Sermon for Septuagesima
Every one that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things
There is something exotic about these three Sundays, known sometimes as the ‘Gesima’ Sundays. They have been largely lost from view in the more prosaic and rather unimaginative re-ordering of the church calendar in the contemporary liturgies with such things as Sundays in Ordinary Time, for instance, or the mere prolongation of Sundays after Epiphany. But more important than the names is what they signify.
They are in one sense pre-Lenten Sundays that prepare us for the journey of Lent but that journey is really the journey of the soul to God concentrated into the span of forty days. The ‘Gesima’ Sundays reflect some of the different patterns about the development of the quadragesima, the forty days of Lent in terms of what days were excluded from the numbering. Septuagesima is the week of the seventieth day before Easter at one time marking the quadragesima by excluding certain days like Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, for instance, from the Scriptural idea of forty days of fasting and prayer that lies at the heart of Lent in the penitential progress towards Easter. In short, these Sundays have a special spiritual significance in relation to Lent and to the Lent of our lives in faith; hence the purple hangings this year.
They are all about the virtues of the soul as transformed by grace. They speak to a quality of inwardness and excellence of character that is all about activity. We are not simply passive in relation to the grace of God imputed and infused into us through Word and Sacrament. These Sundays remind us of the activities of the soul informed by the grace of Christ. In terms of today’s Gospel, for instance, we are not to “stand here idle” all the day long but to “go into the vineyard” of creation and work, “and whatsoever is right that shall ye receive.” This speaks both to the dignity of human labour in itself and to justice as the operative principle that governs our labour, a justice that cannot be measured in our terms as the Gospel rather sternly shows. Divine justice provides what is right absolutely speaking and in principle. God’s justice is never reducible to the scales of human justice, again by definition. Yet justice is the last and the greatest of the classical or cardinal virtues in the human soul and for the human community.
