Sermon for Quinquagesima

admin | 23 February 2020

“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.

Jesus tells us exactly what the journey will mean. He tells us about his suffering and death and about what will come out of that darkness and death, his resurrection. Yet, as Luke so poignantly puts it, “they understood none of these things.” This leads to a real question, at once a biblical question and an existential question. What will it take for us to learn? Paul’s wonderful hymn of love connects love and knowing. And necessarily so. To put in another way there is no love without knowing or conversely, no knowing without love. It is the connection of these concepts that is so crucial.

We have to want to see, knowing only too well the limits of our seeing and our knowing. We have to want to understand and be willing to enter into the journey of the understanding that is the pilgrimage of the soul. That means knowing the darkness of ourselves in heart and mind.

The Gospel suggests that we have to be like the blind man on the way-side who cries out incessantly to Jesus for mercy. Jesus addresses him and asks him what God is asking us, “What do you want?” The blind man says in effect what belongs to the truth of our humanity; he wants to know. “All men by nature desire to know,” Aristotle reminds us, albeit each according to our own capacities. “Lord, that I may receive my sight,” says the blind man. In receiving his sight, he glorifies God, “and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God.”

Wanting to see is wanting to know. It is love and light. Knowing and loving go together; they are essential aspects of our humanity and the counter to the forms of despair that deny and destroy our humanity. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, the journey of the soul to God. That journey concerns the whole of our being. It is an intellectual and spiritual journey undertaken in the body of our humanity individually and collectively. It is the journey to God and with God. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. We go with him in the journey of the understanding about sin and evil which is only possible through the love and the goodness of God.

What makes the journey possible is love, the love of God moving us and moving in us. This is the counter to despair and to the loss of agency in the culture of nihilism. “Thy sweet love remembered,” as Shakespeare says in one of his sonnets, has the power to change our outlook and perspective. What is remembered is what is known.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (Sonnet # 29)

At the very least, there is the suggestion that love is more, though not necessarily less, than something romantic and sensual. Ultimately, all love is grounded in God. T.S. Eliot, for instance, draws explicitly upon this sonnet in his poem Ash Wednesday, changing “this man’s art” to “this man’s gift”. It signals the possibility of an openness to the grace of God without which there can be no turning, no journey. And John Donne in an Epithalamion, a marriage poem celebrating love speaks of the now and then in terms of the images of light and fire, of knowing and desire. “Now as in Tullia’s tomb one lamp burnt clear, unchanged for fifteen hundred year … This is joy’s bonfire then, where love’s strong arts” make one out of two (The Goodnight). Lent, too, is about the light of the understanding and the fire of love. What impells the journey is “the most burning love of the crucified,” as Bonaventure says, Christ’s love and his love in us.

We journey in the now towards the then in hope and faith but already embraced and moved by love. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. “Where there is charity and love, there is God.” Our now and our then are in God.