Day: March 13, 2022

“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

We are called to holiness, St. Paul reminds us. Sanctification means being made holy. The doctrinal concepts of justification and sanctification are necessarily intertwined. Justification is how we are known in the sight of God. God sees us in Christ who is our justification, the one who makes us right with God. In other words, it is about our being known in the knowing love of God. Yet as Paul reminded us on Quinquagesima Sunday “now we see in a glass darkly”; we do not yet see ourselves fully and truly in God. Thus, while the justifying righteousness of Christ is perfect and inherent in him it is not yet fully realised in us. Sanctification is about living more fully truly and fully in Christ and in the work of redemption which he has accomplished for us. Lent is about our journey with Christ in that work of redemption. As such it recalls us to both the principles of justification and sanctification.

Today’s Collect helps us to understand the dynamic between the Epistle and Gospel. God sees “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” This puts starkly the human condition, our sinfulness and insufficiency. But to know this is to be looking to God, to his healing grace and truth for us and in us. What Paul is talking about in the Epistle reading from Thessalonians is about nothing less than seeking to be who we are in the sight of God. That turns on what we see in the Gospel, namely, the amazing story of the persistence and strength of an unnamed “woman of Canaan” who illustrates for us what it means to be looking to God for grace and mercy, for healing and salvation; in short, to being made whole, our sanctification.

The story is about the struggle that belongs to faith. Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel, meaning one who struggles with God. That struggle is about breaking into the heart of God, into the meaning of God’s will and purpose for our life. Here in this story of a non-Israelite we have, in my view, one of the most powerful images of what it truly means to be an Israelite, as it were, to be who we are in the sight of God and to be living in that understanding. It is found in the amazing but disturbing dialogue and exchange between Jesus, his disciples, and this woman. She has a hold of the one thing necessary: an insight into the truth of God in Jesus Christ who alone is the principle of life, on the one hand, and the healing or restoration of our wounded and broken humanity, on the other hand. She knows the human need for divine mercy. This is her litany and ours. The Prayer Book Litany, the first part of the Liturgy to be translated and reworked from Latin into English by Thomas Cranmer, simply explicates in a comprehensive and exhaustive way all the things for which we seek God’s help and mercy.

She illustrates the meaning of the idea “that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51, 17). She is deeply troubled about her “daughter grievously vexed with a devil.” It is a phrase worth pondering. It speaks directly to our contemporary culture of addiction and psychotic disorders, of neuroses and mental distresses that are destructive and paralysing and which affect not only the individual but their families and friends. They are part and parcel of a broken and troubled world. Such things are really about a loss of self, what we might call, a negative negating of the self. Though some may think that there are cures to be found in the therapeutic culture whether through prescribed drugs, the pill cure, or through the talking cure, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, the older view of Freud, for instance, was that there is no cure to the discontents that beset modernity; at best, there are only ways to cope.

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