Month: February 2025

“My soul cleaveth to the dust: O quicken thou me, according to thy word”

Septuagesima Sunday marks a new beginning. We begin at the beginning, even with dust and dirt, as it were, the ground of creation, quite literally, we might say. Thus at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, we begin reading today from The Book of Genesis and the Prologue of John’s Gospel. The conjunction of these readings is quite profound because these beginnings recall us to our end; in short, to the radical meaning of our life in Christ. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” He is “the Word made flesh” who “dwelt among us,” that in him we might “behold his glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father.” But only in accord with his will and in what he makes known to us, namely, “grace upon grace.” John tells us that “no one has ever seen God,” yet “the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” literally, “exegeted him.” It means to interpret, to make known, or to lead out into an understanding. It is the only time in the Scriptures that the word exegesis is used about the life of God himself. Beginnings and endings in a radical sense are set before us. All this belongs to an ancient tradition conveying ancient wisdom, namely, a profound reflection upon the mystery of Creation within the Revelation of God as Trinity.

We begin with Genesis only to find ourselves in the midst of the vineyard of creation in today’s gospel from Matthew. It recalls Genesis and the purpose of creation. Genesis is at once a difficult and a necessary starting point. It is difficult because of the contemporary tendency to view the Book of Genesis in one of two ways, both of which are false. The first way is to attempt to read Genesis as a kind of scientific treatise, which it isn’t – this is the folly of creationism: at once pseudoscience and pseudo religion. The second way is to read Genesis as a haphazard collection of fables and myths, which it isn’t: a form of historicism or positivism, equally pseudoscience in terms of the human sciences and pseudo religion, too.

The Book of Genesis does not propose a human discovery of God. It begins emphatically with God. “In the beginning, God.” There is the proclamation of God as the absolute beginning after which everything else is secondary, after which everything else is derivative, after which everything else is a product. And while something of the ‘Mind of the Maker,’ to use a famous phrase by Dorothy L. Sayers, is made known in what he makes, the Creator is not simply equated with what he makes. He is known as beyond and in control. It is his creation. The distinction between the Creator and the created is absolutely crucial and necessary for the understanding that John presents in the Prologue to his Gospel about Jesus as the exegesis of God by his being incarnate in human flesh. He makes God known as Trinity.

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“Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”

Epiphany runs out this year in the themes of mercy and judgment as belonging to the radical meaning of Christ’s Epiphany. He is the Judge of all humanity and the Lord of all Mercy. Today’s Epistle from Colossians complements and illustrates the Gospel by highlighting the qualities of Christ that we are meant to embody and express in our lives despite the limitations of the world and ourselves. Epiphany is not and cannot be a flight from or a negation of the world; the overarching theme is God’s will and purpose for our humanity regardless of the circumstances of our lives. This is the significance of the images of wheat and tares, weeds, we might say.

Wheat and tares grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? What is weed and what is wheat? To ask this question recognizes the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest,” says the sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean suspending our judgment in the abdication of our responsibilities. We have the obligation and the ability to discern right from wrong and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in the world of wheat and tares. That requires a check upon our judgmentalism both about ourselves and one another. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another is the counter to our judgmentalism. As we all know that is not always easy and increasingly so in our rather disturbed and disturbing world of folly and division, of uncertainty and fear, of vanity and nonsense, of wars and destruction; the list goes on as do the various ways of trying to make sense of our current dystopias, some more insightful and helpful than others. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, for instance, suggests that we are only just now coming out of a kind of 75 year old fantasy, the post-World War II world of relative peace and prosperity that seemed to promise endless material progress and limitless personal freedoms. No longer.

Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. We would put ourselves in the place of God as judge, having forgotten the lessons of Epiphany. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly,” as Paul will say. To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. Yet this is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

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