Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
For I am desolate and in misery
“You were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us in this morning’s Epistle. That might be the only good news since it leads to the idea that perhaps “now you are light in the Lord.” The Gospel reading, on the other hand, is the very picture of desolation and darkness. “Beware the Ides of March,”indeed. Beware of human evil. Yet the good news of this Gospel, it seems, is actually our evil for unless we face that we cannot begin to grasp the radical nature of God’s goodness.
We live in rather apocalyptic times not religiously so much as in a secular way. There is a great fearfulness in the global world especially now with the Covid-19 outbreak and spread. About that it is quite reasonable to take prudent measures and precautions about hand-washing, it seems, and about large gatherings that involve considerable travel from one place to another. All sensible and good. But such reasonable carefulness seems almost eclipsed by a deep fearfulness. That warrants some reflection because there are some real dangers in this fearfulness. The greatest danger, it seems, to me is the fear of the other.
There is even a word for it: allophobia, the fear of others. How do we care for one another if we are afraid of one another? This runs counter to the concept of friendship that belongs to our literary and spiritual traditions ranging from the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the friendship of Jonathan and David, to the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, and so on, and extending to the divine friendship. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says, in a passage that is all about sacrifice as a form of deep care. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Beyond that, there is the even more radical command by Jesus to “love your enemies.” These things counter our fear of the other which can only lead to desolation and misery.
In our fear of the other we forget two things: first, that we are all made in the image of God; and second, the absolute goodness of God himself. Today’s gospel reading from Luke is very dark and bleak, a gospel of desolation that complements the Matthaean apocalypse in Advent about the signs of desolation and fear. In Advent, the focus is on the meaning of God’s coming which is always a kind of judgement and a wake-up call, not altogether unlike today’s epistle reading. What is the desolation in today’s Gospel? It is the reality of human sin which calls what is good evil and then having shut oneself off from God in splendid isolation, the soul finds itself possessed of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself.” “The last state of that man,” we are told, “is worse than the first.” Such is the picture of ultimate desolation and despair, a despair of the good.
