Day: October 6, 2024

“Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

Today’s Epistle reading sums up wonderfully the whole pageant of sanctification in what belongs to the qualities of Christ in us and what God seeks for the redemption and restoration of our humanity. It is very much about what we learn from Christ and about our life in Christ. The Gospel illustrates what God wants us to learn and know. “That ye may know”, Jesus says, “that the Son of man hath power to forgive sins.”

The healing miracle of the Gospel is about the radical nature of human redemption. Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. That is our restoration and the moving principle of our sanctification. It is something which has to be learned. How? By our being awakened to self-consciousness, to the awareness of who we are in God. In a way, these lessons concentrate for us the whole pageant of human redemption and restoration.

The question about self-consciousness is perhaps the defining question for modernity in and through all the confusions and contradictions about identity and freedom, in and through the various forms of our certainties and uncertainties, our fears and anxieties. And yet, it belongs to the much larger story of human redemption as revealed in the Scriptures and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the questions of God to our humanity that come to a kind of clarity in today’s Gospel. Here Jesus’s question – “wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?” – articulates a constant theme of God’s questions to us in the pageant of the Scriptures. They are questions that call us to account and to a deeper understanding of ourselves, questions that perhaps, just perhaps, speak to us in our current perplexities.

The first question in Genesis is the question of the serpent to the woman in the Garden of Eden. It follows directly upon the accounts of creation as an orderly whole and of our place within the order of creation that emphasise the inherent and absolute goodness of creation, and our humanity as made in the image of God and as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The story of the Fall undertakes two things: first, the question of sin and evil, and secondly, the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. As we saw last week at Michaelmas, sin and evil are only possible through the relation of intellectual and spiritual beings to God as their principle. Sin and evil belong to the contradiction and denial of the very conditions of our being and knowing; yet they also belong paradoxically to the awakening of ourselves as selves through our separation from God. But that is what launches the whole pageant of redemption through the questions of God to our humanity that recall us to the truth of ourselves in God.

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