Day: October 29, 2023

“Above all, take the shield of faith”

We go from the “wedding-garment” to “the whole armour of God,” an intriguing juxtaposition of opposites, it might seem. The image of clothing in these readings – at once of last week’s gospel about the wedding-garment and in this week’s epistle reading from Ephesians about the whole armour of God – is not about external appearances but about what moves in us inwardly. Once again is about faith; hence the significance of Paul’s words, “above all, taking the shield of faith.”

This is illustrated for us rather wonderfully in the Gospel story of a certain nobleman “who believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him” about the healing of his son and whose faith is deepened into knowledge upon hearing from his servants that his son was healed. Note that his faith extends to the faith of his whole house. Faith is never simply personal but corporate.

The image of the shield is particularly striking and powerful and belongs to a long tradition of reflection upon the paradoxes of the human condition. Homer’s Iliad presents a detailed description of Achilles’ shield as part of the armour created by Hephaestus as he prepares to return to the battle to revenge the death of his friend Patroclus. The shield is marvellously described as depicting two cities: the city at peace and the city at war. How is the city of peace described? By a wedding festival and by a court of law reconciling a conflict. Virgil reworks the same contrast between war and peace in his depiction of the shield of Aeneas in The Aeneid. And the image of the shield of Achilles is reworked in modern times by the poet W.H. Auden in his poem entitled The Shield of Achilles.

Written in 1952, that poem speaks to the dark and troubling realities of our world soaked in blood and hatred. He has in mind the horrors of the Second World War. Auden depicts Thetis, the mother of Achilles, looking over the shoulder of the techno-god Hephaestus “for vines and olive trees,/Marble well-governed cities,” looking “for ritual pieties,/ White flower-garlanded heifers, libation and sacrifice,” and looking “for athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance/ Moving their sweet limbs/ Quick, quick to music;” all images of the city at peace. But instead of such images of peace and life, what she sees is “an artificial wilderness/ And a sky like lead,” a barren and empty world with “no blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,/Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,” a meaningless world of armies “column by column in a cloud of dust/ … march[ing away] enduring a belief/Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief;” a world of “barbed wire,” “bored officials” and “sweating sentries” where “a crowd of ordinary decent folk/ Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke”, silent in their despair or indifference “as three pale figures were led forth and bound/To three posts driven upright in the ground;” a reference to Calvary by way of the holocaust.

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