“At thy word”
“‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” It is a famous opening line from Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond, an Anglo-Catholic classic. There are also great ending lines, too. “Grace is everywhere” or “all is grace” (tout est grâce) ends George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. There are beginnings and endings that evoke a whole pattern understanding and which illustrate the character of our lives in media res, in the midst of things. And sometimes, mirabile dictu, there are opening and ending lines which go together and complement each other like what we have with this morning’s Epistle and Gospel.
The Epistle reading from 1st Peter begins with the strong phrase, “be ye all of one mind” and ends with “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” The Gospel reading from Luke begins with the strong and compelling image of “the people press[ing] upon Jesus to hear the word of God” and ends with Simon Peter, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and others “for[saking] all and follow[ing] him.” In each case everything in between is held together by these phrases. In the Epistle, what is in between is an exhortation to a godly life against the explicit forms of wickedness which so easily arise not only in our hearts, but also in the forms of suffering and persecution, terror and trouble, fear and anxiety that are part and parcel of human experience in a our common life together. In the Gospel, what is in between is the equally compelling image of the empty frustrations that belong to human experience: “ we have toiled all the night,” Simon Peter says, “and have taken nothing.” We have but laboured in vain, it seems.
“Be ye all of one mind,” Peter tells us. But what is that one mind? Is it mere unanimity regardless of what one is agreed about? Surely not. Peter is talking about the mind of Christ for he goes on to describe the qualities of the love of Christ towards us which must become the form of his life within us. Such is sanctification. But as the Gospel reminds us that is not simply about our doing, a human enterprise. It is and can only be the work of God’s grace in us. “Apart from me you can do nothing,” Jesus tells us.
Being of one mind is not simply about consensus. It is about truth as life in us corporately and individually. Within state and church, within society and parish, we can be of one mind about things which are wrong and unethical, for example, or we can arrive at a good and fine decision but in questionable and coercive ways. Do we not all with one mind cry out “crucify him, crucify him” in the drama and spectacle of Holy Week?
As T.S. Eliot puts it, “the greatest treason is to do the right deed for the wrong reason” yet, it seems to me, there is equally the problem of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. All of this turns on what is moving and alive in us. There are the “dark wood[s]” within and without our souls where “the right way is lost and gone” (Dante). If being of one mind arises out of confusion and ignorance, wilful or otherwise, dark prejudice or the lust for power, then it is not what Peter is saying in the Epistle about holiness and blessings. For there is no being of one mind where our hearts are endlessly divided and where we seek to inflict hurt out of a sense of resentment, fear and entitlement. Hence the power of the last line. “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”
“Being of one mind” does not arise out of ourselves, but only from our life together as consecrated to God in obedience to his Word. Only then there can be reasonable and charitable differences among us about what to do or not to do because then there is a true “being of one mind” about the essential form of our Christian faith and life. There is the constant task of the renewing of our minds on the principles of the Faith that belong to our attention to the high things of God and that honour the legitimate and just differences among us. But how? The Gospel illustrates what is required in such a renewing.
“The people pressed upon [Jesus] to hear the Word of God.” There was a hunger and a thirst for God’s Word, for something more beyond the contrary words and divided affections of human hearts, for something more than the snarl and whine of conflicting opinions. That pressing upon him, that hungering and thirsting, shows the awareness of a deeply felt need. It acknowledges an emptiness within that can only be filled by God. They came wanting to hear and willing to be taught. And Jesus responds to their desire, for it is a godly desire in which they are, we might say, truly “of one mind.”
Jesus makes a fishing boat his pulpit. It is as if those on shore are drawn into the net of his teaching from the boat. The Word of God goes forth from God’s Word and Son and we are willingly caught in the net of his teaching. Yet Jesus does something more. He provides for the continuation of his teaching through those whom he calls to be his “fishers of men”. They are to be the teachers of his Word, under his Word and through his Word. He calls them, moreover, out of the recognition of the barren emptiness of human experience simply considered in itself. By itself, it does not and cannot satisfy.
Our labours and our lives have to be gathered into the purpose of God’s Word and be measured by it. “Master, we have toiled all the night long and have taken nothing.” To be sure. Such is frequently our experience, especially when we ignore or overlook what God would have us know about our end in his love, especially when we refuse to act out of what he has given us to do in his name. But “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” There is the saving grace, the openness to Christ in our hearts and minds, to the primacy of God’s will and not simply to our expectations and frustrations.
“At thy word” is the opening to salvation, not on account of a full net of prosperity and material gain, but because it is obedient to God’s Word. God alone makes something out of the nothingness of our lives. He alone brings true unity out of the mean divisions of our hearts. But only if “at thy word” is followed in our hearts. Only if, indeed, we will see that the rule of his Word is the only means by which “the course of this world,” as the Collect puts it, may be “peaceably ordered” and governed and the only way by which “[his] Church may joyfully serve [him] in all godly quietness,” even and especially in the face of a divided and hostile world.
“In all godly quietness” is not about doing nothing. “Being of one mind” means our prayerful attentiveness to God’s Word and Son. It means our “press[ing] upon [Jesus] to hear the word of God”. That is to hold ourselves accountable to the pattern of teaching that arises out of the Scriptures and gives shape to the ordered life of the Church and to our lives in the sanctity of Christ. To seek it is to think it so as to live it.
These great opening and ending lines open us out to the wonder of our lives with God. In a way they simply echo the greatest opening lines of all: “In the beginning God” and “In the beginning was the Word”, beginnings which are equally endings in our lives in Christ. In such opening and ending lines we shall find grace and salvation, even in the midst of the world’s frustrations, provided we are in the company of those who “press upon Jesus to hear the word of God” with the attention to follow in his teachings, whether or not we are riding camels to Mass. It can only be:
“At thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity V, 2023