“For ye were sometimes darkness”
How do we face the darkness of ourselves and the darkness of our world? Do we seek to deny the darkness of sin and evil, the darkness of despair and depression? Do we seek all manner of distractions to escape the things which we confront outside us and within us?
In a way, today’s Gospel is rather dark and disturbing. We are asked to think about evil not as something out there in some sort of Manichaean manner – as if COVID-19, or the world itself in the physical phenomenon of wind and storm, of disease and sickness is evil or that evil is other people. That is to divide the world into good and evil in a simplistic and dualistic way and to judge oneself to be good and others evil. We are challenged to consider the divisions and contradictions in ourselves and our relation to them and to ponder the darkness of despair and depression that are very much about how we think about ourselves and others.
As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act 2. 2) Everything turns on our thinking. C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, itself a neglected (or discarded!) book, nicely paraphrases the great insight of Boethius (6th century AD): “the character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the subject known but on the knowing faculty,” on us as knowers, as thinkers. How we face the darkness is about our thinking. That is what this Gospel story sets before us.
But the Gospel, as we have it in our Canadian Prayer Book, is incomplete; it is an abbreviated form of the slightly longer and more complete pericope which had been read for centuries. Paul in his Epistle reading says that “ye were sometimes darkness,” only to go on to say “but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” It is as if the Gospel, as presented in its abbreviated form, attends only to the first clause and ignores the second which is illustrated in the more complete version.
“The last state of that man is worse than the first,” the Gospel reading ends. A kind of ending, to be sure, about the deep darkness of our despair really, but that is not the real ending of the Gospel passage. As Luke tells us, “and it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Lk. 11. 27-28). These last two verses complete the reading and help us to face the darkness.
The woman’s cry is a voice “out of the deep,” we might say, referencing Psalm 130, de profundis, as it is called by its Latin title. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.” To call out to God is to face the deep abyss of human sin and evil and not be defined by it. It is to look to God as that which is prior and greater by definition than all and every form of evil. Our dualistic ways of looking at the world and one another are paradoxically about our obsessions with ourselves. In calling out of the deep to the Lord with words of blessing the woman engages with Jesus. In that engagement lies the light that counters the darkness. Jesus’ words to her are not a rebuke but a striking reminder to her and to us about the mission of Christ in his incarnation. He comes to teach and to redeem; in short, to call us back to himself. That means facing ourselves in him. Our blessedness as opposed to our darkness and despair, the endless misery of hell, as it were, is found in the Word of God that counters the sin and evil named in the Gospel as Beelzebul, whom Jesus here also calls Satan.
A house divided against itself falls. The phrase speaks to the name Beelzebul or Beelzebub, the former is probably a dialect variation on the second and connects to Baal, the Canaanite deity. Jerome translated it as dominus muscarum, lord of the flies, because of its association with flies and dung, images of decay and death, a title which William Golding used in his celebrated fable, Lord of the Flies, a critique of power and culture in the cold war period that speaks to the dystopia of our current world. In a way, the novel explores the conflicts and contradictions within the modern world. But the term Beelzebul also refers to ‘the lord of the dwelling’ and so to the theme of possession in ways that relates to our culture of addiction. The point of the exchange is to highlight the contradiction of accusing Jesus of casting out demons, the things that we allow to possess us, by the prince of the demons. Evil in all of its sundry and squalid forms stands in contradiction to the good.
If we remain self-absorbed or self-obsessed we deny the prior goodness and truth of God upon which ourselves and our knowing and being depend. That is the despair and darkness that Jesus goes on to illustrate in a critique of human self-sufficiency. Trusting in ourselves means precisely not looking to God. The point is that we are “not sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves,” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians (3.5), “but our sufficiency is of God.” Therein lies our blessedness without which we take unto ourselves “seven other spirits more wicked than [ourselves]” and “the last state of that man is worse than the first,” a sobering thought about our darkness and our misery.
Our blessedness is about our constant attention to the Word of God which confronts us with the self-contradictory nature of sin and evil and recalls us to himself. “Ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye light in the Lord.” The darkness that so easily defines us is in some sense self-willed. But that darkness can be deadly and destructive in the ways in which things come to define us and to dominate our thoughts and feelings.
Our culture, particularly the therapeutic culture, struggles with such things, opting for various attempts at remedies whether the chemical route, which is the most common, or the talking it out route, such as in cognitive behaviour therapy, which attends to the patterns of our thinking and actions. Yet time and time again there is the tendency to seek distractions rather than to face the storms and stresses, the sturm und drang of human experience, which is not to face the darkness at all in the very direct way of this Gospel story. We are being shown a way to think about the difficult things of the world as really being about ourselves and how we think. It means to take to heart the gradual Psalm for today (Ps. 25). “Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me;/ for I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist prays, “look upon my adversity and misery,” “O keep my soul, and deliver me;/ let me not be confounded.” It has really altogether to do with putting our trust in God, “for my hope is in thee.” This is the insight of Psalm 130. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.”
This is to know that our knowing depends on the principle of our thinking and being. Our blessedness is about hearing the word of God and keeping it. Such is the true mission and vocation of the Church in these dark and disturbing times of despair, and denial, of desolation and emptiness.
Just this morning, I received a lovely note and a book about the poetry of George Herbert from a son of the Parish, Fr. Chris McCann who is a priest in Cleveland, Ohio. It seems providential. The frontispiece contain an apt observation from Richard Sibbes that speaks to today’s Gospel theme. “God will bring us to heaven but it must be by hell … God works by contraries, therefore in contraries believe in contraries.” Out of the deep indeed.
And as another poet, Christina Rossetti, says in her poem, De Profundis, “I strain my heart, I stretch my hands, and catch at hope.”
“For ye were sometimes darkness”
Fr. David Curry
Lent III, 2021