Year: 2019

Then Jesus turned

This Sunday marks the turning of the year, a time of endings and beginnings. “To make an end,” as T.S. Eliot observes, “is to make a beginning” for “the end is where we start from.” He means an end in the sense of a first principle. Metanoia is repentance. It signals our turning back to the One from whom we have turned away. But literally, metanoia is ‘a thinking after,’ our thinking after the things of God. It is an axiom of thought that a first principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but rather by showing that everything after it is radically dependent upon it. This Sunday reminds us that our turning to God is entirely dependent upon God’s turning to us.

In a way, it is about two kinds of intellectual or spiritual motion: a motion to and from a first principle, God. Both motions depend upon the absolute priority of God in his motion towards us and in him moving us back to himself. Advent marks the beginning of that first motion; the Trinity season signals the project of the second. The one focuses on what is properly referred to as justification; the second upon sanctification; in short, Christ for us and Christ in us. Together they belong to the dynamic of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.

“From Advent through to Trinity Sunday,” Dean Anthony Sparrow (1655) says, “we run through the Creed,” through the principles that belong to human redemption as distilled and articulated in the classical Creeds of the Christian Faith. The Creeds themselves are the distillation of the essential teachings of the Scriptures about our life in faith. But “from Trinity Sunday through to Advent,” he says, “the Creed runs through us.” Both motions are interrelated: God’s turning to us and our turning to God, his turning to us in revelation and his turning us back to himself; in short, the coming of God as Word to us and our abiding with that Word.

For centuries, this Sunday was called The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity but was also used and known by way of a rubric as The Sunday Next Before Advent. For regardless of the number of Sundays after Trinity, which varies from year to year owing to the date of Easter, the fifth Sunday before Christmas is always The Sunday Next Before Advent. And for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel reading on this day was John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a story which is also read on The Fourth Sunday in Lent. In each case it is read with a different purpose. Its theme on this Sunday was about the “gather[ing] up of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost” – a kind of reflection upon the nature of our spiritual progress  throughout the Trinity Season – and about the miracle as sign that Jesus is “that Prophet that should come into the world,” an Advent theme about the coming of Christ.

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“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”

Peter’s question is very much our question, especially in a culture of retaliation and revenge, at a time of polarizing oppositions and the politics of power for power’s sake. Shylock’s great speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice calls attention to certain features of our common humanity, including, sadly, revenge. “Hath not a Jew eyes? … hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?… If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Revenge, starkly put, seems to be a certain kind of justice, a getting back at those who have wronged us, tit for tat, as it were. “If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!”

And yet, as Shakespeare shows us, revenge is not only a limited form of justice but actually a betrayal of justice. “The villainy you teach me,” Shylock says,”I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” In other words, we don’t just want to get back, we want to dominate and destroy; in short, to “better the instruction.” We cannot overlook the critical irony. Neither Jew nor Christian, nor Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or any of the philosophical religious traditions should seek revenge; for revenge betrays and destroys our humanity. It is an aspect of our fallen humanity; common, sadly enough, to us all. The play turns on the question of the relation of justice and mercy where “mercy seasons justice”, in other words, perfects justice. The highest form of justice is charity and that is something divine moving in us if we are open to exactly what this Gospel story shows. It is nothing less than a lesson about “the mercies of Christ” and the abundance of his love in us, if we will let it rule and move in us. At issue is the conditional “if”. And if not? Such is the picture of the unforgiving servant, himself a study in self-contradiction.

The Gospel illustrates the point that Portia makes in the play, namely, “that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.” We all stand in need of mercy. The question is about how we come to recognise that common need without which self-interest or the bitter revenge of the self dominates and destroys. The Gospel seeks to awaken us to the significance of mercy. Christ’s parable convicts our conscience with the picture of self-contradiction. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, the servant who was forgiven a great debt refuses to forgive one who owes him a paltry sum. He had sought mercy and received it but when another asked mercy from him he refused it. “We do pray for mercy,” Portia says, “and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” This Gospel is a powerful indictment of our humanity in its hard-heartedness and selfish disregard for what belongs to our common life. But it does so only to awaken us to the divine mercy which redeems and perfects our humanity in and through our common life. If we will act out of what is given to us.

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