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Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 16 [1]

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.

In a way, we are being shown what it means to be rooted and grounded in the love of Christ which passes human knowing. At present we live in a world of uncertainty. That might be a very good thing, a counter to the false assumptions and arrogance of our knowing, our being “assured of certain certainties” no longer so certain, no longer so assured. On the other hand, we also see the way in which the theological concept of compassion has been co-opted by the secular therapeutic culture and, often as not, turned on its head. It is either the kindness that kills, literally, for instance, in terms of Medical Assistance in Dying (M.a.i.d), or the avoidance of the realities of suffering through the endless distractions of contemporary culture, strategies in the avoidance of suffering. In either case, it marks a failure to address the deeper lessons of love which the Gospel presents; our failure to face ourselves and our world. Apologetics is a theological discipline which is about the attempt to understand and to explain the principles that define a way of being and living.

As Simone Weil, the remarkable and compassionate philosopher/theologian of attention, says “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle: it is a miracle … Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough” (Waiting for God). She notes that in the first legend of the Grail – the holy vessel associated with the Last Supper and Christ’s passion which heals and satisfies by virtue of the consecrated host – “the Grail belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, ‘what are you going through?’” That is what the love of neighbour truly means: simply being able to say “what are you going through?” That is what today’s Gospel shows us.

The story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain concentrates wonderfully the theological concept of compassion as being rooted and grounded in love. How? By the encounter and embrace of human suffering, the experience of loss and sorrow. “When Jesus saw her, he had compassion on her.” Such is his attentiveness to the realities of human experience. He carries the sorrow and loss of the widow of Nain and the death of her only son into his inner being where he holds converse with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The whole of the Scriptures, Old and New, is about who we are in the sight of God’s knowing love. The compassion that heals and restores to life is rooted and grounded in God himself. That is what this healing miracle shows us. God seeks our good out of his goodness and mercy which is nothing more than the truth of his goodness and mercy. To put in in another way, we are enfolded in love, the love that unfolds in creation and redemption.

Such are the lessons of love in the pilgrimage of love. It is “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” For that may God be praised.

“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16, 2020