“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.
Thus this Sunday stands juxtaposed between these two feasts in the Sanctorale, the cycle of holy days that punctuate the patterns of the Church Year with the grace notes of glory that belong to the pilgrimage of faith. Conversion and purification are essential to that pilgrimage. Conversion has to do with the constant turning of our souls to the things of God. Purification has to do with the call to repentance and as such the call away from all that hinders and hampers the journey of our souls. These two themes complement the transition to the pageant of God’s redeeming grace in Christ’s sacrifice.
Conversion is not a one off event however much there may be for some a particular moment of clarity and a change of heart and mind. It is really the constant work of attending to the will of God in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ and to our life in his body, the Church. Conversion consists of two interrelated parts: repudiation and recapitulation. Both have to do with a new understanding of spiritual matters that propel us into the motions of discipline and service. Repudiation marks the sense of that change in outlook from old ways to new ways or perhaps old ways as newly understood; hence recapitulation, the recalling in a new understanding the things of the past. Conversion is transformation and in the radical sense of the breakthrough of the understanding, like Saul who comes to see that the sufferings of the Crucified are precisely the marks of the Messiah. That is the breakthrough moment that will lead to the development of the Christian Faith. His conversion is not from Judaism to Christianity for neither really yet existed; Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity arise more or less at the same time. Saul, renamed Paul, will play a major role in the emergence of Christianity.
Purification presupposes our sense of our impurity or sinfulness, hence our need for the grace which comes from God for our sanctification. The Candlemas feast recalls the ancient Jewish customs of the rituals of purification which are taken up and transformed in Mary and Christ. They are about our active participation in the divine will which seeks our perfection, hence our purification from all that defiles us and makes us less than who we are in God’s sight.
What is striving except our wrestling with God so that we may grasp for ourselves what he seeks and provides for us? The first reference to wrestling is found in one of the oldest literary works known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh where Gilgamesh and Enkidu engage in an epic contest. Yet out of it comes friendship, the friendship that ultimately contributes to Gilgamesh’s great quest for wisdom and understanding about death and life. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel, with God, and is named Israel which means one who strives with God.
That striving, as Paul suggests, is for a kind of mastery. But not the mastery of the domination of one over the other, nor the illusions of omnipotence and control over nature and all and every form of limitation in the contemporary world of our techno determinism. No. It is temperance, the virtue of self-mastery, the mastery of our appetites especially. It requires a kind of discipline which means taking seriously the idea that we are spiritual beings who have an eternal end with God and who are therefore not defined by the transitory and passing things of the world. At issue is our proper use of the givenness of things in relation to the transcendence of God; the disciplining of our appetites so that they don’t rule over us.
We wrestle and labour but not in vain, not in a kind of hopeless despair, nor in a kind of passive complacency but for our end in God. It cannot be achieved by us for it is the gift of God’s grace. We wrestle and labour to understand what God seeks for us and gives us. This is our freedom and this is God’s grace at work in us. These ‘Gesima Sundays, marking the seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth days before Easter, bid us to take seriously the disciplines that belong to our end in God. They are about the activity of our souls in working with God’s grace. Wrestling with God. Striving with God.
“Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things”
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima Sunday 2024