Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 20
“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”
The days are evil, Paul tells us in Ephesians. It is a sombre sounding note in what otherwise seems to be a rather encouraging exhortation about being “filled with the Spirit”, about “speaking…in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs”, about “singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord”; referencing directly the cultic practices of our liturgy in the Holy Eucharist, “giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The ethical imperative of this is clearly signalled. It is about “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God”.
This requires constant vigilance and instruction. “Be ye not unwise but understanding what the will of the Lord is”. We are at once fearful and anxious about our world and day and yet complacent and indifferent to the things which matter most. As such we acquiesce and contribute to the evil of our days. This is perhaps the tragedy of the Church in the failure to attend to the principles that belong to its truth and witness.
Something of what that means is seen in the rather disturbing scene presented to us in the Gospel story of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten. This Gospel reminds us in no uncertain terms about the seriousness of the invitation to the banquet of divine love and the consequences of our casual indifference; about our being “cast into outer darkness” with “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Cast out even when you think you are in. Why? Because of our unreadiness which is nothing less than our indifference and complacency about spiritual things especially with respect to our corporate life in Christ, to what belongs to our fraternal and social friendships in their deepest meaning, as Pope Francis suggests in his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Simply put and I think obviously so, we don’t take church seriously because we don’t take God seriously. Ours is the culture of the shrug ‘whatever’. Where God does not matter nothing matters including ourselves. We neglect the idea of human agency and responsibility which is grounded in our life with God.
Something is required of us. What is required is our active attention to God in Word and Sacrament. Being serious about God is about being serious about ourselves as moral and intellectual agents; in short, an ethical understanding which shapes our thinking and doing. We are being called to account. This is something profoundly positive which is why this Gospel story figures so prominently in the second exhortation to Communion (BCP, pp. 90-92). We are “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery, and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof, so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture, and be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.”
Something is required of us in terms of receiving in order to be received into its meaning and truth: grace moving in us to receive the grace of the Sacrament. The exhortation spells out rather directly “the ways and means [of this] devout preparation”. In a way, it is the logic and pattern of the liturgy as extended into our lives in terms of self-examination by way of “the rule of God’s commandments” and by acting upon what we discover in ourselves about our thoughts, words and deeds. This belongs to the sense of contrition – our sorrow and sadness about our shortcomings and sins – leading to confession in the awareness of the very things that we have done that we should not have done or have not done which we should have done, and extending to reconciliation and amendment in terms of one another, and to the forgiveness of others even as we seek God’s forgiveness for ourselves. And all this through a deep sense of God’s loving mercy in the sacrifice of Christ.
Our readings today along with the second Exhortation to Communion belong to an ethical understanding of our lives as brothers with one another and the world. The Pope’s encyclical provides an extended meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan as the ethical paradigm for our thinking and living in the midst of these confused, disordered, and evil times. It is really about being called to account.
What does that mean? It is not about external judgement, judginess, as my daughter Elizabeth puts it. It is about responsibility and accountability to one another and to the world in the face of the divisions and animosities, the hostilities and hatreds which currently consume us. In a way, the Gospel is a striking reminder of the worst aspects of our humanity.
To be called to account is profoundly positive though challenging. Something is demanded of us. This is a constant feature of our life in the fraternity of the Church and extends into every other aspect of our lives. It is about the recovery or discovery of an ethical understanding which is very different from the endless moralizing that is such a feature of our contemporary world, what I want to call ‘Manichean moralism’. The Manichees were a religious movement associated with the phenomenon of gnosticism, a particular kind of extreme dualism which sees the world in terms of the absolute division between good and evil and in materialistic ways. In our world, we face a similar phenomenon of being told what to think, what to say, what to do and in the context of ‘them versus us’. Such is the polarizing climate of our day that shuts down all and any form of discourse and debate. Intolerant and self-righteous, it can only lead to more and more division and enmity.
Lately, I have been pondering the story of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel which follows immediately upon it. What strikes me are the questions. The story of the Fall is about the discovery of human self-consciousness. “Did God say?” the serpent asks. His question stands in stark contrast to the four questions of God. “Did God say?” insinuates doubt about what God in fact did say and which in principle we know as good and true. His question does not seek the truth but calls into question what is known as true. That is to say, ‘adam’, our humanity, knows that creation is good and indeed very good and that God did say “thou shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Why we are not told. But the serpent embodies an essential aspect of our humanity, our reason, albeit in the form of negation and contradiction. His words are half-truths. You shall not die is false. Being like God knowing both good and evil is only partly true. In eating of the tree in disobedience to God and in denial of what is known to be good and true, we discover suffering and death. We will indeed know good and evil but not like God. We will experience death.
The immediate consequence of their disobedience is that “their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked”. Such is an awakening to self-consciousness. We become aware of sexual differences. We are self-conscious beings. That is why we wear clothes unlike any other creature in the natural world. Nothing in Darwinian evolutionary theory explains either human consciousness or this fundamental feature of human life.
Left with just this would be negative and not a complete form of self-consciousness. That occurs through the four questions of God which explicitly awaken us to self-consciousness. “Where are you” “Who told thee that thou was naked?” “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” “What hast thou done?” These questions make explicit the true nature of human rationality; our capacity to grasp the truth even in the face of self-contradiction. In calling us to account, God calls us to the truth of our being as made in his image. We are awakened to the truth of ourselves. This is the positive in the negative of the so-called story of the Fall.
The story of Cain and Abel is the story of the first murder. It is, we might say, the logical outcome of the Fall. We discover our hatred and enmity towards one another in the form of fratricide. Cain kills his brother Abel. God’s questions echo precisely the first and last questions in the story of the Fall. “Where is your brother, Abel?” “What hast thou done?” It is about being called to account, to an ethical understanding of our humanity in terms of our relations with one another but as grounded in God and in the created order. To the first question, Cain lies; “I do not know”. This outright lie, a self-contradiction, is followed by a challenge to the idea of any kind of ethical principle: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This is to call into question – just like the serpent – the very conditions of our being and knowing and the fact of our common humanity, the fraternity or brotherhood of our creatureliness.
“What have you done?” is God’s second question to Cain followed by the profound ethical teaching about the necessary connection between our humanity and God. It is a lovely image. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” This story is the negative form of what becomes the Judeo-Christian ethical principle of the love of God and the love of neighbour illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan. We might note, too, the inescapable connection between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God.
To recover something of the sensibility of this ethical understanding is the counter to the aggressive moralizing of our contemporary culture. It is to reclaim a way of thinking that allows us to think more deeply about the nature of our obligations and duties towards one another. In a way, these stories, along with our readings today, belong to a necessary self-critique of human reason such as in Sophocles’ great play, Oedipus Rex. We often claim to know what in fact we do not know even about ourselves. Only by being called to account by the truth upon which reason itself depends can we learn the truth of ourselves and the truth of the dignity of our humanity.
“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 20, 2020