“For ye were sometimes darkness”
At first glance, it must seem that there can be no greater contrast than that between the Epistle reading from Ephesians and the Gospel reading from St. Luke. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us, while bidding us to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us,” bidding us to “walk as children of the light,” and not the darkness, the light which is given us by Christ, the light which reproves the things of darkness, the light which overcomes the darkness of sin and death. It signals hope and life, light and love. But the Gospel sounds a more sombre and disquieting note where the goodness of Christ is called evil and where, ultimately, “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Where is the light in that?
It is, I think, in naming the darkness. The Gospel speaks prophetically and powerfully to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It is really a telling portrayal of nihilism, the sense of the empty meaninglessness of life. Why? Because of a despair of knowing, a despair of God that results in an intellectual and spiritual emptiness. There is, as is commonly noted, the problem of information overload in the digital culture of our time that only contributes to something more serious, a knowledge deficit, and even more, a loss of wisdom. T.S. Eliot’s verse pageant-play “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” (1934) offers a sustained critique of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our world.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Information is not knowledge, and wisdom is more than knowledge, and while this is ancient truth, it is truth which we have forgotten. It is not simply that the Church is forgotten and no longer wanted but that the churches, too, have forgotten or ignored or denied what belongs to their essential being.
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying
within and attacked from without;
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while
there is time of prosperity
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity
they will decry it.
Our times. Yet the poem asks, “But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?” The challenge is to reclaim what belongs to our life with God.
You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?
Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men
to God.
“Our citizenship is in Heaven”; yes, but that is the model and
type of your citizenship upon earth.
The poem acknowledges the challenge and the difficulty. It has very much to do with ourselves and our unwillingness to hear, to read, and to think and act upon what we hear and read.
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her
laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would
forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they
like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
And that, perhaps, is exactly what we have in this Gospel, a strong reminder to us about the things which we forget or choose to ignore.
The world turns, and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
That is what this Gospel shows us. It brings to a kind of conclusion the theme of the demonic which we have had before us on the First and Second Sundays of Lent. Jesus is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil” and the Canaanite woman seeks from Jesus the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil.” The devil, we have seen, is the principle of all that opposes the goodness and truth of God. It is the great delusion, the contradiction of the self.
“When something is heading towards its end, the cause of its impending death resides either within it or outside it,” the French philosopher, Michel Henry, notes in the last chapter of his book Barbarism, itself a critique of modern culture (1987, trans. 2012). “The Destruction of the University,” as he puts it, is from both, particularly from the ideologies of sociologism that supplant philosophy and any respect for learning. And so, too, for us. There are forces from without that are anti-Christian and there are similar forces from within. “O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart”, Eliot says, and then quotes Jeremiah: “For the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”
Here in this Gospel Jesus “casts out a devil” only to be accused of being a devil himself. Beelzebul, the prince of the devils, is named here in a way that highlights the contradiction in our hearts and minds that is the nature of sin and evil itself. Beelzebul means “Lord of the dwelling”, that which possesses. Baal is a Canaanite god-term, an idol in the biblical view. Jesus brings to light for us the nature of our division and separation from truth. Beelzebul, like all forms of evil, is divided against himself. In calling Jesus’ good evil, we show ourselves to be divided within ourselves and against the goodness of God.
The passage goes on to emphasize that the healing of our hearts of darkness can only be, in a wonderful image, by the finger-grace of God. It cannot be done simply by ourselves. It is not only that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves” but our attempt to do so is itself a denial of that upon which our life and thought radically depend: the prior goodness of God and his grace. In forgetting that we make things worse for ourselves; such is our pride and pretension that results in “the last state of that man [being] worse than the first.”
This is not just a powerful indictment of us and the human condition of sinfulness, hence a word of condemnation. More importantly, it names the darkness; light makes manifest. The darkness here is the profound neglect of God, a denial of the absolute which is the condition of our modern nihilism.
George Steiner, in what was one of the lost (now found) Massey Lectures, speaks to our postmodern world in terms of “the incredulity of meta-narratives,” to use Francois Lyotard’s famous phrase. The lecture is entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute.” He noted that the great ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Levi-Strauss’s social anthropology, Freudian psycho-analysis, and Marxist theory – have all failed, leaving a kind of vacuum into which race all manner of nonsense; as if anticipating the range of conspiracy theories that bedevil us today in the cult-like ways of identitarian politics. There is a kind of despair about knowing, about meaning and thus a retreat into the various forms of nihilism either passive or active. We retreat into hedonism or into activisms that are anti-human and destructive of life itself. It is the worship of the idols of ourselves and serves only the self-interest of an elite.
“O weariness of men who turn from God,” Eliot says, noting, instead, our turning
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
It is all a kind of futility, the futility that Jesus puts his finger on in the Gospel. Every kingdom and every house and thus every soul is “divided against itself” in that wilful forgetting of God and so cannot stand. “If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebul; and if I cast out devils by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.”
This is the light that names the darkness of our human hearts in disarray and it is something which we always need to hear. For without it all claims to walking in love and walking in the light are but empty delusion. We remain trapped in ourselves and in the false assertions and claims about ourselves. This is the darkness of deep Lent upon which the light of Christ is cast, making manifest the things of darkness. The darkness of sin and evil is overcome in Christ, to be sure, but that overcoming in us is the constant struggle of our lives. It can only happen by the grace of Christ.
John Bunyan’s great spiritual classic, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), names this moment in our lives as “the slough of despond,” the swamp of despair that the allegorical figure, Christian, and, thus, all Christians, experience in the realization of sin and guilt and in getting literally bogged down in ourselves and beating up on ourselves which is really a kind of denial or negation of God’s grace. It is as if we are only and always darkness. The pilgrim’s progress, the journey, the exodus of our souls, is God’s grace at work in us illuminating and purging the things of darkness by the light of Christ and so bringing us to that Jerusalem which is above.
In a similar way, Eliot recalls us to the light of the Gospel. It is, he says,
A moment in time but time was made through that moment:
for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment
of time gave the meaning.
It is an allusion to Christ and the Gospel and leads to a profound but realistic portrait of the pilgrimage of our lives.
Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the
light of the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative
being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before,
selfish and purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their
march on the way that was lit by the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet
following no other way.
The good news, the light in the darkness, is that “ye were sometimes darkness.”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 3, 2023