Day: September 22, 2024

“Friend, go up higher.”

In the ninth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Luke tells us that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem”, but it won’t be for another ten chapters that he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. What happens between his intention to go up to Jerusalem and his getting there? And it is a “going up” to Jerusalem, as Jesus makes clear in the 18th chapter in a passage which is familiar to you from Quinquagesima Sunday on the cusp of Lent. The words from the parable which Jesus tells in this halfway point of his journey echoes both passages; “Friend, go up higher.”

The ‘going up’ is equally a ‘going down’. “Friend, go up higher” can only happen if you have first taken the lower seat. The parable is a check upon human presumption and self-promotion, on the one hand, and a testament to the divine intent and purpose for our humanity, on the other hand. This is captured in the concluding words which equally point us to the radical meaning of Christ’s Passion for us: “whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

What happens in between prepares us for the meaning of Jerusalem in terms of Christ’s Passion. It does so through a series of critical teachings by Jesus as he makes his way through the villages and towns and rural landscape of Israel. It is preparation by way of instruction to the disciples and us that entails at times a trenchant criticism of our humanity in general and of Israel in particular. And it is very much about the nature of our pilgrimage in terms of two seemingly opposed but complementary motions, ‘going up’ and ‘going down’.

The readings and Collect for today remind me of a wonderful aphorism that has come down to us (pardon the pun) in a fragment from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. “The way up and the way down are one and the same”. The movement of our souls to its principle, God, is the same in some sense as our movement from that principle, God, in the living out of our lives with God. Our going to or up and our going from or down is really about our being with God. The Collect prays that God’s grace “may always prevent” – meaning going or coming before us – “and follow us” – come after us in the activities of our lives which, by definition, are seen in terms of our being with God.

The Epistle reading from Ephesians exhorts us to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called” and to do so “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love”, not in pride and self-promotion which seeks to get ahead of others. Humility is seen as the condition of our vocation, our calling, and thus to our being awakened to a profound spiritual truth about our faith: God “is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

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