“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”
I like to think of today’s Gospel as the gospel of despair and one which speaks rather directly to the forms of darkness, death, and despair in the contemporary culture of nihilism. But how can that be good news? Because the nihilisms. the sense of empty nothingness, cynicism, discontent, and despair which pervades our culture and day are named, on the one hand, and overcome, on the other hand. The first is easy to see; the second has become somewhat obscured in the Gospel though it is signaled in the Epistle, “Ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light”. What do I mean by somewhat obscured in the gospel?
The last words that you heard in this morning’s gospel were “and the last state of that man is worse than the first”. This follows after an account of the folly and vanity of evil as being like a house divided against itself, the soul in self-contradiction. We hear of the finger-grace of Christ by which the devils are cast out of our souls. But if we do not attend to that strong teaching then we find ourselves not with God in Christ but against God in Christ and discover that we are in the obscene company of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself”. Evil begets evil when we ignore and deny the goodness of God. As such “the last state of that man is worse than the first”. But that is not actually the real end of the reading. It goes on to say: “And it came to pass as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lift up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck. But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Unfortunately, since 1962 in Canada, the last two verses which provide the necessary counter and overcoming of despair have been left out.
Yet they provide a much more fitting conclusion to the encounter and scene and reveal more fully the counter to our despair which arises from the idolatry of our own autonomy. Thinking ourselves to be light we can only discover our own darkness. Paradoxically, to know the darkness of our hearts presupposes the greater light of God’s goodness. To name the darkness is already to be more than the darkness; the darkness is made manifest by the light.
The contradictions of our culture are great, the forms of folly and despair undeniable. In presupposing our own self-sufficiency we can only discover our failings and our sins. That is actually the good news because only then are we open to hear precisely what God seeks for us. The “devices and desires of our own hearts” can only lead to despair. If we think, as we do, that we are entitled to certain things, if we think that we are owed pleasure and security, as we do, and if we think that we deserve certain things, as we do, then we deceive ourselves. We presume too much. Here in this gospel we confront an image of our self-deception. We call God’s goodness in Christ evil. He casts out devils and we accuse him of being a devil. The contradiction is obvious as Jesus shows. Evil is nothing, a privation of all that exists and is good and true, yet we grant to it a substantiality, a quality of ‘thingness’, which it does not and cannot have. The evil lies in us.
On the one hand, we claim to be utterly autonomous beings unfettered and unrestrained by any condition, free to change our sexual identities, for instance, free to change everything about ourselves as if we were utterly self-made beings, and yet, on the other hand, in the carnival of identities, we claim to be endlessly oppressed, the victims of unending persecution and contempt by society, by history, by culture, by every one who is ‘other’ than us. You can’t have it both ways: claiming to be utterly free and yet utterly a victim. The further paradox is the way in which identity politics has been largely subsumed into the corporate world of global capitalism. All that matters is not you – be whatever you want to think you are for who cares? – just keep on buying and spending and sending us your data for that is all you are, a data automaton, another thing in the Internet of Things. Our despair is the partial realization that this is what is happening to us and in which we are utterly implicated. Despair ‘r us because we don’t know what to do about the ethical deficit in our culture and our souls.
What is lost is the willingness to “strive to strive towards” the things that belong to our truth and goodness in God. That means a willingness to embrace suffering as part and parcel of the journey of our souls to God. Such is redemptive suffering which sees God as present with us in our suffering and how in him our suffering is really no suffering since without God we are nothing and have nothing and with God we are and have everything. By definition, we might say. This challenges the death culture which turns death into a commodity, into designer death, for instance, in which your autonomy acts to constrain the agency of others to do your will, even to end your life. The so-called right to die is like saying “I do not exist”. More despairingly, we might ask the difficult question about who really benefits? Is it really about you in your autonomy or is it more a question of convenience for others, for hospitals and the state? P.D. James in her extraordinary novel, The Children of Men, talks about the Quietus, the practice of euthanasia for the inconvenient and the elderly. This is our brave new world. We are at once autonomous selves and un-selves; mere “organic algorithms” as Yuval Noah Harari says, whatever that means. The self is really an illusion, it is claimed, a convenient fiction to be manipulated and disposed at will.
Jesus is at pains to teach us about the dark abyss of the human heart apart from the light of grace. He is at pains to show us that our true identity individually and communally is found in our paying attention to him, in our will for the absolute. God is the absolute upon which every contingent being depends at every moment. Nothing less than God will do which is the meaning of the cryptic exchange which belongs to the true and proper ending of this gospel reading. A woman cries out in praise of Jesus by way of reference to his mother, to Mary, “Blessed be the womb that bare thee, and the paps that gave thee suck”. It is all too common for people to be caught up in the pride of family and in the posturing and pretense that go with such pride. This is Hants county after all!
Jesus’ response is not to deny the blessedness of the blessed virgin Mary, the one through whom God became man for our salvation, and by extension the family and its web of interdependencies. Tomorrow is the feast of the Annunciation which marks the moment of the conception of Christ in Mary’s womb. How does that happen? Not biologically through sexual concourse but by hearing faithfully the word of God and keeping it in her heart! In a way, Jesus provides the true meaning of Mary as precisely the one who having heard the word kept it in her heart. It is a recurring reference in Luke’s Gospel with respect to Mary.
It is also part of an interesting phenomenon which is largely hidden from view. You look around this church and see empty pews. You think it is dying, maybe it is; certainly we are dying. “As dying,” however, “we live”, as Paul has reminded us, unless we are already dead and unaware of what is actually beginning to happen and of which we are as a parish are a part, namely, the remarkable return of religious belief in the world as “post-secular thinking” takes root, to quote Rupert Shortt in a recent article (TLS, March 22nd 2019). There is, literally, a turning of the tide, an awakening to the transcendent across the world’s religions.
The answers for our despairing world are not to be found in technology; the essence of technology, as Heidegger wonderfully recognised, is actually nothing technological. It has everything to do with how we think about things. To suppose that there are technological solutions to technological problems is an illusion, a kind of idiocy. The only answer, which is not so much an answer or solution technologically speaking, is about another way of thinking. What is that? It is about thinking sacramentally, thinking theologically. Shortt notes three forms of awareness for the believer: “first, that we are embodied beings with the capacity to grasp meaning and truth; second, that our status is to be viewed as a gift prompting awe, gratitude and a heightened sense of ethical responsibility; third, an acknowledgement of this gift as grounded in a reality that freely bestows itself on us.” Such is grace, the grace to which the Gospel constantly calls us, the grace which constantly seeks to engage us, the grace which embraces us and counters all our self-willed despair and our cynical complacency.
It is that active response to the divine will that is paramount. Mary’s ‘yes’ to God means the active yielding of her whole being to the divine will. She wills to be defined by God and as such her will enters into the divine will. They are at one. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, Mary says. She articulates the central vocation of our humanity. It is to be defined by grace, nothing less and nothing more, and in so doing to refuse any other substitutes in place of God’s grace. Ours is a culture of confusion and substitution, a culture of ignorant and not so ignorant idolatry, the idolatry of ourselves. It can only lead to despair and death, to darkness and destruction, because we turn our backs on the word of God incarnate in Christ Jesus, the one who says “Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it”. Such is light and life. Without that, it can only be said that “the last state of that man is worse than the first”.
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2019