Sermon for Quinquagesima
“I will show you a still more excellent way.”
A journey. “A still more excellent way.” Lent is upon us. Lent, not lint. What does it mean? The word refers to the lengthening of the days. We are, believe it or not, looking towards spring after the bleak mid-winter, the brutal cold of February and now the messiness of March. The real spring is the spring of our souls in Christ’s resurrection. Yet that makes no sense apart from the readings and meaning of this day and without the lessons of Lent.
“We go up to Jerusalem” Jesus says. Not I. Not you. We go up. It is a powerful statement. Lent is nothing more than the concentration of our lives in Christ which is about our going to God, a going up, as it were. It is all about the radical meaning of Christ as “the way, the truth and life”. We are being recalled to the journey of the soul to God but with Christ. That makes all the difference. And what is that difference? It is love. God is love.
This is not the sentimental, emotional and romantic love which distorts and conceals more than it reveals and heals. No. It is about the divine love moving in us. Nowhere is that signalled more profoundly, perhaps, than in Paul’s wonderful hymn to love.
In his First Letter to the Corinthians, he lays out a consideration of what belongs to the good of the body, to the good of our lives together socially and corporately for we have no life apart from our lives with and for one another. In chapter twelve, he lays out the rather traditional view that the human community finds its unity in justice with each part honouring what belongs to each part to do within the whole. Such a view is the constant counter to all of the forms of the autonomous individual which infect, destroy and betray our contemporary culture. The counter is our recognition and respect for each other, for the good of the individual within the good of the community, the body, particularly, the body of Christ, the Church. That is true and marvellous but at the end of chapter twelve he says, “I will show you a still more excellent way”. What is that way? It is the way of love.
