by CCW | 26 July 2020 08:00
Audio file of the Services of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 7[1]
“I can’t get no satisfaction,” Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sang way back in 1965 in one of the great classics of rock’n roll. Yet what he sang long ago, the disciples hinted at even longer ago. Even if the song is, well, ungrammatical, and, no doubt, sexually charged, we get the point. Whether it is “useless information” on the radio, or dubious advertisements on the television, or “ridin’ round the world,” “doin’ this” and “signin’ that” in the parade of worldly fame and in the pursuit of sensual pleasure, such things just don’t satisfy. The phrase captures the human situation rather well. It serves to point to what we need and want and which is shown in the Gospel. We seek something more, something which only God can provide.
Today’s readings are particularly suggestive and wonderfully instructive about the realities of human life. Slaves to sin become servants of righteousness. How? By being freed from sin, the wages or outcome of which is death. How are we freed from sin? By becoming the servants of God. How is that accomplished? By “the free gift of God [which] is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Thus the wilderness of the world becomes a kind of paradise where we are satisfied with what the Lord provides for us; “bread in the wilderness.”
From slaves to servants. The shift in words is entirely about translation. It is really the same word that Paul uses throughout this passage from Romans; doulos in its various noun and verbal forms. In short, we are slaves either to sin or to righteousness, even slaves to God. Yet the transition from sin to righteousness signals something profound. Being slaves to God is our freedom. The classic Collect at Morning Prayer for Peace echoes the Epistle: “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom” (BCP, p.11). Perfect freedom is found in our slavery or service to God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.”
We live in the now of God through his Word and Sacrament. This is the counter to the false satisfactions of the ideology of progress which assumes that we are always making everything better and better; always progressing upward and onward, always going forward, as we constantly hear. But neither is it simply its opposite, namely that we are always making everything worse and worse, regressing, as it were. These are two complementary yet contradictory ideologies that are duking it out in our current discontents. They are overly simplistic civilisational narratives united in one thing: no satisfaction. Either we haven’t got there yet in our attempts at progress or we are utterly condemned, forever and always, to misery and death, the death of ourselves and the natural world. These are the two competing narratives. No satisfaction either way.
Both ignore who we are in the sight of God. The only answer to our dissatisfactions is God. Our humanity is radically incomplete and false to itself without God. And God is not some sort of add-on to our lives, an app to be downloaded to our devices in the illusion that it will make our lives better. No. The only satisfaction for our souls is God and God is now and always. When we forget or deny that truth then we are alone and isolated. We are in a kind of wilderness.
The disciples state our condition quite clearly. “How can anyone satisfy these ones with bread in the wilderness?”, they ask. For us the question is loaded with cynicism. They ask this, it is worth noting, after Jesus said “I have compassion on the multitude.” They have been with him for three days with nothing to eat and are a long way from their homes. In other words, he describes the human condition with respect to the necessities of life; food and shelter. But these universal conditions are more than though not less than something physical and material. Such is the much more radical nature of Christ’s “compassion,” a very rich and significant word in the Gospels. It signals the deep truth of God as love, the love which enfolds us in itself.
Bread in the wilderness. Another set of rich images. The word, wilderness, in the text here is eremia, meaning a solitary place similar to eremos which is a place of desolation, a wasteland, or wilderness. In a way, both words speak to the confusions of our culture about what we mean by the wilderness. Is it a solitary place meaning a place where there are no human beings? Some seek a world without humans. Humans are the problem for the natural world. The solution for extreme environmentalists is simple. Get rid of humans. Is the wilderness a wild wasteland which simply awaits our magical technological touch to reduce it to our ends and purposes? We know only too well where that has led. These are competing and incomplete viewpoints.
The multitude with Jesus in a solitary place means that they are not in a city. As we saw two Sundays ago, “the people pressed upon Jesus to hear the word of God.” It would seem that here we have a crowd who have gone with Jesus away from the city and into the eremia, the solitudine, the solitude of the desert. Why? To be with Jesus so as to learn from Jesus. Just as in the Morning Prayer lesson from 1st Kings where Elijah is sent to declaim against Ahab and Jezebel with respect to the injustice of taking Naboth’s vineyard (I Kgs. 21), so in the Book of Ezekiel, God sends Ezekiel to proclaim against those who have forgotten and denied God. Speaking on behalf of God, he says, “I will lay your cities waste {eremia], and you shall become a desolation, [eremos]” (Ez. 35.4, Septuagint). The point is not simply punishment as something negative but that “you shall know that I am the Lord.” It is through our experience of the world which does not and cannot satisfy and which leaves us isolated and desolate, alone and in despair, that we can be awakened to what alone can satisfy us.
Solitary doesn’t always and necessarily have a negative meaning. It can also mean being self-collected, being together with ourselves as grounded in God. As such solitude belongs to prayer and contemplation, particularly in the monastic traditions which contribute to our lives as centered upon God. In God, our solitude is communal. Being self-collected is about being with God in whom is everything.
Bread in the wilderness recalls the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, the petition which inaugurates the last four petitions which have to do with our lives here and now with God. They speak about our relation to God in the world: “give us this day our daily bread,” “forgive us our trespasses,” “lead us not into temptation,” and “deliver us from evil.” They are really all about finding our truth and the satisfaction of our desires for the goodness of God while in the midst of the world. God is our satisfaction for in him we have knowledge of eternal life, “whose service is perfect freedom.” We can only be awakened to this through our awareness of our insufficiency, our lack, our incompleteness.
We can’t make the world a paradise; more often than not we put up a parking lot. We have forgotten that our churches, too, are to be gardens of delight, a kind of paradise in which we are fed with the bread of God. God “grafts in us” the love of his own name, to use the agricultural metaphor in today’s Collect. God “increases in us true religion,” the proper binding of our being to God. God “nourishes us with all goodness,” the all is everything. We find our satisfaction in him. Instead of isolation and separation, we are gathered into the life of God eucharistically.
Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, breaks bread, and gives it to the disciples to set before the multitude. Such is the image of the Church as a kind of paradise in the wilderness of our world in its denial and forgetfulness of God.
My daughter, Madeleine, sent me a lovely video about the Church-Forests of Ethiopia: https://vimeo.com/390833915?fbclid=IwAR2_jpMorKcY_wUi8ANA7t4A59IQrNoN7fDx5PlnhsmJ-cJ4rvdu-4X9jV8[2]. It reveals an aspect of the spirituality of the very ancient Coptic churches of Egypt whose buildings are surrounded by forests. The Copts have a strong and vivid sense of the sacredness of the churches in relation to the sacredness of the forests which are given to be honoured and respected as holy to the Lord. Ecology is theology. Not the wilderness as a solitary place. Not the wilderness as a wasteland awaiting human manipulation, but the wilderness as paradise, a remembrance of the garden of Eden. The wilderness redeemed is a place of praise and worship, a place where we are gathered into the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. That gathering has a universal quality to it; the whole of creation sings with joy. We are one with God and with his creation when we honour him in his creation and in his word. The wind moving the trees is prayer, a prayer to God and with all who pray. It is a sensibility which I fear we have lost. Yet such an understanding is about living in the deep compassion of Christ. His sacrifice is our satisfaction, our good and our joy. The bread he gives in the wilderness is eternal life.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 7, 2020
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