Day: September 14, 2025

“How readest thou?”

This is one of my favourite texts, I have to admit, though not simply for personal reasons, but because it speaks so strongly to the nature of the theological enterprise in itself and certainly in our times of uncertainty. The gathering of all things into the unity of God is the summary of the law and belongs to the highest dignity of our humanity; that gathering is our thinking and our doing as shaped by God’s thinking and loving at work in us. It means theology as prayer and sacrifice in service and compassion; in short, the harmony of intellect and will, of mind and heart. Our living to and for God necessitates our living to and for one another. How we read is about how we think and act. It is quite telling that the Gospel story that follows is about Martha and Mary understood in their complementary relation; contemplation and action go together.

Today marks a kind of mid-point in the pageant of sanctification. They show the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour most fully in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is an illustration of the fruits of the Spirit manifest in our lives with one another. Yet, at first glance, the Epistle and the Gospel seem opposed. Paul says that “if we are led by the Spirit, we are not under the law,” whereas the Gospel argues for the law as summed up in the love of God and the love of neighbour and as essential to life. But Paul is not an antinominian, someone who believes they are freed by grace from the moral law. Quite the opposite. He is arguing for our being freed from the condemnation of the law by grace, our being freed for our life in the Spirit. Love is the fulfilling of the law not its negation. This is the real meaning of our being Christ’s, namely, those who: ”have crucified the flesh.” Love is sacrifice precisely in terms of the Cross. Today too marks the Feast of the Holy Cross.

The works of the flesh are not the moral law but precisely its opposite, works of immorality, rather summarily and clearly laid out in a list that comprehends the various disorders and misdirections of human desire that ultimately harm ourselves and one another. In a way, the works of the flesh counter the good that the law seeks: adultery for instance, which betrays the law and the good of marriage, or fornication which is lust for lust’s sake, idolatry which confuses God with the things of creation, witchcraft which is a misuse of power for other ends than the good, and so on. They are negative and life-destroying and stand in stark contrast to the fruits of the Spirit that are positive, life-fulfilling and life-enhancing. They are the qualities of grace that belong to the good and perfection of our humanity for ourselves and for one another and that overcome through love as forgiveness all our failings and short-comings, all of which belong to desires of the flesh.

In other words, it has more to do with our relation to the world and the flesh in terms of our relation to God. In baptism there is the renunciation of “the world and the flesh and the devil” in order to affirm the things of the Spirit. But that affirmation is really about entering into the redemption of our desires through the gathering and ordering of all things to God, the proper task of theology as prayer.

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