“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.
Jesus calls us “friends” here in Luke’s Gospel and in a powerful passage about love in sacrifice in John’s Gospel. He calls us friends at the height of his passion, on the night of our betrayal of him. “Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends … I have called you friends.” It is the wondrous thing, the thing that passes human understanding. God makes us his friends even when we are enemies against him! This turns the world on its head. We live in a hopeless and fearful world. Here is the antidote to our despair and fear and our resentments and envy of one another. It challenges us to redeem us. It humbles us. “Haply,” it happens through “thy sweet love remember’d.”
We are called out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ.
Paul reminds us of the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to be and how we should act: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” These qualities arise from the teaching which has been given to us and without which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all and in you all.”
It is a high calling, to be sure. And it would be impossible, except for this. The means whereby it is accomplished in us is the same as what has been shown to us. Jesus himself is the teaching. He is what he says. In other words, it is grace – what comes from God to us. Grace goes before us and follows us, as the Collect puts it. “Prevent” in its older and fuller sense does not mean “hinder” but “a going” or “a coming before”. Our grace-ordered lives are about the teaching, in short, the doctrine of Christ living in us, our “walking worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called.”
“Friend, go up higher” is not our presumption but our calling. Christ has come to where we are but not to leave us where we are. He wants something better for us. He has come to us and we find our vocation in him, in what he says to us and in what he does for us. Our vocation is simply about the quality of our being with him.
That quality of being is not something static. It is dynamic and alive, charged with the presence of God. It is the awareness of God in our lives that makes all the difference. Awakened to that, we can only be set in motion, in sacrifice and service, in prayer and praise. “Friend, go up higher” signals to us that there is always more and never less with God, more than what we deserve or even desire.
But it requires our openness to the reality of God, both as priest and people, as a parish and as individuals. Without that openness to the reality of God we are trapped in the presumption of ourselves. We are really atheists. That may seem harsh but it really follows that in putting ourselves ahead of one another we also put ourselves ahead of God. The God who is the afterthought in our lives is the God who is dead to us. We are dead to him. We forget that the grace of God is the whole premise of our existence: “it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture” (Jubliate Deo, Ps. 100.2). In a way, this gospel story would remind us of who we are and to what we are called by way of a patient, prayerful watchfulness and an acting upon what we see and hear in God’s word. This is the counter and the contrast to our self-presumption. God’s grace goes before and goes with us but only if we are humble and open to his presence.
“They watched him,” Luke tells us rather ominously about the Lawyers and the Pharisees. They are watching Jesus but how? In what way? Critically and negatively. Watching to see what he might do that they can catch him out. Everything turns on how we look at Jesus yet that turns really on how Jesus looks at us. Jesus’ words convict them of their hypocrisy, their presumption and judgmentalism, and ours. They have forgotten the deeper meaning of God and his creation and have put certain laws and rules in place of God to advance themselves. Jesus calls them out to teach us about true watching, a watching with an openness to God and to acts of goodness. Such watching requires humility.
We so easily get stuck in the various ruts of our lives, hobbled by the narrowness of our presumptions. It so easily turns into despair. We forget so easily the gospel of our transformation through repentance: our turning to God who turns us to himself. It is not by accident that T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” draws upon both the theme of turning and this sonnet in the line about wishing ourselves not just “like one more rich in hope, featured like him, with friends possessed” but in “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,” wanting for ourselves the gifts of others. Eliot makes one small but critical change, art becomes gift. It is by grace that we are raised up. God has come to us to raise us to where he is. That is the radical grace of the gospel. It is made visible and audible to us in the liturgy of the Church. Here we are called “friends” and here we are called “up higher”. But only as the counter to our presumption and our despair. Only through humility.
“Friend, go up higher”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 17, 2026
(A complete reworking of an unpreached sermon 2018)