Day: September 27, 2026

“Friend, go up higher”

It is, I think, an intriguing text. It’s not about ambition or pretension, or for that matter despair. It’s about the hope of transformation. Better to be called up than to be put down. It conveys the sense that we are called to something more, that we have an end beyond what we know is before us but fear to face, namely, the grave and gate of death. But it requires humility, a kind of honesty about our humanity and about ourselves in the sight of God.

The operative words are “friend” and “go up higher”. We are made friends of Jesus by being called up higher but only through his death and resurrection. That is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us. But humility is the necessary condition of receiving God’s grace. It is not about putting ourselves down so much as not puffing up ourselves and claiming status over others. Humility in this sense is honesty in contrast to both presumption and despair.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29 captures something of the power of love ultimately expressed in Christ’s “sweet love remember’d.”  Consider the poetic force of his sonnet that lifts us up to heaven’s gate and that speaks of the love that overpowers ourselves even when we are in disgrace and despair.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

All love belongs to God and thus this sonnet can, I think, be understood in more ways than simply the romantic, the erotic, or the sentimental. Plato understood that love or eros belongs to something heavenly and divine, namely, the love of the Good itself which gathers up all of the forms of love, incomplete and partial, into what is perfect and eternal. That way of thinking has its highest expression in Christ Jesus. All love belongs to God.

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