Sermon for Quinquagesima
“For now we see in a glass darkly”
The most important thing that has happened to you today, and perhaps even the most important thing in your life is that you have heard the remarkable readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Now and then, nunc et tunc. “Now … in a glass darkly but then face to face.” Now and then. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A profound statement, it captures an essential aspect of our humanity. This ‘now and then’ is about the recognition that our knowing is at once limited and partial but, and this is the crucial point, something which belongs to the divine knowing and to our participation in that knowing. “[We] shall know even as [we are] known.” This is an amazing insight which checks and challenges, counters and corrects all our assumptions.
It is ancient wisdom in the sense of the realization that human knowing is by definition finite and incomplete and utterly dependent upon an intellectual principle which is beyond our knowing, and which at once unites the knowing and being of everything. It is the underlying assumption without which there can be no scientia, no knowing whatsoever, including our modern sense of science, for instance, and yet it is, shall we say, by definition beyond the unity of being and knowing as well. God, in other words, cannot be tied to us and to our interests and concerns, to our knowing.
Some will conclude, and many have in the culture of secular atheism, that God is completely irrelevant and unnecessary to our thinking and doing. That is the opposite to the kind of thinking that these readings present to us. What is revealed here for thought is precisely how we cannot think ourselves or the world without an awareness, albeit “in a glass darkly,” of that upon which our thinking and being necessarily depend. We see but “in a glass darkly,” yet we see and our seeing is part and necessarily a part of the greater knowing that belongs to God himself.
Such is the suggestive power of Paul’s most famous and intriguing hymn to love which launches us into Lent, into the programme of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that is the journey of the soul. It begins on Ash Wednesday and it begins profoundly with our awareness of our darkness and unknowing. Yet, more profoundly, it begins with love, the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. It begins with the awareness of something more than ourselves. It begins with love, the divine love which is light and life in itself and in us. It begins with the desire in us to go up to Jerusalem that we might begin to see what Jesus wants us to see and know. That is the connecting point to the Gospel. Knowing and loving are interconnected. There can be no knowing without the desire to know.
