by CCW | 4 October 2020 08:00
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 17[1]
And what is that vocation? “Friend, go up higher,” as the Gospel suggests, pointing to the idea of life as an ascent to something more, to something better, to what is the Good. Yet Epistle and Gospel concur that the way up higher is by way of humility “with all lowliness and meekness,” and even “with long-suffering,” as Paul puts it. “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted,” Jesus says. The way up seems to be the way down.
The way up is only accomplished through humility not presumption. And so this loaded phrase is the antithesis of presumption and pride at the same time as it sets us on a pilgrimage to God and places us with one another and with God. It counters all of the obstacles of human perversity and self-righteousness. Jesus here challenges a narrow and restrictive understanding of the Sabbath. It is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as Jesus memorably says elsewhere. Something of what that means is captured in the phrase, “Friend, go up higher,” which in turn signifies the vocation of our humanity. It is about our life to God, in God and with God and so with one another in “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
To go up higher is to enter into what God seeks for our humanity. It means a certain kind of conversion of the soul – our being turned around and turned to God. The turning here is through dialogue, even if it is one sided. “They could not answer him again to these things,” Luke tells us about the Lawyers and Pharisees who appear to disapprove of Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath. Like Socrates, the questions of Jesus confront us with ourselves. Only in that confrontation can we begin to make sense of the positive injunctions of the parable which follows this encounter between Jesus and the Lawyers and Pharisees.
“Friend, go up higher” has nothing to do with the overrated and disastrous pre-occupations of the idea of endlessly upward mobility in our world and day. The most over-used phrase in our current discourse is “going forward.” We might be better off in going back to what we have lost if ever we might hope to be going higher. Higher, though in what sense? Does this mean a repudiation of our quotidian lives, our lives as lived in the messiness of the everyday? Quite the opposite. But it does suggest a far different orientation than what is implied in the false idol of endlessly expanding economic growth and the even more disastrous illusions of the ideology of progress which has so bedeviled our culture.
Paradoxically, this Gospel phrase is the counter to such notions. It is about our going to God by way of God’s coming to us. Such is the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. God comes to us so that we may come to him. Going up higher is about the transformation of our humanity into oneness with God, a kind of theosis, becoming who we truly are in the sight of God. This healing, like all of the healing miracles of the Gospel, concerns the wholeness and completeness of our humanity which is found in God and through God. That the healing takes place on the Sabbath reveals the higher end or purpose of creation itself. We are called to enter into the rest of God, into God’s delight in his creation. In the Christian understanding that has to do with the redemption of our humanity in Christ. Paul’s resonant language about “one body, one Spirit, one hope…; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” speaks to the unity of our humanity in union with God “who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”
This is our calling, the calling to our life in God which is only possible through the life of God moving in us, restoring, perfecting, healing and transforming our lives into holy lives. God seeks something far greater and more for us than our worldly aspirations that are only and can only be about transitory goods. God seeks our eternal good which is our life in him. And this is the grace which “prevents,” meaning that it goes before, and “follows us” to “make us continually to be given to all good works,”as the Collect puts it. We are only and truly in motion when we are oriented to God and God’s grace moves in us.
“Friend, go up higher” is our vocation to God. It is entirely a spiritual motion, the motion of our souls to God as the principle of our being, our knowing and loving. It is equally the motion of our souls from God towards others in care and compassion. It is the same motion. The way up is not about exalting ourselves over one another in competition with one another, in the perversity of some sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest. My good cannot be at the expense of your good. What we have here in both readings is our common good as found in the Good which is God. As the healing on the Sabbath shows, it is for all and not just for the privileged few.
You don’t come to Church because you think you are better than everybody else. Quite the opposite. Christians are simply those who know that they are sinners in need of God’s transforming grace. Such is humility, itself a kind of wisdom.
“What philosophers call intelligences,” St. Bonaventure reminds us, “we call angels.” This week marked the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels and as Bonaventure’s contemporary, Thomas Aquinas argues, the angels teach us by moving our imaginations and strengthening the light of our understanding. Our liturgy too is angelic. We go up higher on the wings of angels. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of creation, ascending and descending upon the Son of man, as Jesus says to Nathanael, ascending and descending upon our humanity. Such is the gathering, the intellection, of all things to their principle, to their being in God. It is our constant calling, our being called to God in our lives with one another in one body and one Spirit.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 17, 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/10/04/sermon-for-the-seventeenth-sunday-after-trinity-8/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.