“Cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you”
Compelling words. Compelling readings that speak directly to our souls and culture in disarray. These words and readings counter the despondency and despair that inhibits and negates life and in particular our individual lives. Why and how? Because they call us back to God in the deep meaning of God for us and for our lives. 1st Peter reminds us of the truth of God, the God who cares for us in the midst of the world’s sufferings and pains, a world in which there is much evil and darkness. That has to be faced and not just wished away. Peter here reminds us profoundly about the realities of suffering, about “[our] adversary the devil,” the very principle of evil, and that “the same afflictions are accomplished in [our] brethren that are in the world.” The Christian Faith does not mean that you are inoculated from suffering. No. It is about a way of thinking through suffering.
God cares. This is a strong statement about the goodness of God but it is a statement which we cheapen by reducing God to ourselves and our concerns, making God subject to us. This is not what Peter is saying and not what Luke is showing us in the Gospel. After all, we are bidden to “humble [our]selves” and to “be subject one to another.” Being “clothed with humility” is the condition of grace, the grace which alone exalts and lifts us up. Such things point to a kind of spiritual activity in us, a movement of the goodness which belongs to the essence of God. That God cares, theologically speaking, does not mean that God is measured by our sense of well-being, but that we are alive to his goodness, his power, and truth. God is always more and greater and beyond comprehension by definition. To know that God cares is to be open to the transcendent and transforming power of divine love, the love that is shown to us in Christ.
That is the point of the Gospel. It illustrates the strong meaning of God’s care for us in the face of the sufferings of our world and day, sufferings that arise from our evil. God’s care requires our repentance. Repentance is the strong term for our being turned back to God. We can only be turned back to God by virtue of God’s turning to us.
Luke in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel famously tells three parables of repentance. Two of them are before us today. The third, and the most compelling of the three, is the parable of the prodigal son or, perhaps better put, the parable of the lost sons, referring to the prodigal son and the elder son. It builds upon the preceding parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin by showing us something of the nature of God’s love turning us back to the God from whom we have turned away. Such is the journey of our souls into “a far country,” the place of our alienation and estrangement from God, regio dissimilitudinis, ‘the region of unlikeness’, as Augustine calls it. Yet it is in the far country of our sins and follies that we may “come to [our]selves,” as it were, and remember our homeland. Our distance from God is also our means to God. But only because God’s grace goes before us, is prior to us and moves in us, awakening us to an awareness of ourselves as sinners, a knowledge entirely predicated on the knowledge of God’s goodness and love. Without that there can be no motion, no life in us. We are as dead as the dead husks upon which the swine feed in the memorable image of the prodigal son’s “com[ing] to himself” in a far country. Ungelic is us, Unlikeness is us, as an Anglo-Saxon poem says (The Wolf).
The two preceding parables are about the priority of God’s grace shown in terms of the man who seeks out the one lost sheep and the woman who sweeps the house diligently in search of the one lost coin. The word, ‘diligently,’ is one of the Greek and Latin words for love, a kind of serious love, signalling deep care. Both the man and the woman are images of God’s love. Once again, though, there is the danger of misunderstanding these parables. It is not that the one lost sheep and the one lost coin mean more than the other ninety and nine sheep or the nine pieces of silver or by extension that the prodigal son is worth more to the father than the elder son. The rejoicing in the finding of that which was lost is for the whole community for it is there that we belong to each other and are properly ourselves. It is not about claiming status. The parables challenge our tendencies to erect barriers and to make judgements about one another; in short, our self-righteousness.
The parables are told in the face of animosity and criticism. Jesus is being criticised for the company he keeps, the company of “publicans and sinners,” publicans here meaning tax-collectors, specifically Jews working for the Roman authorities by gathering monies from their fellow Jews. You can bet that they weren’t particularly popular. Hence the association with sinners. Jesus tells these parables to convict us of our self-righteousness; the way we look at one another and create insidious and invidious distinctions based upon envy and pride. The parables seek to awaken us to who we are in the sight of God. God’s care inspires the necessity of our care and respect for ourselves and for one another in complete contrast to our self-righteousness which assumes that we are better or superior to others. In so doing, we promote ourselves at the expense of others rather than seeing one another as embraced in the goodness and love of God. The paradox is that such judgements deny our individual lives. We reduce ourselves and others to types, to things, to objects really. Yet our unique and metaphysical self is irreducible to others or to some imagined thing, some abstraction of class or type. It is only in and through our individuality that we know ourselves in a community, the community defined by its trust and openness to God.
Our summer journeying is not to the far country of our self-alienation. It is the journey of our souls to God because God cares for us even “in the dark wood,” as Dante puts it, the selva obscura e selvaggio, the savage wilderness that we have made, of God’s creation and our lives. Yet even there we may find a “great good” in the awakening to God’s care. Such will be our joy and our good together, even our coming to ourselves.
“Cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity III, 2019
Christ Church & St. Thomas’