“All men are seeking for thee”
Lent is the season of our striving to strive for the things of God that belong to the good of our humanity. The conjunction of this Ember Wednesday with the commemoration of St. Gregory the Great, one of the founding giants of the medieval Church and of western Europe, is perhaps instructive and at least intriguing. The Ember seasons belong really to the development of western Christianity to which Gregory was a major contributing figure; one has only to think of the formative power of what came to be known as Gregorian Chant in the liturgy of the western Church. The Ember seasons belong as well to a recognition of the order and life of the Church as the body of Christ and to a certain sensibility about the natural world in relation to our spiritual lives; in short, to a sacramental understanding. The Ember seasons not only recall us to Pentecost as the birth of the Christian Church; they also recall us to our lives as embodied within the patterns of nature’s year.
Our Lenten programme this year seeks to explore the sacramental imagery that the Christian Church found in the Scriptures, particularly the Jewish Scriptures or what Christians have commonly called the Old Testament. A sacramental understanding has very much to do with the relation between Word and Sacrament and with the way in which the things of the world belong and contribute to our life of faith and to the forms of our participation in the life of God in Christ. The sacraments are, after all, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, as the Catechism teaches. In a way, they are a critical feature of all religions. Something invisible and spiritual is made known through what is external and visible.
It is a feature of Judaism that the world reveals the glory of the Lord. A sacramental understanding necessarily connects us to creation. To speak of creation is to speak about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not created. That connection between God and the world and between God and our humanity as created beings is essential to our thinking sacramentally. The sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion recall us to creation as the means of our participation in the life of God. The things of the world become the vehicles and vessels of our spiritual life. As Paul wonderfully puts it in Romans, the invisible things of God are made known through the visible things of creation. At once, the scriptural ground for what will be known as natural law, it also belongs to a sacramental understanding. The sacraments are not an add-on, a holy extra, as it were, but rather essential to the nature of the Christian religion and to its doctrine and patterns of thinking.
So the beginnings of a sacramental understanding are found in the very idea of creation. The world and our humanity within the world are created by and for God. The sacraments right from the outset are a critique of the mistaken idea that in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic view, the world is made for us. To the contrary we are inescapably part of the created order and exist in a knowing relation to the Creator. The sacraments are about our honouring that relation explicitly. To speak of creation is to speak of the world not as a random accident but as an ordered whole, a cosmos, in which we, too, find our place. The sacraments remind us that the world exists for God.
In this way, our lives are profoundly sacramental which is to say that in every way our embodied lives in the world are connected to our life in God and to our participation in the divine life. To think sacramentally changes our whole orientation and way of thinking about nature. It counters explicitly our manipulative and destructive relationship to the natural world in which we reduce the world to just stuff which we presume to manipulate to our ends. To think sacramentally recalls us to God and to the world in God.
It is not surprising that the Christian Church found in the Old Testament a wealth of images and associations that informed its thinking about the nature of our relation with Christ. Baptism and the Eucharist, in particular, draw upon a vast range of Old Testament imagery. Both are especially related to the narratives of the passover which is the major defining event in the Jewish understanding. The exodus, one might say, provides the perspective from which Genesis and the idea of creation emerge. It has very much to do with the idea of a transcendent God upon which time and nature radically depend.
The Book of Exodus is a primary source for much of the sacramental imagery of the Christian Church. Exodus is about a going forth, a journey in which the Hebrews come to understand themselves as the people of God defined by the Law, itself the universal moral code for our humanity and engraved upon tablets of stone; something sacramental, we might say, in which the invisible is made visible. The story of Moses and the burning bush is altogether central to that understanding and to the sacramental understanding. God reveals himself to Moses as “I am Who I am”, the principle of the being and knowing of all things to put it philosophically, but especially as the beginning and end of rational beings, our humanity, as later theologians like Thomas Aquinas note. God reveals himself in and through the burning bush, a bush which burns but is not consumed.
This at once highlights the nature of God as Creator who is above the natural world as its cause and principle and who cannot be reduced to it. Instead the natural world becomes the means by which God makes himself known in his transcendent truth and goodness. Moreover, God reveals himself to Moses in two ways, first in terms of a particular tribal identity, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”, secondly, in terms of his universality upon which all life depends, “I am Who I am”. Thus what is particular and natural, the family, as it were, is gathered up into something universal and for all. God says to Moses, “I am has sent you”. That is the statement that inaugurates the journey of the exodus, the statement, too, that marks the introduction to the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”. Just as the Law is the ground of our rational freedom, our liberation, as it were, so too the sacraments are about our participation in the God who reveals himself as “I am Who I am”.
The story of the exodus provides a host of images that contribute to the sacramental understanding. The Passover itself informs the story of Christ’s last supper and thus the meaning and nature of the Eucharist. The crossing of the Red Sea, too, is a crucial image for the meaning and understanding of Baptism. Both events in the Book of Exodus emphasize the divine initiative but one in which the things of the natural world are taken up and used for a spiritual purpose. It is all about signs and things signified; in short, the sacraments as the means of our participation in the life of God.
Each of the Embertide observances have a special focus. The theme of the Lenten Ember readings is on missionary work in our own country. By the preaching of the Word of God, Paul reminds us that “you became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction” and yet, he adds, “with joy of the Holy Spirit: so that ye were examples to all that believed.” We are called ourselves to be the signs of our faith and belief to others, in short to be what we believe is itself sacramental. In the gospel reading from Mark, “all the city was gathered together at the door” seeking the healing grace of soul and body which Christ bestows before rising up and departing to a solitary place to pray. Simon Peter and others follow after him and say “all men are seeking for thee”. Christ makes his mission clear. He goes forth into the neighbouring towns; he is not constrained to one place. He goes forth to preach “for therefore came I forth”. Something is made known and we participate in that which is proclaimed and made known. Preaching is not opposed to the sacraments. Word and sacrament go together.
The Word heard is the Word made audible; the Sacraments are the Word made visible. They go together. The harmony of their relation is part of the close association of intellect and sense that are an important feature of Anglican spirituality. Christ gathers us into his life so that his life may live in us, in the world and in the places where we live. Such are the missionary implications of a sacramental understanding. We can only strive to strive for the things which Christ wants for us and to seek his will.
“All men are seeking after thee”
Fr. David Curry
Ember Wednesday (Comm. of Gregory the Great, transf.)
Lenten Programme: Thinking Sacramentally I
March 13th, 2019