“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.
It is a dead world where men died “before their bodies died,” spiritually dead, a world where there is “no dancing-floor/ But a weed-choked field” and where “a ragged urchin, aimless and alone” knows as axioms only “that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third” and “who’d never heard/Of any world where promises were kept,/Or one could weep because another wept;” a world bereft of any compassion. It is a telling indictment of our modern times. How are we to think and face the evil of our days?
“Put on the whole armour of God,” Paul tells us. The Greek word, panoply, refers to all of the accoutrements of a warrior – shield, helmet, breastplate, sword – yet Paul uses them as analogies to the greater spiritual struggle that underlies the disorders of our world and our hearts. For we contend, he says, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places.” Strong stuff. I wonder if we can hear it even in the approach to Remembrance Day and at a time when we confront the forms of active nihilism which arise out of our communities and ghettoes of passive nihilism, out of our spiritual emptiness; the nothingness of evil which breeds a destructive nothingness.
The real issues, even the so-called “root causes” of our global discontents with respect to Ukraine and now, once again, the Middle East, in the attempts by Hamas to annihilate the state of Israel and to negate the long-sought for two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian peoples, are profoundly spiritual, an endless retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, of the voice of our brother’s blood endlessly crying out to God. At the heart of the matter is the reality of knowing that we contend against spiritual principles of darkness within our own hearts. We forget this at our peril. The real problem of evil lies within. It takes strong armour “to withstand in the evil day and, having done all, to stand.” It is really about the ethical teachings that bid us to transcend the animosities of our hearts and world by recalling us to a deeper understanding of the dignity and truth of our humanity. Such is the radical meaning of the love of God and the love of neighbour which belong to what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the ethical way of life for our humanity as reflected in the world’s religions.
We wrestle against spiritual powers of wickedness that negate the primacy of the ethical. But we are not without the means of withstanding but “above all” and only by “taking the shield of faith.” For alongside the classical and modern images of the Shield of Achilles, Paul draws upon a number of Scriptural passages.
Abram, even before he is renamed Abraham by God, heard the voice of God in a vision, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield,” your protective force, in other words, come what may in the journey of your life, the journey which I, God, have set you upon that “through you all nations may call themselves blessed.” The image of shield, too, appears frequently in the Psalms: “The Lord is my strength and shield: my heart has trusted in him, and I am helped;/ therefore my heart dances for joy, and in my song will I praise him” (Ps. 28.8). That sense of trust in the truth of God allows for the expression of joy and for singing God’s praises. It is part and parcel of what we do in the liturgy. We take hold of “the shield of faith.” It is about who we are in our essential Christian and human identity.
Shields are more than the artefacts of war; they also serve as icons of identity, capturing some understanding of who we are as a community and a culture. But more profoundly the shield here is an icon of faith, of what belongs to Christian understanding and life as expressed in the great Catholic creeds which encapsulate the essential teachings of the Scriptures, the faith in which we are to “dress ourselves,” as Augustine teaches.
The shield of faith is an image of our identity with God in Christ. He and he alone has overcome all of the animosities of our souls; we have only to will that same reconciling love in our own hearts and lives; to want it in our troubled world. Therein lies the struggle: to be what we are called to be.
To embrace that struggle with grace and dignity means to be open to the radical truth of God, like the certain nobleman who “believe[ed] the word that Jesus had spoken unto him” and went down to his house in peace. To do so is both a mighty victory of grace against ourselves in the vanity of our opinions and certainties and a work of grace within ourselves that allows us to see one another as God sees us; to know even as we are known. We have to will what is made known to us by the grace of God’s Word.
This miracle, we are told, was “the second sign which Jesus did.” What was the first sign? The story of Christ at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee where Jesus turned the water into wine, making something good and wonderful out of our lack and insufficiency and all for our good. Such is the marriage feast.
The Scriptures reveal things about the truth and the majesty of God, and things about ourselves, both the good and the bad. They are only bearable in the mercies of Christ which is why Paul bids us “above all, [to] take the shield of faith.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 21, 2023