by CCW | 19 September 2021 08:00
It is an intriguing phrase. The Greek verb translated here as visited also means to look upon or to watch over in the sense of having oversight from which derives the idea of bishops. Here it is about God’s oversight of our humanity.
Today’s readings offer an interesting sense of the dynamic interplay between abiding and visiting that belongs to a larger Scriptural and cultural understanding about the nature of our humanity. Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in [our] hearts by faith”, that we may be “rooted and grounded in love”; in short, in that which abides. In the Gospel Christ comes near the little city of Nain, visiting it, as it were, and yet something abides in and through that encounter. Both readings invite us to consider the nature of lives with one another and with God.
Is God simply a visitor? One who comes and goes, here today and gone tomorrow? A welcoming presence or something more disturbing? Ishtar, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and war (an interesting combination!), wants Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, to be her boy-toy, her lover. But intimacy with the gods is not always a good thing. Gilgamesh rejects her advances because he knows that she turns all of her lovers into animals. In other words, you lose your humanity! Encounters between humans and the divine can be terrifying. “Our God is a consuming fire,” as Hebrews reminds us, recalling the sense of distance between God and man. “No one can see God and live,” as Exodus puts it.
Owing to the pandemic, there has been considerably less visiting among friends and family. Social distancing is the mantra for our isolation and separation from one another, tainting the forms of public interaction with fear and suspicion, with anxiety and even animosity. Perhaps, though, this may ultimately help us to reclaim the primacy of our lives as essentially social creatures in our care and concern for each other rather than radically autonomous beings whose relation to each other is merely instrumental, using each other for our own ends, trapped in the illusions of our self-completeness. This Sunday speaks to these deeper truths.
Visitors come and go. Yet, in the momentary intersection of their lives and ours, there is an abiding truth. There is the recognition of the common bond of our humanity. There is the opening out of our souls to each other, a sharing of our lives however fleeting, however brief. Visitors come and go but we, too, are visitors.
This leads to the ancient insight about hospitality as a moral obligation. The stranger, the foreigner, the alien is to be welcomed into our midst and treated with courtesy and grace. The sojourner, the visitor, is the one who has come near to us. He is, in fact, our neighbour. The stranger is owed what we owe our neighbour. The Old Testament makes this abundantly clear. “When a stranger sojourns with you in the land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” as Leviticus states (Lev. 19.33,34). And it is further emphasized in the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament.
The sojourner is our neighbour to whom we owe the love of neighbour. The obligation arises out of the deeper recognition that we, too, are the sojourners, the visitors, whom God loves. God “loves the sojourner … love the sojourner therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10.19).
God, too, appears as a visitor in our midst. The Scriptures are rich with the stories of God visiting his people. God visits Noah and Abraham and Moses to make his covenant with us through them. God visits Israel time and time again, guiding and correcting them, leading and protecting them on the wilderness journey, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night” (Exodus 13). God sojourns with his sojourning people, filling the tent of meeting with the glory of his presence. He visits the prophets with the Word of God which they are to declare and bring that Word near to us. Zechariah the priest proclaims what becomes our morning-song of praise: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel/ for he hath visited and redeemed his people.”
In the Gospels, Jesus Christ seems to come and go constantly as a visitor, a man of no fixed address and one who is always, it seems, passing through. He is the babe of Bethlehem, but apart from his birth there is no mention of his birthplace. He is the boy of Nazareth, but apart from his boyhood, Nazareth is only the city to which he returns once and then only for rejection. He is by the sea and on the sea; upon the mountains and in the desert places; in the fields and on the roads. He passes through all the countryside and every region of that ancient promised land. He comes to innumerable villages and towns. He makes his way to Jerusalem. He is constantly drawing near and passing through. And yet, he is constantly in our midst, the abiding presence of God with us. Christ in our midst is more than a visitor to our lives. He comes and goes, strewing blessings on his way. But the blessings are not the passing moments of God’s visitation. They are the signs of his abiding presence.
Christ comes to the little city of Nain. And “as he came nigh,” near, to the gate of the city, he meets a funeral procession. Christ is the stranger who becomes a neighbour to those who mourn. He enters into the sorrows of the mourners and, most especially, into the grief of the widow of Nain whose only son lies dead and is being carried to the grave. He has compassion on her. The word is strong; it refers to his innermost being. He takes her sorrow into his abiding love for the Father. Do not weep forever, he says to her; Don’t always be weeping. The weeping is not to be forever, for the compassion of Christ is the abiding love of God for us. That love means resurrection and life through sorrow and death. That love means fellowship and joy. “Young man, I say to thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak: and he delivered him to his mother” (Luke 7.14,15).
God is glorified for this act of restoration but not because “a great prophet is risen up among us” as some said. Nor is it that the God who has “visited his people” is just passing through, here today and gone tomorrow. No, the point is this: the sojourning Christ communicates an abiding love. The last of the great seven “I am” sayings in St. John’s Gospel signals our abiding in that love by being grafted into the living tree of faith. “I am the vine, ye are the branches”; “Abide in me, and I in you.” And as with the Widow of Nain, Christ does not just come and go. He comes to draw us into his abiding love. “I am the Lord your God”; “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” He is the God who has not simply visited and redeemed his people and then gone merrily on his way. He comes and goes in order to draw us into the truth of his abiding love.
God does not come and go in and out of our lives. It is we who are the visitors, the sojourners. We come and go before the abiding presence of God. It is we who make ourselves strangers, we who alienate ourselves from God by our sins. But he has become the stranger in our midst to bring us near to him again and to open us out to the truth of his abiding love. It is simply the story of the Fall and our Redemption, the story of our lives in the greater story of God. The Lord God walked about in the Garden in the cool of the day, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from the presence of the one who is always near and “from whom no secrets are hid.” God was not a visitor to that Garden of Paradise. He is at home with the creation he has made and he would have us dwell with him in the heaven of his love. But we would not. Yet, out of the refusals of his truth, God has made our sojourning ways. He has become himself a sojourner with us to bring us back to him again. Such is the truth of God’s visitation. “God hath visited his people” so that we may abide in his love.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI, 2021
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