Day: March 6, 2022

“As dying, and behold, we live”

The Epistle reading from 2 Corinthians 6 lays out in a powerful and compelling way the forms of our response to the grace of God now which is “the day of salvation.” Our text is simply one part of a wonderful series of dialectical and paradoxical relations which have to do with who we are and how we see ourselves in the sight of God “as the ministers of God.” It provides a way of thinking the question which Plotinus (3rd c. AD) will later articulate but which actually belongs to all philosophy and life. “But we … who are we?”

The preoccupation with ourselves is an ancient and modern question albeit in different registers of meaning. The story of Narcissus for the ancient Greeks is a cautionary tale which has a certain modern resonance. It is really about the forms of self-obsession perhaps best illustrated in the ‘selfie culture’ of our contemporary world, not to mention the self-absorbed features of social media in general. Just as Narcissus drowns in the image of himself in the pond so in our contemporary world we are obsessed with ourselves and drown in the image of ourselves. In both cases we lose sight of who we are in the greater canvass of reality and, more importantly, in the sight of God.

“Know thyself,” the great Greek maxim of the Delphic Oracle, has its perfect counterpart in the Hebrew idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10; Ps. 110.10; Job 28.28). This is, I think, completely different from our modern self-obsessions which are entirely solipsistic and entirely self-involved, as if reality is only what is in our minds rather than in our engagement with what is greater than ourselves. To “know thyself” means to know your place within the world as an ordered whole, the cosmos, hence reality. “The fear of the Lord” is the wisdom which knows God as the principle of all things.

Lent seeks to clarify who we are by placing us more clearly and more fully in the sight and life of God. Paul’s wonderful rhetorical flow in the Epistle confronts us with the necessary interchange and back-and-forth of opposites; in short, the dialectic of human life as informed and transformed, or at least in the process of such a transformation, by virtue of our response to the grace of God. Paul is calling attention to our attitude of mind towards everything which we confront and experience. It offers a kind of coincidence of opposites as well as a sense of inner resilience and strength over and against the ups and downs of the world. In that sense it is really about facing suffering and learning from it. Such is the meaning of the Exodus in its fullest sense.

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