by CCW | 11 February 2024 10:00
“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love. Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of experience and life, as one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs in his latest album, O sun O moon, puts it. Well push has come to shove as we stand on the brink of Lent for which this Sunday wonderfully prepares us. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and in a kind of Providential paradox it is also Valentine’s day! It’s all about love! But what do we mean by love? This Sunday teaches us about the divine love which redeems and perfects our human loves.
Lent concentrates the whole Christian pilgrimage to God into the span of forty days. It is a journey into light and understanding about the radical meaning of God’s love accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells the disciples and us in today’s gospel. Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration and desire for an absolute good or end. It is “Jerusalem which is above,” our heavenly end in God.
We know, at least in part, I suppose, what that going to Jerusalem means: the overcoming of all sin and evil in the Passion of Christ; in short, the free gift of Christ for us and for our wounded and broken humanity. It is altogether about the accomplishment of “all things written by the prophets concerning the Son of man,” as Jesus himself says. The challenge for us is to take a hold of that radical love of God revealed to us in the Passion of Christ. It is nothing less than learning and living the love of God in our lives. Jesus speaks about his Passion, death and resurrection but, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things,” for as yet they have not happened. We know about them after the fact but are here being given the interpretative means to understand exactly what they mean.
Paul’s great hymn to love complements and shapes the understanding of the journey to Jerusalem. It celebrates the eternal love of God made visible in Christ’s Passion. The love he is talking about is the divine love, the love which never faileth. Charity means love in its strongest sense. Caritas in the Latin carries over into English as charity and charity is more, though not less, than our compassion and outreach to those in need, the acts of charitable giving, as it were. Yet those acts are grounded in the deep love of God. The Greek word here is agape and belongs to the theology of amor, for the pilgrimage of the soul by love, with love, and to love, the love of God which is the true end and meaning of all our loves.
Paul’s great hymn belongs to a larger tradition of reflection about the deeper meaning of love. Like Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, itself a treatise on the nature of love, it teaches us about love not in terms of the objects of love but by way of love as an active and dynamic force moving in us and perfecting our human loves. Human desire or love is essentially tragic: an endless longing after this thing and that things, for one thing after another after another after another, literally a bad infinity, schlechte unendlichkeit, with apologies to Hegel. All of this hides and conceals the true nature of our longing for God in whom alone we find the redemption and the truth of all our loves.
What redeems our loves in disarray is the divine gift of love which Paul highlights. It is the love which gives of itself, the love which suffers long and is kind, which does not envy what others have, which does not boast and get puffed up in self-importance, which does not act with impropriety and rudeness, which does not seek its own interests, which is not easily provoked, which thinks no evil, which rejoices not in evil but in the truth, and which bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things; for love or “charity never faileth.” It is eternal; it is the free gift of God in Christ’s sacrifice.
“Charity suffereth long.” It is the passion, the suffering of Christ for us that we are meant to consider and contemplate. That is the meaning of our journey, a journey at once into light and life but most importantly the journey of love. Light, life, and love.
In Luke’s Gospel, Christ’s teaching about the radical meaning of our going with him to Jerusalem is followed immediately by the encounter with the blind man sitting on the way-side begging near Jericho. The symbolic contrast could not be clearer. Jericho is the biblical symbol for the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly city. We are meant to be like the blind man in wanting to see, to know and to understand and so be whole; “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” known and embraced in the knowing love of God. Something is required of us. What is it? The desire to see or know just like what the blind man seeks from Jesus. Though blind he sees; he has an insight into the radical meaning of Jesus of Nazareth. He cries out to him: “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.”
That mercy is the charity or love of God. But we have to want it, to seek it and so persevere in the disciplines of charity that belong to the pilgrimage of love. The Ash Wednesday Penitential Service makes it clear what those spiritual disciplines are that belong to the observance of a holy Lent: self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word (BCP, p. 612). All of this can only be about our longing for what is accomplished and given to us in Christ’s Passion. The great traditions of spiritual pilgrimage in one way or another are all about our participation in the great and saving work of Christ for our humanity. We are to will what he has willed and suffered for us.
This is part and parcel of the theme of redemptive suffering about which our culture and even our churches are often in denial. Salvation or redemption is not about a gnostic flight from the world, a flight from all and every form of limitation, real or imagined. It is rather about learning the love which redeems our desires precisely through the givenness of the things of creation, a learning about the grace which does not destroy nor negate nature but perfects it. Human longing or love finds its truth in the divine love, the charity which never faileth for it is the love of God.
I began with a lyric from one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs. Let me end with another. “The list is long – as I recall/ Our orders said to love them all.” This is a reference to the radical interplay between the love of God and the love of one another, a love which extends to all of the confusions and complexities of our disordered humanity. It is signalled, for instance, in the Prayer for all Conditions of Men (BCP, p. 14). His lyric canvasses the various forms of the disorders and brokenness of our fallen humanity. We are to love them all in spite of and not because of the claims and assertions of personal faiths and identities. To love them all in the love of God is the love in which we shall know even as we are known. That can only be found in the eternal love and truth of God. “Push come to shove/ It’s all about love.”
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima, 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/02/11/sermon-for-quinquagesima-sunday-3/
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