`“Ye know not what ye ask.”
The Litany is quite a work-out, a spiritual work-out, we might say. In a way, it is about learning what to ask for and about what prayer itself means and looks like. It belongs to our life with God in Christ. “Prayer signals all the service that ever we do unto God”, as Richard Hooker notes. “Teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.”
This brings out an important point. Our good – our blessedness – does not lie simply or primarily in our knowing that we know God, a kind of self-consciousness, as it were, but rather in God himself. Prayer then is more than a self-reflective exercise; it is about “acknowledg[ing] him [as] our sovereign good.” That is the point of the Litany. It is grounded in God and grounds the whole of our life in God and with God. It is, to be sure, a kind of intellection, an activity of the understanding in which all the various aspects of human life are gathered to God in prayer. There is in the Litany a going out from God, revealed as Trinity scripturally and credally, and a return to God in and through the sequence of intercessions “for all sorts and conditions” of our humanity.
Our praying the Litany this morning complements the Epistle and Gospel readings. The Epistle from Hebrews is a tour-de-force of theological thinking about the mediatorial role of Christ. He is, to use the later and necessary theological language, both God and man, who in his pure and true humanity effects human redemption from sin and death. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Such is the nature of his being “the Mediator of the new covenant.” What is that new covenant? Our life in God and with God in Christ as no longer defined by sin and sorrow, by death and despair. How is it accomplished? “By means of death,” by means of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
And yet this is something which we see “but in a glass darkly.” Its full meaning and truth are veiled and hid from our eyes. We know it, of course, at least partially. The cross is veiled before us, but we know it is there. The point is that we don’t really feel its meaning deeply enough. And that has to do with us, with the state of our souls, with the nature of our self-awareness or lack thereof. We both know and do not know ourselves.
But we think we do. We think we know what we want. We think we know what is best for our children and for one another. That is what makes today’s Gospel so challenging and so compelling. It simply points out that we really don’t know completely and fully what is good for ourselves and for one another. In a way, the Gospel challenges and counters our ambitions, our desires for what we think is the good for us and for one another. We are very much like “the mother of Zebedee’s children,” who seeks prestige and prominence for her two sons, James and John; in short, power and position “in thy kingdom.” In such a request we understand a very common desire and one which drives so much of our world. ‘Look at me, looking at you, looking at me’ is one way of capturing the narcissism of the contemporary world and a feature of the selfie culture. We want power and prestige; ‘like me on Facebook! On Snapchat! On Instagram!’
Two things are worth noting here. First, that our sense of ourselves seems dependent on others; secondly, that what we think we want in wanting attention and recognition for ourselves means that we necessarily put ourselves above others. The Darwinian struggle for survival becomes the will to power, to dominance. It necessarily means setting ourselves over others. Look at me and how important I am carries with it the corollary that you are not as important as I am; therefore you must defer to me.
The paradox of the selfie culture, it seems to me, is that we unself ourselves precisely by turning ourselves into objects both to ourselves and to one another. It is not surprising that this inevitably leads to misuse and abuse of one another, to a misuse of ourselves. You are more than a picture of you. In fact, the selfie is at best only an image and not the real you and not even a real image of you.
The saving paradox is what we see in the Gospel. The real truth and worth of ourselves is found in God; not in our exercising dominion over one another, not in our self-idolatry, but in service and sacrifice, in humility. Christ is the “High Priest of good things to come” through his propitiatory sacrifice for us; he effects for us what we cannot accomplish for ourselves. Prayer is our acknowledgement of his essential goodness; our acknowledgement of him as our sovereign good is found in God’s reaching down to us, to use the spatial metaphor, in Christ. He is “the Son of man” who “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Passiontide calls us to a deeper reflection upon the meaning of Christ’s suffering, his passion and his death without which his Easter resurrection will have little meaning for us. We are being recalled to our baptismal identity in Christ, to our being made “the children of God,” born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God,” as John puts it so powerfully. That new birth is entirely about our incorporation into the life of Christ. The imagery in Hebrews is pretty powerful. At once architectural, “a greater and more perfect tabernacle” – an image that draws upon God’s leading the people of Israel into his covenant with them literally “by tenting among them” and through “the ark of the covenant” that encases the law, it turns to the theme of sacrifice.
The image of tenting is the meaning of Christ as “the Word made flesh who dwelt,” literally tented, “among us.” To what end? To our being in Christ as in “a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands; that is to say, not of this building” – even this structure can only point to and remind us of our identity in Christ. That is accomplished through a greater sacrifice, “neither by the blood of goats and calves,” the ancient and primitive forms of substitution that acknowledge the importance of blood as life, “but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,” into the heart of God, “having obtained eternal redemption for us.” The Church is not a building; it is the body of Christ.
Christ in his Incarnation has of us from Mary what to offer unto God for us. He is the “Mediator of the new covenant” and as mediator unites in himself both the human and the divine. Such is the great mystery and wonder that Passiontide inaugurates.
Our redemption is about our being restored to fellowship with God and with one another, to the idea that we are more than, though not less than, animals, more than, though not less than, our bodies, but spiritual creatures made not in the image of our vanities in seeking power and prestige but in seeking the goodness of God. It means discovering who we truly are as made in the image of God. That idea of the imago dei becomes transformed for Christians into our being in the image of Christ; indeed, into the image of the Trinity. But that means our dwelling in him who comes to dwell in us.
Our lives are grounded in Christ. His sacrificial service shapes “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” Our lives of service and sacrifice for God and for one another are about nothing more and nothing less than Christ in us. It is the counter to our misguided notions about ourselves and our desires.
Passiontide seeks the redemption of our desires and not their destruction. That is the crucial point in our liturgies. We only find ourselves by losing ourselves in him. That requires confronting ourselves in all of our false loves and ambitions and desires, learning about God’s love in Christ through all the forms of our own unloveliness. It requires humility not the pride and arrogant self-righteousness that diminishes and destroys our common life.
“Ye know not what ye ask.”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, Lent V, 2018