“Then shall I know even as also I am known”
Quinquagesima Sunday makes explicit the logic which underlies the ‘gesima’ Sundays and which runs through the whole pageant of Lent which begins with Ash Wednesday this week. “We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says to the disciples, and explains exactly what that means. Yet, the disciples, as Luke points out, “understood none of these things”. This captures what Paul means by saying that “now we see in a glass darkly”. The hope of Lent as the journey of the soul to God is that “then” we may see “face to face”, that beyond “know[ing] in part”, we shall “know even as also [we] are known”. It gives a deeper meaning to the strong petition of the blind man on the wayside who simply wants to “receive [his] sight”.
The deeper significance of this is that we might see ourselves as God sees us, to see ourselves in Christ; in short, to know even as we are known in God. This highlights Lent as the season of the mystical journey of our souls to God. It emphasizes two themes which stand in complete opposition in our dystopian world: knowledge and will or power.
The great lesson of 1st Corinthians is about wisdom in love, the counter to the delusions of our technocratic culture which is utterly and entirely bereft of wisdom, of virtue, and is anti-life and anti-intellect. Know-how skills do not provide us with the knowledge of what belongs to character, to the virtues of the soul, which concern ends and purposes; in short, meaning which goes beyond techne or technique. Knowing what something is or knowing that it exists for a purpose extends far beyond the know-how skills of our digital devices which reduce us to machine-like things who think like our devices. We make the machines that make and unmake us. To know even as we are known is to reclaim our humanity from the disastrous projects of its being re-engineered, as Brett Frischmann & Evan Selinger pointed out in Re-engineering Humanity (2018).
Such is the paradox and the perversion of the famous Turing-test devised to see if a computer is capable of thinking like a human; now it is about whether humans can be made to think like computers. “I am not a robot,” we are sometimes asked to check but that only confirms how conditioned we are to being essentially technobots, mere cogs in the machinery of algorithms which work for purposes that are entirely remote and hidden from us but serve the interests of the technocratic elites. Such examples serve only to highlight the divide between power and knowledge.
“We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says. It signals the meaning of the pageant of Lent. It is the journey of knowing love, of love growing into understanding. The non-understanding of the disciples to what Jesus is saying sets the scene for the encounter with the blind man on the wayside, who not incidentally is sitting near Jericho, symbolic of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city. He cries out to “Jesus, thou Son of David”, for mercy, and he will not be silenced. He wants to receive his sight.
He shows us two things: our blindness and unknowing, on the one hand, and our desire to see and to know, on the other hand. The eros or passion, the desire to know, implies our awareness of our incompleteness and ignorance. Our seeking to know is the faith that there are things to be known as well as the idea of ourselves as knowers in one way or another. The blind man ‘sees’ “in a glass darkly”, we might say, that healing power is found in Jesus whom he calls the Son of David, a reference to the Shepherd-King who united the tribes of the Hebrews and made Jerusalem the center of Israel. Our going up to Jerusalem in the journey of Lent is about a similar seeking and knowing based upon an awareness of our sins and failings from which we seek forgiveness and mercy. The journey is undertaken in the quest to know and in the hope of being healed and in the knowledge that wisdom is love, the greatest of the three theological virtues that alone transforms all the various virtues of the soul into forms of love.
The Lenten pilgrimage of love seeks to purge and purify, to illuminate and enlighten, and to unite and perfect our wounded and broken humanity. “That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me” John Donne says in the extravagant and violent imagery of his sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God, “and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new”. Donne prays to God to break him down in order to build him up, to restore him to himself and to separate him from all that separates him from God, namely, the enemy of God, the devil, the creature who exists in self-contradiction from the principle of his very being and knowing.
This past week in Chapel at the School, I had occasion to speak about the story of David, “probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity about a human life” (Robert Alter, The David Story) shaped in and through all of the ambiguities and confusions of life. The story begins with his being anointed king by Samuel, the prophet. Prophecy is a form of knowing, an insight into what is, not a know-how knowledge but a knowing about what is, a kind of divine knowing. Yet Samuel, it seems, is also moved by human ambitions and desires; he had appointed Saul who turned out to be an uncertain quantity as king and especially uncertain about knowing what to do. Thus God has taken away the kingship from Saul and bids Samuel go and review the sons of Jesse in Bethlehem. There is the sense that Samuel had chosen Saul on another basis than insight into character and more on the basis of thinking that he could manipulate him, the ambitions of power that darken knowledge. The first of the sons of Jesse to pass before Samuel is Eliab and Samuel thinks that he is the chosen one but in a telling phrase God said to Samuel, “do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature”. This is intriguing because it appears that Samuel is not acting in the truth of prophecy. And so God reminds Samuel that “the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
As John Donne notes, the story of “David shows us all the slippery ways into sin and all the penitential ways out of sin.” He is everyman. In other words, we confront the truth of our untruth in our sins and follies only to be made new, as the Collect for ?sh Wednesday and for Lent puts it, through penitential adoration. We learn and know at once our sinfulness and the mercy of God’s healing power and truth. We find ourselves in the lessons of Lent. This Sunday sets before us the meaning and purpose of the journey of Lent, itself the image of the journey of the soul to its truth in God. It is about wisdom in love and acting in love, the love without which “all our doings are nothing worth”. It is nothing less than our seeking what God seeks for us: that we may know even as we are known in the truth and love of God.
“Then shall I know even as also I am known”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima 2022