Year: 2018

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.

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