by CCW | 17 November 2024 09:00
The year runs out with the themes of judgment and mercy. There is the sense of apocalypse. The Gospel for today is sometimes called the “Matthaean Apocalypse”. That section of his gospel deals with the sense of the end-time and the theme of judgment. We are also, in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, reading from those books which take their place between the Old Testament and the New Testament sometimes called collectively the Apocrypha. These writings contain various forms of apocalyptic literature. The term “apocrypha” literally means “things hidden away”; the words “apocalyptic” and “apocalypse”, on the other hand, refer to what is revealed or uncovered. They call us to reflection, to a kind of remembering upon which all our thinking depends, namely, the wisdom of God in moral teachings and in the order of creation.
In general, what we confront is the uncovering of all things from the standpoint of God, a consideration of how things stand in the sight of God’s all-knowing, absolute and total judgment. In particular, what we confront is the unveiling of our souls and lives in the light of God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ.
There is nothing soft and sentimental about any of this. Quite the contrary, it may seem terribly harsh and perfectly dreadful. We all cringe at the idea of death and judgment. But that is to miss the point. The judgment is itself the mercy. We are reminded – strongly reminded – that our lives are lived in the sight of God “from whom no secrets are hid”, as we say at every mass. It is, too, the very point which the psalmist makes: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising/Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”. Nothing falls outside of God’s eternal knowing and loving.
We are reminded that who we are is altogether bound up in his Word and Will for us. “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, and so we are”, as St. John puts it in the Epistle for this day. The question is, will we resist and deny, or will we accept and follow? Will we acknowledge the struggle and allow ourselves to be called to account?
The judgment is not something external and arbitrary. It has altogether to do with the truth of our thoughts and actions, the unveiling, as it were, of our true intentions. That, of course, can be most terrifying if we are simply left with the terror of our own knowledge of our own intentions. Our hearts are exposed by God’s truth. We stand convicted of all manner of evil intent, all manner of angry, dark, malicious, lustful, and hurtful thoughts, not to mention deeds and actions.
But if we are not accountable to God, how can we be accountable to one another and how can we even live with ourselves in the awareness of our darkness? We can’t, except by persistence in denial, by willing the darkness and refusing the light in which alone there is forgiveness. But then, we are in a contradiction that is altogether unlivable because it is simply untrue.
The Collect calls us to who we are as “the sons of God and the heirs of eternal life”. This is the hope that belongs to the truth of who we are in God. And who we are as the sons of God or, as John says, “little children”, has everything to do with the purpose of Christ. Here the Collect draws explicitly upon the Epistle. “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil”; only through that overcoming of all sin and evil – the radical meaning of Christ’s coming – can we begin to understand ourselves as the sons of God and live and act out of that understanding. God would not leave us in the darkness but calls us into the light of his truth. We are the sons of God, he says, and while “it does not yet appear what we shall be: we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for he shall see him as he is”. This is our hope and blessing, our end in God which is also our life now with God. It is our restoration to God-likeness.
Two paths are open to us. There is the path of revolt or the path of repentance; in short, our turning away from God or our turning back to God. The Matthaean Apocalypse points to both, to a kind of fear which paralyzes and a fear which propels us into motion. The fear that paralyzes is when we call what is good evil, and what is evil good. We paralyze ourselves because we will not look towards God in his infinite goodness.
The fear that propels us into motion and stirs up the heart is holy fear. It seeks to walk in the light of God’s truth unveiled to us. It hates what God hates and loves what God loves. It seeks the goodness of God and brings that measure to bear upon our lives: in repentance for sins committed; in amendment of life; in the constant looking towards God and ordering all things to him in love; in the desire for purity, for the holiness of God. Only then can we say with Julian of Norwich that indeed, “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, adding with T.S. Eliot, “by the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching”, for our praying is our desiring.
The grey month of November signals a time of remembering, to be sure, but in so doing it signals as well a time of spiritual awakening from the dead paralysis of our dark souls in disarray. We arise to walk in the ways of truth and righteousness. That we may do so is the mercy of God and the hope of God in us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 25, 2024
(Propers as appointed from Epiphany 6)
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