by CCW | 17 February 2019 15:00
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.
Why? Because justice keeps temperance, courage and prudence in proper order. Such virtues are altogether important but without justice, temperance can become over-regulated and overbearing, courage can become foolish and destructive, and prudence can become limited and short-sighted. And justice, too, means more than human justice which is always partial and incomplete in spite of our intentions. In the Gospel reading what we really see is justice as transformed by love. We labour in the vineyard of the Lord whether early or late but the measure and truth is God, first and foremost, who always gives what is right for each, and always according to his grace and mercy without which we are condemned and left bereft. He seeks the good of all.
In the Epistle from 1st Corinthians, the emphasis is on the firstof the classical virtues, temperance. But as with the Gospel, what we contemplate is the way that virtue becomes, like justice in the Gospel, a form of love alive and active in us. Temperance is self-mastery, especially of our bodily appetites. It speaks to the purpose of the Lenten discipline of fasting and abstinence which is not a weight-loss programme for the improvement of self-image and better selfies but about a more reflective understanding about the good things of creation and our proper use of them. As such it is very much the question: to what end? Paul is emphatic. It is not for the sake of “a corruptible crown,” to the here and now, but for the sake of “an incorruptible” crown; in short, to who we are in Christ. Temperance is re-ordered to our relation to God and with God. It becomes a form of love and as such something positive because it belongs to the ordering of our lives to God.
The things of the body are not ignored but are inescapably part of our spiritual journey. We strive for self-mastery and self-control but not in place of God. The mastery is about temperance as a form of love moving in us in our journey towards God and with God. It is informed by love, the greatest of the theological virtues, which perfects all the other virtues. Our love for God translates into temperance in all things for the sake of God and our life in God. It is really a question about what truly defines you.
Temperance is largely ignored in the culture of endless self-gratification and the culture of endless excess. Both are a kind of idolatry of the appetites, the defining feature of the consumer world. The lesson here is that we are not primarily nor essentially defined as consumers. That would be the mastery of the market over ourselves through our surrender to it. Then there is no struggle, no striving for the mastery of desire and appetite. There is, instead, the endless acquiescence to what can only destroy us. It is profoundly unreflective and uncontrolled even to the point of being addictive and obsessive. We are easily possessed by our appetites and desires but at the expense of the truth of our humanity.
Temperance is the conquering or governing principle of our desires, as Plato teaches. It does so through the rule of reason. He imagines the soul in his dialogue The Phaedrus, as composed of two winged horses and a charioteer; one horse is noble and good, the other ignoble and unruly. The charioteer has to keep them on the right path towards the good; it means controlling our lesser impulses and desires and ordering them properly.
Self-mastery challenges the defeatist and passive idea that we are endlessly, inescapably, and exclusively defined by the things of the body, whether it is the dopamine effect exploited by the digital culture, or the cannabis effect by the cannabis culture and by extension to all forms of substance abuse. They render us pathetically passive, destroying all activity and responsibility in us.
They all belong to a denial of God and to an idolatry of ourselves. We default to our bodies at the expense of our bodies, denying the active role that they have through the virtues as transformed by love in the ordering of our lives to God. Far from something negative, the love-infused virtues belong to our life with God and to the highest and freest activity of our souls. Temperance is like the charioteer who keeps in check the unruly steeds of our desires. That is Christ in us, the love which unites faith and hope, our knowing and our willing. Such is the love which seeks our good.
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima 2019
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