Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 16
To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge
Paul in Ephesians lays out wonderfully the principle that will underlie the itinerary of the soul in what becomes the Trinity season in the liturgy of the Church. It is about our being “rooted and grounded” in love. We journey in love and bylove to love in the growing awareness of God and of ourselves, mysteries which by definition we can never fully exhaust. The journey of the soul is something inward albeit conveyed by our reflection upon things outward in creation and even through suffering and tribulation, our own tribulations as well as others. The love of God is learned through things positive and negative; both lift us up into the mystery of God which is always greater than ourselves and the world.
Love is learned, not just felt. The passage from Ephesians, like Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians, belongs to the intellectual traditions of amor which in turn draw upon the Platonic eros, the passionate desire to know, so profoundly explored and explicated in the Symposium. Love leads us to the Good, to the knowledge of a principle of beauty and goodness upon which every part of the journey, from the very lowest to the very highest depends. It is what Paul speaks of here as “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of love, the love of God running through all things. In the Christian understanding, it means “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge;” in short, to know what is beyond our knowing.
Such a way of thinking challenges our contemporary assumptions about an instrumental, mechanical, and technocratic reason which reduces us all to objects, to things. That is really a kind of anti-love, a betrayal of the love of God which is the ground of our very being and knowing. It is very much the dilemma and problem of our age. Yet “wisdom taught me,” the Wisdom of Solomon says, but are we teachable? Are we able to learn about the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary which has to do with our life in God and God in us, the very things which the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the Faith would teach us? And how will we learn the lessons of love?
In today’s Gospel, we have a story which teaches the meaning of our being “rooted and grounded” in love, the love that passeth human knowing at the same time as it is the truth of human knowing. What we are presented with is a healing miracle of restoration to life motivated by compassion, a very rich and powerful concept, however much it is misunderstood. The theme of compassion is rooted, even grounded, in something intellectual. “When Jesus saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is a recurring expression – seeing followed by compassion followed by love in action.
