KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 16 February
They understood none of these things
It is a telling remark that belongs to the possibility, on the one hand, of Lent as the pilgrimage of love in the Christian understanding, and to the whole project of education, on the other hand. Learning can only happen in the awareness and the acknowledgement of our ignorance. The disciplines of the spiritual traditions focus especially on the importance of self-examination. “The unexamined life,” Socrates goes so far as to say, “is not worth living.” Why? Because we are all learners in one way or another. Education necessarily emphasizes the theme of self-criticism as the counter to self-importance and pride. The Lenten journey begins with dust and ashes; in short, with the spirit of humility.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” as the first Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount puts it. The poor in spirit are the humble, precisely those who seek the things of God and recognise their need for what transcends the boastful claims and assertions about ourselves. We are too much with ourselves only to find a kind of emptiness within. Loneliness, we are told, is the major problem which our culture faces. It is the paradox of the ‘connect to the disconnect.’ The forms of connectivity actually separate us from being able to connect face to face and to engage in meaningful conversation. We need more than social media with all of its distortions and distractions to find meaning and purpose in our lives.
“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel story which launches us into “the journey of the mind to God,” to use Bonaventure’s great phrase for the pilgrimage of the soul (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum). Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration for what is beyond ourselves. It is the biblical symbol for the heavenly city, the “Jerusalem which is above,” as Paul puts it in Galatians. Our human longings – our desires – are incomplete and partial, an endless and futile chasing after this thing and that. Mercy is the gift of divine love which redeems and seeks the perfection of our partial loves. Thus the story of Jesus going up to Jerusalem illustrates and is shaped by the divine love so extravagantly expressed in Paul’s great hymn to love which was read last week; the charity that never faileth, that suffereth long, that seeketh not her own.
Jesus tells the disciples precisely what it means to go up to Jerusalem. It means the spectacle of the disorders of our humanity made visible in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. He tells us that “all the things written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished” in Jerusalem. Such is the divine love which overcomes all and every form of sin and evil. It is made manifest in the crucified Christ.