Year: 2018

“Friend, go up higher”

Friendship is the antidote to arrogance and presumption. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says to us. And here in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable in which the crux of the matter is “Friend, go up higher.” It captures the moral of the story and scene. “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Such is the power and significance of divine friendship. Friendship seeks the good of each other.

“God is friendship,” Aelred of Rievaulx suggests in his wonderful 12th century treatise, Spiritual Friendship, boldly translating “God is love” into “God is friendship.” The friendship between God and man is the great wonder and mystery of the Christian faith but it connects powerfully and wonderfully with the idea and concept of friendship as it is explored in other religious and philosophical traditions.

At work in today’s Gospel parable is the idea of friendship as the counter and corrective to pride and presumption, to arrogance and domination. In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” friendship is an essential element. Described by the German poet Rilke as “das Epos der Todesfurcht,” the epic of the fear of death, the epic poem is equally about the power of friendship. The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is central to the dynamic of the story and to the making of Gilgamesh as the hero of the culture as knower and doer, as the one who faces the fears of the culture and in some sense transcends them. He does so only through the coming of Enkidu.

The prologue proclaims Gilgamesh as the hero, as the king of Uruk, and specifically as one who is wise and knew all things, all countries of the world, and who brought us the tale of the time before the flood engraven on stone. These are significant accolades and features of Gilgamesh. But the story of the Epic is really about how Gilgamesh comes to be these things. For, at first, he is a bad king and is seen as such by the city. How is he a bad king? By lording it over everyone. By using the people of the city and its resources for his own interest. He is an arrogant bully, simply put. The description is a kind of foreshadowing of the questions about justice that Plato wrestles with in The Republic more than twenty-five hundred years later. Does might equal right? Is justice the interest of the stronger as Thrasymachus asserts?

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Follow me

The Feast of St. Matthew coincides with the Fall or Autumnal Equinox, that point of nature’s year, at least for us in the Northern Hemisphere, when the length of the day and the night are equal. We know, of course, that it marks the official end of summer and the not so slow march to winter with the lengthening of the night. Yet that moment of a kind of equilibrium between day and night, between light and darkness, has a spiritual significance captured in the St. Matthew’s feast day which coincides more or less with the equinox. With St. Matthew, we mark “the closing down of summer” to use Alistair MacLeod’s felicitous phrase, the end of summer officially and symbolically and beginning of autumn. Light and darkness in a kind equipoise, even if it signals the coming increase of darkness.

The wonder of The Feast of St. Matthew is that it signals a kind of inversion of the patterns of nature. If with the Fall Equinox we mark the beginnings of the turn towards the darkness of nature’s year, with St. Matthew we mark the turn to the greater light of Christ. We celebrate two things: the call of Matthew to apostleship and its result in the first Gospel, The Gospel according to St. Matthew. The connection to light and darkness is wonderfully captured, it seems to me, by two paintings by the renaissance painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), a master of the chiaroscuro which is precisely about the interplay of light and darkness, hinted at in the shadowing forth of more profound ideas.

Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ (c.1599/1600), represents  the Gospel story for this feast. Another painting, ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ (c. 1602), hangs with it in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The themes of darkness and light are central to both.

The painting of ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ depicts a dark and interior scene of men at a table counting money with huddled heads, a worldly scene, we might say, of cupidity and cunning (think Wall Street imaginatively). Into the darkness of the scene, following the pointing finger of Christ, light illumines the face of St. Matthew. His face is not only illumined but transparent and open to the face of Christ in a way which the other characters in the scene are not. That openness is the moment of Matthew’s conversion. Out of the darkness of human intrigue, with the accompanying overtones of deceit and dishonesty, comes the contrasting and compelling glance of Christ, a look and a word which challenges and changes everything. “And he arose, and followed him.”

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”

The Epistle reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians complements wonderfully the Gospel story from St. Luke; in a way, the Gospel illustrates the teaching of the Epistle. We are shown something of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”

But what does that mean? Does it mean that love is unknowable or even irrational? The love that is shown to us here and elsewhere in the Gospels is the love of God which by definition goes beyond human knowing because it is a divine knowing, the knowing love of Christ for our humanity which always exceeds the limitations of all and every form of human knowing. What is known is something which goes beyond what we can produce by our knowing. In short, something is known; it is just not something which we produce as knowledge.

Faith, too, is about something known but known as beyond us, as something divine and as such something which is always beyond our finite comprehension. We are being raised up by God to learn and know what belongs to our life with God. It is the idea of being raised up that is key, our being raised up by God and to God. Such is the power of the Gospel story. It illustrates wonderfully the love of God in Christ.

The poet, Dante, in a wonderful phrase, designates Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ (De Monarchia I, xvi). The Gospel story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain is one of those stories which reminds me of that description. It shows the gentleness of Christ and illustrates the nature of the divine love which seeks our good. We are raised up out of our falleness, out of sin and death, out of grief and sorrow. Here is a kind of resurrection story which shows us something about what God seeks for our humanity. It the love which “passeth knowledge” because it goes beyond what we could imagine or do for ourselves or for one another.

It teaches us about what it might mean to be “rooted and grounded in love.” To be rooted and grounded in love is about being raised up into that divine love by “comprehending”, itself a verb about knowing or understanding, “with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of that love, the love “which passeth knowledge.” It is not a knowing which comes from us but from God to us. How that is shown is the wonder and the marvel of the Gospel.

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