Month: March 2019

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, with the ashes of repentance and the idea of turning back to God. “Return to the Lord your God”, the prophet Joel exhorts us. But there can be no turning back to God without an awareness of our having turned away from God. That is the reason for today’s readings from Matthew and Paul, the one about the temptations of Christ, the other about our striving with God. Against the idea of the wilderness as a pristine place empty of human presence, Paul seems to suggest that the wilderness is inus. That is where the struggles of the soul for the good take place. And that is the true meaning of the story of Christ’s temptations. It illustrates the forms of our temptations.

The story of the temptations of Christ reveals to us a very basic and fundamental principle. All temptations have to do with our relation to the essential goodness of creation and to the will of the Creator. The very nature of God and the goodness of God is a challenge to us about what we think truly matters and what is truly good. This is what is set before us in the story of Christ’s temptations. The whole aspect of temptation turns on the idea of the good. That is what is primary and what the sequence of temptations in Matthew’s account shows us.

The temptations are about being put to the test. Temptation in that sense is about the relation of our knowing and our willing. Temptation tests us about our relation to what is good and true. They all involve a question about power in relation to truth. The devil here is the tempter as in The Book of Job and, as in The Book of Job, the matter of temptation is explicitly allowed by God; in other words it belongs to our good. Here Jesus is “led up by the Spirit”. The point is not about mere play-acting; the point is that the devil himself is good as a created being. His evil and the nature of all evil lies in his denial of his creatureliness and in his pride and presumption to be God himself. That is to will a lie. It is to turn your back on the truth of your own being. It involves a perversion of the good, a refusal to will the good order of creation and the will of God.

Temptation itself is not sin; sin is the yielding to temptation. The story of the temptations of Christ teaches us two things: first, the nature of all our temptations; and secondly, the way of the overcoming of all our temptations. In other words, we are shown the temptation and we are given the true response.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry