Day: February 5, 2023

“Go ye also into the vineyard”

With the ‘Gesima Sundays’ we are turned to the dust and ground of creation, quite literally, it seems, even if frozen and covered with ice and swirling snow. The Latin term gesima as in Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima belongs to pre-Lent; they already anticipate the quadragesima, the forty days of Lent excluding Sundays. The ‘Gesima Sundays’ recall different patterns historically about the numbering of the forty days of Lent in terms of not just excluding Sundays but other days which also marked a break from the fast of Lent. Septuagesima refers to the week of the seventieth day before Easter; Sexagesima, the week of the sixtieth day, and Quinquagesima, the week of the fiftieth day. Thus they orient us towards Holy Week and Easter.

But they do so in a preparatory way by providing a kind of treatise on moral life in terms of the classical virtues as transformed by the theological virtues, principally, charity or love. Temperance and justice are set before us today, then courage and prudence, on Sexagesima Sunday and, then, on Quinquagesima Sunday, we are launched into the journey of Lent as the pilgrimage of Love by way of the theological virtues highlighted most profoundly by Paul in his great hymn of love. The pilgrimage of our souls to God requires illumination, purgation and union or perfection. These ‘Gesima’ Sundays belong to that journey.

Just as Candlemas marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, so these Sundays mark a transition by adding to the Epiphany theme of illumination the themes of purgation and perfection or union that ultimately belong to the disciplines of Lent. But on all three Sundays, we are turned to the ground of our lives, first, in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard of creation; secondly, in the parable of the sower and the seed in its question about what kind of ground are we? and, thirdly, in the idea of going up to Jerusalem understood as the meaning of our lives in spiritual pilgrimage, a going up with Jesus in terms of the teaching or illumination about the end and purpose of our lives, the teaching about the purgation of all that belongs to the sinfulness of our lives, and the teaching about what belongs to our perfection, namely, our being with Christ in and through the drama of his Passion. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says.

What is wonderful about today’s readings is that they are really confessional. Paul is speaking about temperance or self-mastery of the things of the body and the need for self-control but with an awareness of the danger of hypocrisy – saying one thing and doing the exact opposite. Hypocrisy casts a wide net in which we are all entangled. This is a reminder of the imperfection and incompleteness of our own lives that should put a check on the forms of self-righteous judgmentalism so prevalent in our world and in which we are all complicit in some way or another. Deploring the problem of climate change and pointing fingers of blame at others, for instance, while remaining beholden to our devices in their massive consumption of energy and to our reliance and sense of entitlement about air travel, to take but two instances.

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