by CCW | 3 March 2024 10:00
Quite the readings, it may seem. They are rather challenging and not a little disconcerting, and yet most appropriate to the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Why? Because we have to confront the darkness of our souls and know the potentiality and reality of evil. Only the light of Christ can help us to “walk in love,” “to be giving of thanks,” to “walk as the children of light,” “proving what is acceptable unto the Lord,” and thus “reprov[ing] the unfruitful works of darkness,” learning in our journey that “all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light,” to gather Paul’s remarkable words into a kind of summary. But meaning what exactly? That Christ makes known to us the nature of evil in making known and accomplishing the things that belong to the absolute goodness of God.
And what is the evil? The tempter, Satan, the deceiver, is at once the principle of what opposes God and is us in our betrayals of Christ. In this story, it is us in calling Christ’s good, his act of healing, evil, on the one hand, and demanding further signs, on the other hand. Christ’s response highlights these contradictions. Lent, especially in Holy Week, is the pageant of our betrayals of the love of God, but God, and God alone, makes light out of darkness, good out of our evil. Today’s readings are a sober and honest assessment of the human condition in self-presumption and pretension. It is a powerful indictment of human pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and one which arises from the illusions of the self.
The Gospel speaks profoundly to our current dilemmas of a polarized and divided world which witnesses to a deep loss of self and the crisis of meaning. It may be as the neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist along with John Vervaeke suggest, the problem of the dominance of left brain thinking which results in the loss of any sense of wholeness. We are as T.S. Eliot says, “the walking dead.” There lies in this the false assumption of our own abilities to solve all our problems through technique and praxis forgetting that such things cannot create heaven on earth but more often than not, hell.
This is ancient wisdom shown in the wise but commonplace idea that “every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against itself falleth.” And so too for ourselves in the very soul of our being. We are presented with the stark contrast between what is indivisible and what is inherently divisible. The kingdom of heaven is indivisible. Such is the kingdom of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which “endures in eternal unchangeableness” (Bede). The divine unity stands in complete contrast to the forms of our dividedness. As Ambrose, commenting on this part of the Gospel, puts it, “There is no division of an indivisible thing, and accordingly the term [divine power] is to be used to refer, not to a division of power, but to the nature of the divine unity.”
Athanasius offers an astute comment that speaks to the assumptions of the modern managerial therapeutic state. “Human nature, unaided by the Holy Spirit, is unable to cast out evil spirits.” All the more so the more we deny the very idea of evil and thus negate human agency and the true meaning of our humanity. That is about our constant looking to the light of Christ and seeking his grace as the guiding principle of our lives.
For what does this seemingly dark Gospel teach? First, there is the powerful lesson of the inherent contradictions that belong to all and every form of evil expressed here in terms of Beelzebul and Satan. Beelzebul looks back to the Baals – the gods of the Canaanite and Phoenician cultures. The term is variously translated as Lord of the Dwelling, suggesting what defines or possesses you, and as the Lord of the Flies, best known in modern times by William Goldings’ classic fable and cold war novel about the modern world written in 1954. The image suggests death and decay, the odour of dissolution and despair. Satan is the biblical term for the Tempter, particularly as examined in The Book of Job. Looking back to the Genesis story of the Fall, we confront the inherent contradiction of our fall into reason through the denial of the absolute goodness of the created order and our relation to God in whose image we are made. The point is that we contradict ourselves and God when we presume to be the lords of creation; paradoxically we are possessed with ourselves only to discover our complete emptiness.
Secondly, this Gospel highlights that problem of the loss of ourselves through ourselves and our own emptiness. To know this is actually part of the good news of this Gospel story but it needs perhaps to be fleshed out a bit by way of recourse to the wisdom of the Fathers (Ambrose). They see in this part of the Gospel the problem of our betrayal of the good in thinking that we possess “the seven virtues” only to find that we are possessed by “the seven vices.” It is the problem of spiritual pride, thinking that we can cleanse our souls and our world by means of human power. We can’t and the great mistake is to think that we can. It is the hypocrisy of thinking ourselves to be self-sufficient and good while failing to recognise the persistent reality and evil of our own self-will.
As Bede puts it, drawing on Ambrose and Augustine, “we learn that we must be very careful, lest through our own neglect the fault we thought dead within us return unawares. But he finds – [meaning] the faithful – swept and garnished; that is purified by the grace of baptism from the stains of sin, yet without any great eagerness in good works.” The pilgrimage of faith is a constant conversion of the soul and mind to God; there can be no pretence about resting upon the laurels of self-achievement. This is wonderfully shown in the images of the Proud in Dante’s Purgatorio. Pride is OMO, meaning Man, but in the conceit of ourselves as oblivious to God and so to others. The truth of our humanity is Homo Dei; our humanity is of God. To forget that is to lose everything and to be lost to ourselves.
In the commentary tradition, the seven virtues unite the ancient ethical and philosophical teachings about the four classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice with the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (love) which inform and re-order our humanity to its end in God. These stand in contrast to the forms of disordered love in the seven vices: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. These are organised by Dante into three forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective, and love excessive. Such a way of thinking is an extension of today’s readings, it seems to me.
Peter Kreeft makes the interesting observation that evil for the ancient cultures was the fear of death; for the mediaeval world of Christians, Jews and Muslims, the fear of Hell; but for modernity, it is the fear of meaninglessness. The point of today’s readings is that our humanity finds its meaning only in God. “Christ shall give thee light.” Paul says, echoing Isaiah, and we have to walk in that light and not in the illusions of our own light.
This rather long Gospel reading is actually slightly shorter than what was traditionally read. Formerly it included as a kind of coda, the remarkable passage which immediately follows about a woman in the crowd having heard Christ’s words, crying out “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts which you sucked,” to which Christ replies, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” Like Blessed Mary herself, as the Fathers testify. But that concluding coda serves to emphasise the teaching in these readings: our constant attention to Christ’s Words, his light and life in the midst of our darkness and death; the counter to the empty meaninglessness that belongs to The Malaise of Modernity (Charles Taylor).
Let me end with a passage from Cyril of Alexandria about the meaning of Christ’s words here about his casting out of the devils and our casting doubts upon Christ.
“And so fittingly is it said, ‘The kingdom of God is come upon you’; that is, if I [Christ], being man, cast out devils by the power of the Holy Ghost, in Me human nature is enriched, and the kingdom of heaven is come.”
It can only come by seeking the light and grace of Christ which redeems and enriches our humanity; the counter to the despair and loss of the self and to the crisis of meaning.
Fr. David Curry
Lent 3, 2024
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