by CCW | 27 March 2022 08:00
It should be the mantra for our divided and fragmented world in the attempt to reclaim the spiritual and intellectual principles that give meaning to human life. We are in the wilderness in a flight from the world, a flight from reality; the very opposite of the wilderness of Exodus and of Lent. For we are scattered in the confusions of our minds, scattered in the pride of the imaginations of our hearts, as Mary’s Magnificat suggests.
This Sunday looks back to the Exodus and to the other Sundays in Lent and looks ahead to Holy Week and Easter. It is simply about what is learned in the wilderness journey, our journey to God and with God as the principle of all reality. The Exodus was about a journey from slavery into freedom. What enslaves us is more than something external, more than the restraints and limits that belong to the natural world and to human life. The deeper forms of enslavement have to do with the realities of sin which are about a denial of God and of the goodness of creation. The modern gnostic flight from reality sees the world as something fearful and evil yet assumes a human freedom from the world through the fantasies and illusions of our control over nature; a flight into a technological future away from the limits of the world. It is no longer God’s world to be engaged respectfully and with care. It is an evil from which we assume we can escape. The movie ‘Interstellar’ is, perhaps, one illustration of this theme – a flight from an earth which we have made inhabitable to other planets but with the realization, perhaps, that the one thing we cannot escape is ourselves.
Lent is about facing the reality of ourselves. The good news, paradoxical as it may seem, is the knowledge that we are all sinners. Good news?! Indeed, because we can only know ourselves as sinners through the realization of what is prior to our sins and follies, namely, our own created being and our place within the created order.
Lent began on Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes signaling the acknowledgement of ourselves as sinners. Turning to God in repentance, however, is not an act of human pride and ascetic accomplishment; in other words, a work of man. It is our response to the grace of God moving in us in the deepening awareness of ourselves as sinners. It belongs, in other words, to that twofold sense of freedom from what enslaves us and our freedom to God; “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue,” as The Penitential Service rather beautifully puts it, “that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore” (BCP, p, 614). Such a movement is about our being gathered to God.
The First Sunday in Lent, Jesus, Matthew tells us, was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” Thus the temptations which are our temptations are already contained by the Spirit as signaling the created order and reality which are presupposed in their denial. The temptations of Christ encapsulate the lessons of the Exodus in terms of the complaints and temptations of the ancient Hebrews. In other words, they are about what we are to learn in the wilderness journey about ourselves in relation to the world and especially God. The Second Sunday in Lent is also a story in the wilderness, a meeting between Jesus and the unnamed woman of Canaan in the coastlands of Tyre and Sidon. But it is a testing of the disciples and Israel itself about taking God captive to ourselves, in short, a god of our own making which Jesus undertakes to expose. The woman’s great tenacity of faith rests in her humble yet profound insight that God is the God of all creation and thus the source of all life and healing. “Yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
The Third Sunday in Lent is a tour de force of the demonic in its depiction of self-contradiction and division; we are scattered and in flight from ourselves and reality in contrast to the gathering of ourselves in truth to Christ. The gathering is found in our being awakened from the death of ourselves and entering into the light of Christ and to the blessedness of hearing and keeping the word of God.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent gathers up the lessons of these Sundays and concentrates them for us sacramentally. In so doing, it looks ahead to Maundy Thursday, to the Last Supper of Christ on the very night of his betrayal, and ahead to the Paschal victory of Easter and to Eastertide. In other words, it belongs to a re-ordering of ourselves to God and to the created order. The Epistle from Galatians is about our liberty as found in Christ who hath made us free. Free from what? Freedom from bondage. Freedom to what? The promise of God in Christ. “Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.” The Gospel taken from the sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel is known as the bread of life discourse. It begins with this story which is connected explicitly to the Exodus theme of Israel being fed “manna in the wilderness.” But this story belongs to the further development of Christ as “the bread of life,” “the true bread from heaven.”
At first glance, it seems simply about God providing for his people in the wilderness journey of human life. He does, of course. That is an important insight which the woman of Canaan also grasped. The problem is that we take the material provisions for granted and ignore the deeper spiritual meaning of this Gospel passage. The real provision is the teaching. And the teaching is about an awareness of human insufficiency, on the one hand, and the grace of God, on the other hand.
Some interpretations focus on the theme of sharing. If we just share with one another what each one has there will be more than enough for everybody. While there may be some truth in that conceit, it is not what the story teaches, for that would turn the story into something merely about human activity in itself. Such an interpretation belongs to the anti-religious bias in modern liberalism, forgetting that its own market economies have contributed greatly to the vast inequalities of wealth within and between countries, a point noted by Francis Fukyama, the former poster boy of liberal triumphalism, in ‘Liberalism and Its Discontents,’ his chastened criticism of the western liberal world. The anti-Christian elements of the contemporary world are even more clearly indicated in Patrick Deneen’s account of Eric Vogelin’s 1987 prescient work, The New Science of Politics. Deneen writes:
What was once a “reformist left” is today a radicalized messianic party, advancing its gnostic vision amid the ruins of the Christian civilization that once balanced these forces. What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” – i.e., natural – family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life – the working class. The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse – the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death. All the while these various mandates followed the trajectory of a raft of other economic and social policies that had led to the empowerment of a disembodied “laptop class” – or what N.S. Lyons has dubbed[1] “the Virtuals” – at the expense of the working class, or the “Physicals.” The decades following America’s victory in the Cold War was a perfectly scripted expression of Gnostic belief and power – ironically, the pyrrhic lap of a “classical and Christian” civilization that was enjoying the fruits of victory over its Gnostic foe. (Patrick Deneen, ‘Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism’[2], March 2nd, 2022, The PostLiberal Order, substack).
It is not hard to see where the institutional church is complicit in this collapse.
The Gospel story is about more than economics and counters the gnostic tendencies of our contemporary world. John’s telling of the story is based on what Jesus knew he would do and does as indicated parenthetically. The whole scene is set by Jesus’ question to Philip, “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?” The problem of feeding such a great company, a multitude who have come to hear and learn from Jesus, by the way, is stated first by Philip in terms of how much bread would be needed and then by Andrew who calls attention to the lad with five barley-loaves and two small fishes. Both are suggesting the utter insufficiency of any human means to address this situation. That provides the context for what Jesus says and does.
He takes the bread, he gives thanks – the word is eucharist – he distributes to the disciples and then the disciples distribute to the rest. What we have in a nutshell is the meaning of the Church in the wilderness of the world. It is about being gathered to God in Christ, the God who makes ex nihilo and makes something more and greater out of the little things of our world. Such is the sacramental logic. We are opened out to a larger reality than what belongs to calculative and instrumental reason.
We are never more truly human and fully ourselves than in the eucharistic action. As Rowan Williams observes, “for that short time, when we gather as God’s guests at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God … [whether the congregation is] large or small, this is it – the moment when people see one another and the world properly.” “And what is the appropriate response?” he asks, and answers, “thanksgiving. Because one of the ways in which the Eucharist overflows into the rest of our life is precisely in giving us that energy and vision for thanksgiving in all things, for making the connection between God the Giver and everything we experience” (Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer, Eerdmans, 2014, p. 58).
That is the point of Jesus’s direction to “gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” Everything is gathered back to God in service and sacrifice, in prayer and praise. John alone tells us that twelve baskets were filled with what remained. Such are the crumbs which fall from our master’s table. The twelve baskets are symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel and of the Apostolic Church. In other words, this morning we are fed from the gathering of the fragments that remain. What is wanted is that nothing be lost.
The sacramental life of the Christian Church seeks the redemption of all, the gathering back to God of everything that belongs to our life with God. This Sunday looks ahead to Christ’s giving of himself in bread and wine at the Last Supper in anticipation of his death and resurrection. Such is the pattern of his life in us if we are willing to be opened to it. Looking further ahead, this Sunday anticipates the themes of Eastertide. We participate in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father. Here is the gathering that makes us truly who we are in Christ, come what may in the ups and downs of our life in the contemporary post- Christian wilderness.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 4, 2022
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