Day: November 19, 2023

“We give thanks to God … for the hope which is laid up for you in heaven.”

At the heart of Paul’s lovely flow of words of prayer and praise to God for the people of Colossae is the hope of heaven which they have heard and received in what he calls “the word of truth in the Gospel; which is come unto you” and which “bringeth forth fruit and increaseth” in them “since the day ye heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth.” His prayer is that they “might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,” and that they “might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.”

The passage in its intensity of warmth and expression belongs to the grace of God at work in our lives which has been a dominant feature of the Trinity season in terms of the idea of sanctification. Yet at the same time, the readings in the late Trinity season also point us to the coming of that grace towards us that belongs to Advent. Thus these Sundays are transitional; at once an ending and a beginning.

T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets, begins with the phrase “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning,’ capturing the nature of the transition that belongs to the interplay between justification and sanctification. It is really all a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of Christ, what Eliot terms the “still point of the turning world” … for “there the dance is” (Burnt Norton).

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

That end which is always present is God and the hope of heaven in us that “makes us meet to be partakers of the saints in light,” as Paul puts it. What that hope looks like is illustrated in the Gospel story. It is the yearning or desire for wholeness, for the integrity of our lives as found in Christ. That yearning is captured in the unspoken prayer of the woman who was diseased with an issue of blood for twelve years who came behind Jesus and “touched the hem of his garment.” As Matthew tells us, “she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Such is her insight into the grace of God in Christ and such is her desire for healing, for wholeness. Yet it is as if she thinks she can steal a cure from Jesus without his awareness. As such her desire is incomplete.

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