“That you may know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge”
We meet on Angel’s wings in Micahelmastide to ponder the mysteries of God’s love and of our lives as embraced in “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”. Michaelmas belongs to a rich tradition of reflection about what it means to be human; in short, it contributes to a form of ‘theological anthropology’, to how we think and understand our humanity as grounded in God. So, too, in today’s readings, we are being reminded in profound ways that we are intellectual and spiritual creatures, creatures whose very being is caught up in the activities of knowing and loving. The interplay of knowledge and love contributes to a more comprehensive and a larger view of our humanity, to the ontology of love rather than merely power.
God’s question to Job is particularly suggestive and arresting. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job. 38. 4, 7). The morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. They testify to the spiritual and intellectual nature of reality. We are one with the Angels in thinking the things of God in nature and in human affairs; we are together with them in the same house of the spirit, they above stairs and we below stairs, in Mark Frank’s lovely image. Angels, like us, are spiritual and intellectual beings but, unlike us, they are invisible and immaterial realities. We are embodied creatures; they are not. They are the pure thoughts of God in creation and in redemption, non spatial and sempiternal.
God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question to us in the Garden of Eden. “Where are you?” God asks (Gen. 3. 9). Not because he doesn’t know but because his question awakens us to self-consciousness, to the idea of knowing that we know. It is about who we are. Yet our awakening to self-consciousness happens through disobedience and separation, through contradiction and the denial of what we, in some sense, know; in short, through our presumption. ‘Adam, our humanity, is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2.17). The serpent, later identified as Satan, the Devil, the great dragon, asks the very first question of the Scriptures. “Did God say?” (Gen. 3.1) But we know what God said. The serpent is simply an aspect of our being as spiritual and intellectual creatures who seek to know. Such is our nature. Man by nature, Aristotle famously says, desires to know. But in what way? Everything turns on that question.
There are questions that subvert and undermine our understanding and there are questions that seek the deepening of our understanding. The serpent’s question seeks to undermine the understanding of what God said. He insinuates an alternative interpretation which speaks directly to human pride and presumption. “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing, good and evil” (Gen. 3.5).
Two things are true about our eating of “the fruit of that forbidden tree” (Milton, Paradise Lost). We become aware of human mortality, of death and suffering exactly as God said. And we become aware of good and evil. But what the serpent says about our being like God in knowing good and evil is, at best, only a half-truth. We come to know good and evil but not like God. For we come to know the good only through the experience of sin and death, through evil. God, on the other hand, knows evil simply through the knowledge of his own goodness.
We cast ourselves out of the garden. There’s no going back despite Joni Mitchell’s later and more meditative version of her famous song, Woodstock, itself a reflection on an admission and regret that the modern belief that we can somehow control nature and history as if we were gods is false. The simple truth of the matter is that we aren’t gods and that we can’t control the world. We are only deceiving ourselves.
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
But we can’t get back to the garden. We can’t unthink nor undo what we have done. Are we, then, to be simply left with this gulf, this separation between ourselves and nature, ourselves and one another, ourselves and God? No. Why not? Because the truth of our humanity is found in God and not in ourselves, all our follies and sins notwithstanding. Thus we embark upon the long journey of education that seeks to recall us to who we are in the sight of God, learning that God and only God can restore and redeem our fallen humanity. Such is the project of redemption through the justifying and sanctifying grace of Christ.
Michaelmas recalls the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Yet “there was war in heaven”, not there is. Here in our lives there is the struggle, to be sure, but both Genesis and Revelation highlight the greater power and truth of the goodness of God. St. Michael and All Angels fight against Satan, the devil, “that old serpent” echoing Genesis. They overcome all that opposes the truth and goodness of God. They do so not by some power and conceit of their own but only by the blood of the lamb, by Christ.
Paul in Ephesians wants us to reflect upon the knowledge of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”. That seems paradoxical but it really is the truth about our knowing. We know in some sense what is beyond our knowing, a knowledge that is not simply something which we can possess. To put it in another way, we do not and cannot possess the truth; the truth possesses us. We learn about the interplay of two essential principles, knowing and loving, and how they go together and are perfectly united in Christ. Our knowing and loving, on the other hand, are always partial and incomplete because we are finite creatures and fallen beings. Yet through our experience of sin and suffering God makes a way for us back to his loving care for us.
The Gospel shows God’s loving care for us in motion. The Lord sees the widow of Nain in all her grief and sorrow, having lost not only her husband but now her only son. She is utterly bereft. She is not alone exactly. The whole city is united with her in her grief and sorrow. But to what end? Just a company of mourners? But when Jesus “saw her,” Luke tells us, “he had compassion on her”. That compassion is his knowing love of our humanity, a knowing love which does not deny nor negate the reality of our sorrows and griefs, of sin and suffering, of death and loss. It does not reduce us to those facts of our separation and the experience of death. They do not fundamentally define us.
Christ’s compassion is nothing less than God’s goodness in creation restoring us to life in redemption. The young man is raised from the dead and restored to his mother. Such is a wonderful illustration of the love that defines the community of the spirit, the active love which seeks our good and spiritual perfection.
The Gospel teaches us that we are not just defined by sin and evil. It teaches us the greater power of God’s loving knowledge for us; the divine compassion which shapes and informs human compassion. True compassion places us and one another in the love of God.
Luke, as Dante nicely observes, is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ which this story shows us in action. It is the very thing which Paul in Ephesians teaches about our lives in Christ as “rooted and grounded in love”, “comprehend[ing] with all saints”, and Angels, too, what is “the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of that love. He wants us to know “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”, a knowledge that belongs to the truth of our humanity as made in God’s image as part of a world which is far greater than us and one in which we are surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses,” the company of saints and angels, a company defined by “the love which moves the sun and other stars” (Dante, Paradiso). The compassion of Christ lifts us up into the life of the spirit, to who we are in the sight of God. Only in him can we begin to know even as we are known and to love even as we are loved.
“That you may know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16 (Michaelmastide), 2022