by CCW | 21 August 2022 08:00
“Jesus wept,” in sorrow for his friend, Lazarus, John tells us in his Gospel (Jn. 11. 35). It is sometimes said to be the shortest verse in the Scriptures and a phrase used colloquially to express a sense of sorrow and regret at something particularly sad and unfortunate. Here Luke, the Church’s spiritual director especially in the Trinity season, tells us about Jesus coming near and beholding the city of Jerusalem and weeping over it. Why does Jesus weep?
“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” Jesus says. We are ignorant, it seems, “concerning spiritual gifts,” as Paul puts it in the Epistle and thus to the nature of our lives in community and in communion with God and with one another. What follows is equally important: the difficult scene of Christ’s cleansing of the temple, “cast[ing[ out them that sold therein and them that bought,” upbraiding them and us for the misuse of the house of prayer, “mak[ing[ it a den of thieves.” Why? So as to re-establish its proper use. “And he taught daily in the temple.” Prayer and teaching go together; they are about the pilgrimage of our souls into the knowing love of God for us, our itinerarium mentis ad deum, “The Journey of The Mind to God,” in Bonaventure’s famous treatise by that name. “Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,/God’s breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,” Herbert says in a wonderful collection of images drawn from scripture, from nature, from domestic life, from the exotic and the intimate but ultimately summed up as “something understood.” Prayer is “something understood”.
We know the story of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple because it is set before us in Matthew’s Gospel on the First Sunday of Advent and, of course, on Palm Sunday. But in both it has to do more with the troubling theme of the wrath or anger of Christ. Here it seems, it is more about the sorrow and sadness of Christ. Jesus weeps for us at what we have not learned or for what we have ignored despite its being present to us because God “hath visited, and redeemed his people” (Benedictus, BCP, p.9). We know but do not know.
The concept of visitation here is spiritually significant. It has very much to do with what God wants us to know, with what belongs to the good of our humanity over and against the things which diminish and destroy us. In the providence of God we are meant to be looking for the things of God, to find “the good in everything,” as Shakespeare puts it (As You Like It), “books in the running brooks, sermons in stone;” in short, reading the providence of God in our lives. It means being recalled to who we are in God, to “know even as also [we] are known” (1 Cor. 13.12). That is an essential aspect of our summer journeyings in the land of the Trinity.
And it means some tough lessons. It is not all ‘gentle-Jesus-come-and-squeeze-us’, all sentiment and emotion, as it were. It is rather about a kind of maturing in faith and understanding. This is challenging for our culture and Church. We are altogether uncertain and perhaps dismissive of the idea of redemptive suffering, of the learning of things positive through the experience of things negative. Yet this is part of the spiritual journey.
The 1662 Book of Common Prayer provided an “Order for the Visitation of the Sick” which is quite different from what we have in the 1962 Canadian BCP. The difference has entirely to do with its emphasis upon the idea of God’s visitation. While both services seek to provide comfort and strength and consolation for our souls in the times of sickness and death, the older service is more direct, we might say, about confession and self-awareness, about the realities of sin in relation to suffering. While there is importantly no direct causal relation between sin and suffering in the sense that you have cancer because you did x or y thing which was wrong, suffering is nonetheless altogether bound up with the sense of our disconnect from God and the world which belongs to the story of the Fall and so to the human condition of suffering.
Suffering is inescapably part of the human experience and thus becomes part of the soul’s journey to its end and place with God and especially through the sufferings of Christ for us and with us. The older service reminds us that we are “dearly beloved,” loved by God. That is the deep truth of our spiritual identity. Christians are simply those who know themselves as sinners and as God’s dearly beloved. Nothing more and nothing less. This is who we are. It goes on to say “know this, that Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness and sickness.” This is a strong theological statement that nothing falls outside of God’s providence. What follows is most challenging to us in our sensitivities. “Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly that it is God’s visitation”!
Does this mean punishment? God as the stern judge? How can that be reconciled with the tears of Jesus? What is God’s visitation? It is not simply external judgment. It is redemptive. It recognises that there may be different “causes” for the sicknesses which we endure. We suffer sometimes because of ourselves and sometimes because of the actions of others or because of any number of circumstances that are entirely beyond our control. We might want to blame someone for covid-19, for example, but have to recognise that, no, things like epidemics and pandemics cannot be looked at in that way (however much covid-19 is a modern pandemic).
What, then, is this older tradition saying? It is challenging us to be self-reflective about ourselves and our sufferings. The sickness, it suggests, may have been sent unto you “to try your patience for the example of others” thus connecting your sufferings to the sufferings of Christ, who is “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as the Collect for the Second Sunday after Easter puts it and to our witness to Christ. That locates our sufferings within the interrelated themes of the doctrine of the atonement – Christ as victor over sin and death, Christ as propitiatory sacrifice, and Christ as example. Thus suffering can be seen as a testing of our faith through our becoming aware of how we participate in the sufferings of Christ “to the increase of glory and endless felicity.” Which is another way of saying that our sufferings are not nothing but neither are they everything. They are a means not an end.
Or, on the other hand, the exhortation suggests, the sickness may be sent “to correct and amend in you whatsoever doth offend the eyes of your heavenly Father.” This we probably shrink away from in horror but the point is the necessity of self-examination about our thoughts, words and deeds; in short, confession which is not negative but positive since it presupposes some sense of God’s goodness as the truth of ourselves. In this way, our self-reflection “shall turn to [our] profit, and help [us] forward in the right way that leadeth unto everlasting life.” In other words, human suffering is seen to connect us to God’s redemption of our humanity in one way or another. There is a certain kind of maturity to the spiritual outlook that this older service assumes.
So too with today’s Epistle reading which simply lays out the spiritual gifts that belong to our life in the body of Christ. It is the first 11 verses of the 12th Chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. A remarkable passage it highlights the idea of our being all members of the body of Christ in and through the diversities of gifts that belong to our confession in the Holy Spirit that “JESUS IS LORD.” Note the capital letters. It is a kind of credal shout-out. Different gifts that all contribute to the building up of the body of Christ. Different gifts that reflect upon different talents and skills in relation to different situations; gifts of healing, and of discerning of spirits, for instance. Yet all from the same Spirit. Paul ends this 12th Chapter by saying “I will show you a still more excellent way” which introduces Chapter 13, Paul’s famous hymn of love where faith, hope and charity are identified, the greatest of which is charity or love, and where, like the older service of the Visitation of the Sick, there is a certain self-awareness. “For now we see in a glass darkly,” to be sure, especially in the discerning of our souls, but what we seek is what today’s readings also seek: “to know even as also I am known.”
To be known in the abiding and knowing love of God is always to be open to the visitation, the presence of God in our lives. His presence seeks our good. We know only in part but we are known as whole in God. In a way, it is a question about how we look at things, both in ourselves and one another. Jesus weeps when we forget or ignore what we have been given to know by the visitation of God towards us, a visitation which does not deny nor negate the realities of human suffering and human sin but recalls us to the path of salvation through those realities. It is about our life in Christ, come what may in the ups and down of our times. Jesus weeps for our good. May his tears move us to compunction and contrition, to compassion and commitment, to care and love. Those who saw Jesus weeping at the grave of Lazarus, his friend, said, “see how he loved him” (Jn. 11.36). May we, too, see how he loves us.
Fr. David Curry, SSC
Trinity 10, 2022
August 21st, 2022
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