“Go thy way, thy son liveth”
But is God’s word alive in us? Here is the Gospel story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again, and all without seeing. And its effects extend to define a community of faith, “himself believed, and his whole house”. “Faith cometh by hearing” has its illustration in this touching scene. But does his Word have its resonance in us?
We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvelous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, and recalls to us as well the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and world.
They remind us of what so much of our culture and church is often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that, properly speaking, define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the empty barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness, what one theologian has called “metaphysical boredom”.
This is the modern disease of secular society which has denied the deepest questions of meaning. But banishing such questions leaves a God-shaped hole in our hearts and our culture into which run a whole plethora of false gods. George Steiner, in a largely forgotten Massey Lecture, called attention to this modern phenomenon as “Nostalgia for the Absolute”, noting that in the place of religion, the ideologies of secular atheism rushed in with such things as Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism and the social anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, all ideologies which have come and gone. They have left in their wake “the incredulity of meta-narratives”, as François Lyotard puts it, a defining feature of what is sometimes called post-modernism.
Yet in the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are altogether about the resonance of God’s word in human lives. Without them our churches, like our souls, are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, in Shakespeare’s poignant words.
There is the paradox that out of the metaphysical barrenness of contemporary culture arises a cri de coeur for God. A recent article in the Financial Post actually argues in the face of the decline of religion in Canada the need for religious education in the Schools. And if so, then surely attention should be paid to the teaching Church, to our churches as places of teaching in and through the liturgy. For such is the resonance of God’s word in us, if we will take it seriously. And if we don’t, then we will find ourselves taken captive to the new religions of identity politics which seek to coerce thought and expression about identities in the name of individual rights in flight from nature and the world. It is endlessly divisive and corrosive of our common life both politically and spiritually.
Here in the Gospel we have a powerful story about the radical meaning of healing, a healing of body and souls, we might say. “A certain nobleman … besought [Jesus] that he would come down and heal his son.” He assumes that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective: “Come down ere my child die”. Something divine in Jesus is at once acknowledged and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our demands and desires, there the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word and not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such acknowledgement is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.
The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” and my will only as it is found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will, but only in the captivity of our understanding to the divine Word – to the resonance of that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom.
In the Gospel, Jesus who said “except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”, tells the man, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” We are told by John, and this is the interest of his gospel, that “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.” His believing is his acting upon what he has heard. He gives his understanding over to the Word and places his desire under the power of that Word. It is exactly what defines the saints and the communion of saints.
“Go thy way”, Jesus says. He does not say, “I am subject to your will.” No. “Go thy way, thy son liveth” is what he says. “Thy son liveth” stands upon the condition of the priority of God having his way, as it were, with us. God, of course, will not have his way with us against our will but only through our wills; our wills finding their place in God’s will through the play of his Word upon our understanding. The man’s desire for the healing of his son, with all its poignant intensity, is simply placed with God.
That faith “cometh by hearing” and in the captivity of the understanding to the Word means that faith cannot be primarily a sensual or emotive experience. The resonance of that Word in us means a boldness of faith and a quiet confidence of faith precisely in the face of a world which incessantly demands signs and wonders, on the one hand, and yet despairs of God, on the other hand. It signals a deepening of the understanding of the Word, an increase of faith in us.
The captivity of the understanding is no imprisonment of the mind to some dungeon of dogma. Rather, it is its freedom for inquiry in the Word, for the form of living doctrine in the soul. In going his way the man hears – he does not see – that his son lives and “he inquired of them the hour when his son began to amend.” His inquiry is not an external testing of God’s Word, putting God to the test, as it were. No. It is rather the resonance of that Word in the man who, having heard Jesus’s word, went his way, going we might say from faith into understanding, fides quarenes intellectum, “faith seeking understanding”, in Anslem’s famous words. The captivity of the understanding opens out a way of understanding in which our desires properly find their place, ultimately, in that Communion of Saints which signals the vocation of our lives, namely, to be the company in which God’s Word has its resonance in us.
It is in the times of a felt emptiness that there can be the possibilities of a remembrance, the possibilities of a return and a renewal of our souls and our churches, but only if we hear and act upon what we hear. It is the particular challenge of the Church in our times: to hear the Word with understanding and to be captive to that Word.
We come to God in prayer, not to bend his will to ours, but to allow his Word to capture our understanding and to shape our wills to his. For such is the sovereign freedom of God’s Word in us. Such is his word alive in us.
“Go thy way, thy son liveth”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI (in the Octave of All Saints)
November 6th, 2022