“Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”
So Paul bids us and so Luke shows us. What is that vocation? It is about our life in Christ. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling,” we are told. And what is that calling? That there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Paul in Ephesians gives us a clear and objective statement of faith. But how does it become our faith? That too is stated: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
This counters all of the empty assertions and personal faith or identity claims that beset an anxious and fearful world in which we are increasingly isolated and alone, separated and divided from all that makes us human. This is the antithesis of the culture of “look at me looking at you looking at me,’ a culture which is essentially narcissistic and empty, in other words, nihilistic, even as it seeks for meaning in belonging to whatever seems to offer self-affirmation. Belonging not believing. Paul is talking about both. And believing, not as some form of personal assertion or opinion, but as holding onto what is transcendent, true, and God-given, is the condition of our belonging. We belong to what is greater than ourselves. To know that is the saving grace which counters our self-pretension and self-righteousness. We are known in the loving embrace of God.
“Friend, go up higher.” This too is our calling in Christ. Not on the basis of our presumption and claims to greatness. Based on what? Our sense of self-importance which is really about our claims to entitlement and privilege over others? That is to miss the whole point of our calling. The Gospel shows us the great misreading and misunderstanding about the Law, particularly the fourth commandment about the Sabbath. As Jesus famously says, drawing upon the example of King David, “the sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath,” for the sabbath is given not as burden but as a blessing. It belongs to what God seeks for our humanity; our wholeness and completeness as found in Him, signaled in Paul’s words about our life in Christ.
The sabbath is given as a time for prayerful reflection and meditation upon the truth of God and his creation and our place within it without which our thoughts and actions become deceptive, delusional, self-seeking and thus divisive and destructive. “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?”, Jesus asks rhetorically to the Lawyers and Pharisees who have watched him with critical and judgemental eyes. He names their hypocrisy. For if is not lawful then we would be justified in ignoring the needs of one another; holding to the letter of the law while denying its truth and spirit. Such is the evil of self-righteousness and hypocrisy as Jesus shows. “Which of you shall have an ass, or an ox, fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?” One cannot miss the irony of his question in preferring our animal possessions to the care of human beings. “And they could not answer him again to these things.” They are convicted in their consciences and so are we.
This means denying the love of neighbour and the love of God, a denial of our calling. It means asserting ourselves over one another as Jesus goes on to show about those who presume to “choose out the chief seats,” thus claiming a place of superiority over others.
The sense of vocation concerns the question about the true nature of our humanity. It complements the theme of Michaelmas. We are in the company of Angels. Michaelmas reminds us that we are spiritual and intellectual beings. We are not defined just by our being in the world “following too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” as the confession of sin so powerfully reminds us but which we have forgotten or ignored. (P.D. James in one of her detective mystery stories, Devices and Desires, written in 1989, refused to include an explanation of the source of the title because she thought it belonged to the kind of common knowledge that everyone should know! One can only wish it were so.)
Can the angels teach us? Thomas Aquinas asks this in the Disputed Questions on Truth and answers, yes. How? “By moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.” But what do they teach us? They teach us that we belong to an intelligible and spiritual world and that human reason participates in intellectus, meaning understanding, in the gathering into unity of all things in God, especially our humanity. In other words they remind us of the world as a whole and of the higher kind of unitive thinking that is the counter to the divided and divisive nature of linear thinking. Lancelot Andrewes makes the interesting point that “diversities,” even as “diversities of gifts,” is misleading since diversity suggests “an indeterminate heap of things” as opposed to the division or distinction of one thing from another which presupposes and depends on the gathering of all things into unity without which they are really nothing. Our ‘culture of diversity’ is more often than not about an indiscriminate heap of things each vying for attention, privilege and power that is divisive in the negative sense of division. Thus Michaelmas belongs to the paradox of the Gospel. We are called up higher only by humility, the humility which is not about self-abasement, beating up on ourselves which is really a form of self-obsession.
Humility recognizes our common humanity as made in God’s image as spiritual and thinking beings. The angels too are spiritual and intellectual beings. We cannot see them for unlike us they are invisible and immaterial created beings. We can only think them. Yet the most important things in life are the things you cannot see, only think and feel. Such is love. Such too are things like number. You can only see the representations of a number but number itself is entirely a mental reality. I often tell students that they have never seen a three walk across the school’s fields. Same thing with a point or a line. They exist as mental realities and not as things physical and material. We cannot see one another’s thoughts or even our own (though Jesus knows our thoughts and our hearts!). Only when our thoughts take shape as words can they be heard sensibly and then as written down, seen and read. But to think what we hear and see, that too is an intellectual act that is unseen. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world, the angels occupy no space. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world, the thoughts of God in creation.
Nowhere are we more in the company of angels than in worship. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name. The Angels are “those messengers of God” that are so much an essential feature of the spiritual landscape of the scriptural and philosophical traditions that belong to the deeper meaning and understanding of our humanity. We are together in the same house, as one writer puts it, “they above stairs and we below.” It is on angel wings that the thoughts of God come to us and that our thoughts and prayers ascend to God. We pray with the Angels. As Richard Hooker puts it,
What is the assembling of the Church to learn, but the receiving of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sending of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holy desires are as so many Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us. As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good. (Lawes, Bk. V, ch. xxiii)
The point is clear in the Gospel. It is not about exalting ourselves but humbling ourselves thus learning the unity that redeems and dignifies what is truly distinctive about each of us within the “one body and one Spirit,” in our calling and life of faith, a faith in God and not in ourselves. With the angels we are called up higher to the God “who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Only in that knowledge we can embrace Paul’s bidding to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 17, Octave of Michaelmas
Oct. 1st, 2023