Year: 2020

Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 6

“Jesus said, Love your enemies”

Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel for Trinity IV began. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” Both readings belong to the Lucan counterpart to the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel. Christ’s Sermon on the Plain in Luke complements Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Mountains and plains, death and life, friends and enemies. It seems that  we confront a series of binary opposites in these readings and yet something greater overrides and unites. It is mercy.

The radical nature of that mercy is shown in this Gospel. It is about reconciliation and reciprocity which is a dominant feature, it seems to me, of the great philosophical religions of the world but expressed most clearly and emphatically here. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says. The Gospel opens us out to one of the commonplaces of the ethical understanding that appears in other cultures, namely, the ethic of the golden rule. “As ye would that men should so unto you, do ye also unto them likewise.” The underlying assumption is that we properly and rightly seek the Good for ourselves and for one another.

As Plato notes no one seeks what is evil, only what is good, however mistaken we might be about what we think is good. But to command us to love our enemies takes that thought much further because it implies that opposition and enmity, antagonisms and even hatreds, still persist. To love your enemies is to love those who hate you. Love is in the face of those oppositions, not in their overcoming. Or to put it another way, to love your enemies requires transcending ourselves. It means to see ourselves in a new light and consequently to see others not just as enemies but as friends, as companions, as one with us in our common humanity. I in the other and the other in me.

I am trying to place this radical and essential Christian concept within a larger ethical framework because it is, I think, at once a commentary on the universality of the golden rule and an intensification of it in a most remarkable way. It is, at first glance, an impossible ideal. The question is how can it be possible to love our enemies? How is this impossible to be made possible? For if it is not possible then Christ’s commandment is mere nonsense.

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Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 5

Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord

Peter’s confession here is paradoxically the condition of our abiding in the Word and truth of God. It signals the wonder of the grandeur of God in the beauty of the world and the beauty of human affairs but only through our awareness of our emptiness, our nothingness in and of ourselves which stands in such stark contrast to the abundance of the divine life. His confession complements his exhortations to us in the Epistle to “be of one mind” and to “sanctify Christ as Lord in [our] hearts.” Such things are only possible through his confession here.

Peter’s confession is usually understood to refer to his response to Jesus’ question, “Whom do men say that I am?” to which Peter replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” His insight into the divinity of Christ solicits, in turn, Christ’s words, “Blessed art thou, Simon son of John: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it  unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” But that doctrinal confession complements this confession of sin. Why? Because all confession of sin is equally a confession of the truth of God. Confession is equally praise, an acknowledgement of God’s truth without which there can be no acknowledgement of our sins and failings. As such Peter’s awareness of the gulf between himself and God is the condition of our being with God, of our abiding in the holiness of his Word. That theme of abiding in the Word and Truth of God belongs to our sanctification, to our holiness as found in our abiding in the holiness of God.

How does that work? Through our attention to the things of God in our midst. “The people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” Luke tells us. Do we? Or we are caught up in all of the false forms of knowing that belong to our technocratic world? We are easily caught up in an instrumental reason that limits us to what we think is practical and useful only to find ourselves as the willing slaves to the devices and desires of our lives. The devices are even now quite literal and they so easily define us. But Jesus “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” What was that teaching? “Master” Peter says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” What was that word?

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Audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 4 in Petertide

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye,
and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye

The blind leading the blind is a common image mostly familiar to us from Luke’s ‘Gospel of Mercy’ in the parable where Jesus speaks about leaders leading others astray. It has its antecedents in the prophetic criticisms of the leadership of Israel such as “You have turned aside from the way; you have caused many to stumble by your instruction”(Malachi 2.8), or “Those who guide these people have been leading them astray” (Is. 9.16) and, “His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge”(Is. 56.10). The image has very much to do with a critique of our claims to know. “Eyes have they and see not” extends the image to all of us in our blindness about what we think we know when in fact we are ignorant, and, yet, judgemental about others, hence the moral point about hypocrisy; judging others while exempting ourselves from the same judgment, unable to see ourselves in the other.

The image of the blind leading the blind is not unique to Christianity. It belongs as well to Siddhartha Gautama’s strong critique of Hindu religion out of which arises classical Buddhism. For him the Brahmin caste, the gurus of the Upanishads, are the blind leading the blind. He rejects the Brahmins even as he rejects the caste system altogether in favour of a more inclusive ‘enlightenment’ available for all.

The image of the blind leading the blind belongs to a self-critique of reason and knowing. Perhaps nowhere is it better illustrated than in Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex (Wayne Hankey, Wisdom belongs to God), and in ways that speak to our current confusions about the self and the modern managerial technocratic culture which consumes us. Oedipus thought that he knew who he was both in terms of his parents and in his confidence about his form of knowing when in fact he was blind to both. The play is about how he comes to know that he didn’t know. He comes into collision with himself in thinking that his form of knowing, a kind of discursive reasoning, is absolute, only to discover that it is at best limited and partial. His discovery happens through the encounter with prophecy, in his case, the blind prophet of Apollo, Teiresias, who, though blind, nonetheless knows the truth about Oedipus. The play explores how Oedipus comes to know this truth and in so doing discovers that his form of knowing belongs to a higher form of knowing; it is incomplete and partial in itself. To use a later language (Boethius), he comes to know how ratio participates in intellectus.

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