveals to us the contradictions of our souls, explicitly in calling what is good, evil. Jesus casts out a devil such that one who was was dumb now speaks. It occasions wonder, to be sure, both then and now. What are we to make of the idea that a physical infirmity has psychological or spiritual roots? And yet, that is a profound insight into the human condition theologically speaking. In the Gospel, it leads to a critical questioning about who Jesus is and in ways that take us back to the story of the Temptations of Christ as well as pointing us ahead to the pageant of Holy Week
He is accused by some of “cast[ing] out devils by Beelzebul,” the Prince of the Devils, as it were, and an ancient Mesopotamian name for “the Lord of the Dwelling,” but also a figure of death and decay, the proverbial “Lord of the Flies,” of William Goldings’ famous novel by that name about our modern dystopias. What is interesting in this designation is just the idea of possession, the ways in which the darkness of our thoughts can overtake us, possess us, as it were, and make us the very picture of desolation. The beast, as Simon points out in Goldings’ novel, is not out there as some external and fearful force of uncertainty, but in us.
In the Gospel,Jesus points out the contradiction in the thinking of his accusers. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” He counters their accusation by pointing out the incoherence of evil itself as “a house divided against itself”. Only God can overcome evil; the finger grace of Christ is more than enough. Such is the power of the good. “If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” And such is the blessing. It can’t be something which we can achieve simply of ourselves. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” This counters the idea that we can somehow make ourselves whole again. That presumption can only lead to an even greater desolation.
George Steiner’s 1974 CBC Massey Lecture was entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute.” He noted that “the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts – more or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent – to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology.” He called this vacancy the “darkness in the middle” and noted the attempts to fill the vacuum with the ideologies of Marxist economics, Freudian psychology, and Lévi-Straussian anthropology, all substitute religions, all of which have failed, leaving us yet again with a “darkness in the middle.” He recalls Nietzsche’s much misunderstood phrase “the death of God” which was more about how “the decay of a comprehensive Christian doctrine … had left in disorder, or had left blank, essential perceptions of social justice, of the meaning of human history, of the relations between mind and body, of the place of knowledge in our moral conduct.” Today’s Gospel, I think, speaks directly to this sense of a “darkness in the middle,” not just of culture but of our souls.
What is wanted and needed is our longing for the absolute, our “hearty desire” for goodness of God in the radical nature of his goodness. Blessedness is found in our being open to God in Christ and letting his word dwell in us. “Ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul reminds us in the Epistle, “but now are ye light in the Lord.” Therefore, “walk as children of light.” That is the challenge, the struggle, the struggle to let God’s will and word define us. Christ is the Word and Son of God who hangs upon the cross for us. Is it too much for us to hang upon these words and learn from him?
Blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2018