“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.
What is that love? It is the very heart of the Christian faith. Love is the virtue, the highest and most perfect of the virtues or excellences that belong to our humanity. But only through Christ in the Christian understanding. In a way, it is about a higher justice, the justice of God which is really charity moving in us.
Charity is one of the words for love but we often have a too restricted meaning and sense of its application. We think of charity as helping the poor and needy. As important as that is, charity is more. Paul is praising the divine charity without which we are nothing. “If I have not charity, I am nothing.” Charity is everything, the moving principle that belongs to the perfection of human life.
Make no mistake. We are radically incomplete and broken, full of “dust and sinne” and should know ourselves as such. That is the good news. Because only so can we be aware of what God seeks for us, our good as found only in him. That is the point of Lent: our awareness of sin and our yearning for grace. “To decline from sin, and incline to virtue”, as the Penitential Service wonderfully puts it (BCP, p. 614), asking God to “forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives.” There is something straightforward and honest about such prayers; a kind of reality check on human hubris and vanity.
Lent concentrates for us the threefold path of our pilgrimage to God: the way of purgation, the way of illumination, and the way of union. The way of purgation is about the cleansing of our souls in the disciplines of “self-examination and repentance”, of “prayer, fasting, and self-denial” that concern our awareness of sin and our desire for God to set love in order in us. The way of illumination has to do with our “reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” by which we are opened out to the mystery of God’s love. The way of union is about our being with Christ through Word and Sacrament and in our lives of service and sacrifice, all of which is about Christ living in us more and more. In other words, these three ways are all inter-related. The way of purgation is equally part of our illumination and belongs to our union with God in his love for us and vice versa for each of these ways of pilgrimage. Charity is the operating principle in each.
Ash Wednesday marks the traditional beginning of Lent. “Fire ever doth aspire and makes all like itself, turns all to fire, but ends in ashes” as a love poem by John Donne suggests but as in that poem love does not end in ashes so too with Lent. Indeed, love, we might say begins with ashes, the ashes of repentance, the sign of our turning to God and of God’s turning us to himself. We begin with ashes but not so as to end in ashes. The ashes are imposed upon our foreheads in the shape of the cross and with the words “remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”, words which recall us instantly to the story of creation and the fall. Dust and ashes signal the way of purgation and illumination that set us on the way of union.
The poet George Herbert in the last poem of the Temple, Love (III), concentrates the ways of pilgrimage wonderfully and compellingly. Lent is about God’s invitation to love and to find our good in his love. “Love bade me welcome”, the poem begins, emphasizing the divine invitation, “yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne”, an awareness of sin in the form of contrition or sadness for the state we are in. Yet love invites us. It is ourselves who draw back as if to wallow in that state of dust and sin. The divine initiative signals something more, the possibility of a journey but only through our awareness of ourselves as “dust and sinne”. Love, the divine love, counters our resistance and reluctance. “But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in, / Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” There is the gentle yet strong encounter between God and us drawing us to himself.
The soul is moved to self-awareness and to confession. “A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here.” Such is an acknowledgment of our incompleteness, of the gulf between us and God. True. But “Love said, You shall be he.” You – we – shall be made the guests of God’s love imagined here as a banquet. In the face of such love, the soul can only confess its unworthiness and the form of its sinfulness. “I the unkind, ungratefull?” What a wonderful and complete summary of our sins. Our sins are really all about unkindness and ingratitude, a failure to know and act upon God’s goodness and kindness towards us. The soul in such an awareness feels the distance, the gulf. “Ah my deare,/ I cannot look on thee.” Sin affects our vision, our knowing which is here confessed by the soul. True enough but “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?”
Love illumines not only our sinfulness but recalls us to the truth of our creation and being. We are constituted by love and for knowing love. Love reminds us of what God as love wants us to know. In this sense we are like the blind man on the wayside crying out to Jesus “that I may receive my sight.”
The soul acknowledges the truth of this but still feels the gap, the distance, belonging to the effects of sin. This becomes the occasion for the greater truth of Love which seeks our good and our union with him. “Truth Lord,” the soul says, “but I have marr’d them” – marred the eyes that you have made, so “let my shame/ Go where it doth deserve,” implying the justice of punishment where the sin itself is the punishment. Love replies most wonderfully and compellingly. “And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” recalling us instantly to the cross of Christ. As the preacher Lancelot Andrewes notes, Christ crucified is liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read. Lent takes us to the cross by way of purgation, illumination, and union. The reference to Christ’s sacrifice acts as the great persuasive to love in the soul; it convicts and convinces. “My deare, then I will serve,” the soul says much like the prodigal son in his return to his father not as son but as servant. Yet Love seeks something more for us. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat.” Such is the superlative goodness of God’s love. “So I did sit and eat,” the soul says. For what else is there to say or do? There can only be our humble and grateful acceptance of our union with love and in love.
“I therefore invite you, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent.” God invites you to enter into his love, the charity which perfects and restores, which enlightens and renews, which delights and unites. I wish us all a blessed and holy Lent. Love is the still more excellent way.
“I will show you a still more excellent way.”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima Sunday, 2019