Day: January 28, 2024

“Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things”

Striving? Striving for what? Something that passes away – a corruptible crown, as it were? Or something which is everlasting – an incorruptible crown or end? Which is it? It makes all the difference.

Yet the paradox is clear. We strive for what we cannot achieve on the basis of our own merit. The Epistle calls us to the disciplines of spiritual life, specifically today to the virtue of temperance, the self-mastery of our appetites. It extends to all the exercises of mind and heart through the athletic metaphor of runners in a race. Yet the Gospel reminds us that the prize of eternal life is God’s free gift that can neither be taken for granted nor simply assumed. We labour by faith in the vineyard of God’s creation. We are not owed anything except what is right according to the Lord of the Vineyard, not according to the limits and vagaries of human justice. “Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.”

This Sunday marks the transition from the Christmas cycle of feasts to the Easter Cycle which culminates in Ascension and Pentecost. The ‘Gesima Sundays are pre-Lenten Sundays that at one time marked the beginning of the penitential season of Lent in the early Church but have now become for us the necessary means of our preparation for the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls to God. We are to be like athletes in training for the games, engaged in the disciplines that belong to the perfection of human character. But for what end? Our end with God which is by definition not of our making but one which requires the activity of our souls in faith to grasp what God wills for us. For in so doing, we will what God wills for us and for the good of our humanity and “in all things,” as Paul notes. The classical virtues are the qualities of the excellence of character identified in the Greek poetic and philosophical traditions. They are not negated but transformed into forms of love in the Christian understanding.

Thursday past was the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul who was blinded into sight by “a light above the brightness of the Sun,” the divine light of the Epiphany, we might say. Next Friday will be Candlemas, the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Christ in the temple as an infant, a double feast at once of Mary and of Christ. It marks the fortieth day after Christmas but points us to Holy Week and Easter. Christ is at once “a light to light the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel,” as Simeon says. To Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also” in reference to Christ’s Passion. “This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against … that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Powerful images. And as if in complement to today’s epistle, the Candlemas Gospel includes Anna the Prophetess who “departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” Fasting and prayer are some of the spiritual disciplines that belong to the pilgrimage of faith.

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