Month: June 2022

“Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God”

It is true, profoundly true. Why then does Jesus respond to the statement with a parable about our excuses? We excuse ourselves from the heavenly banquet by turning to our worldly interests such that “none of those which were bidden shall taste of my supper.” Strong words that highlight the problem of our indifference. We exile ourselves.

Once again, it seems, like the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, that we have ignored the truth that is before us and negated the calling of our humanity to abide in that truth. Our preoccupations are with ourselves and to the neglect of others more than perhaps we realize. In a way, these readings counter the tendency to think that salvation or human happiness is found in our choices and actions in themselves. We forget that the ground of all human activity is God. The parable Jesus tells is simply about our turning away from the divine life into which we are constantly invited and turning instead to our own concerns apart from God. In a literal sense, it is about turning to the ground of human affairs as if that were everything, a kind of divinizing of ourselves and our doings.

It is not that the places of our lives, the “piece[s] of ground” upon which we live, and our activities with the living creatures of the land, “prov[ing] five yoke of oxen,” and our lives with one another in such things as marriage, symbolizing one of the sanctified states of life in the world, don’t matter. The question is, in what way? Through our daily lives God is readying us for the fullness of life which is found in him with one another. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Such is the banquet of heavenly love in which we participate now sacramentally. The strong teaching is that our liturgy is not simply an add-on, an extra, an option; rather it is a necessity and for no other reason than that it is about our life with God and in God. When we ignore or neglect that we are forgetting the real truth and dignity of our humanity.

We meet in the Octave of the Nativity of John the Baptist. His whole ministry from the moment of his conception in the womb of Elizabeth to his being beheaded by Herod is about one thing: pointing us to Jesus as the one whom we seek and with whom we dwell. He points us to Jesus so that we can be with Jesus. His ministry is a ministry of preparing the way of Christ by the “preaching of repentance.” That is about a constant metanoia, a constant turning of hearts and minds to God in Christ. Repentance is the counter to all our prosaic complacencies and preoccupations; in short our indifference to the things of God. It means taking the love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ seriously and joyously out of an awareness of our sinfulness.

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“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also”

“You have the poor with you always, and whensoever you will you may do them good,” Jesus famously says. But what do we will? It is a disturbing statement. What does it mean? What we will is what we love or desire and what we love or will is inescapably bound up with what we see and know in some sense or other. And what we do or do not do with the poor and with one another belongs to our knowing and loving God. That is the point and the challenge of this day.

The Epistle reading from 1 John 4. 7-21 is a theological tour-de-force. It highlights the mystery of the Trinity for us in our lives together with one another. How? By the necessary interplay of knowing and loving in God and that interplay in turn in our knowing and loving. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 Jn. 4.8). “God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 Jn. 4.9). “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us; because he hath given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4. 13). Everything is grounded in the mutual indwelling of God as Trinity. We live in the knowing love of God. Our loving is our knowing and vice versa.

The mystery of the Trinity perplexes us, perhaps. We may look askance at it because the images of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit may seem to be mere metaphors that reflect social and political power structures of our devising. This would assume that we make God in our own image and not the other way around. Yet last Sunday made us think upwards not downwards; that is the true meaning of thinking analogically. Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit are not metaphors; they are the names of God revealed by Jesus which open us to the mystery of God as love. “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth (or abideth) in love, dwelleth (or abideth) in God, and God in him” (1 Jn. 4. 16).

This statement governs our thinking and doing especially in the Trinity season. It governs how we see and deal with one another. “This commandment,” John tells us, “have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 Jn 4. 21). And our “brother” is the other who is inescapably one with us in our common humanity. The brother is the one whom we see and know in some sense or other and whom we are therefore commanded to love. This is a strong ethical imperative, the radical meaning of which is illustrated in the Gospel parable of Dives or the Rich Man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

While the poor man/rich man dichotomy reflects social and economic realities, the paradox of the parable is that it reverses them. The poor man turns out to be rich, and the rich man poor but only because the parable shows that the truth of our humanity is not found simply in matters of material wealth but in how we see and love one another. That turns entirely on our knowing and loving God.

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