Author: CCW

Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 5

Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord

Peter’s confession here is paradoxically the condition of our abiding in the Word and truth of God. It signals the wonder of the grandeur of God in the beauty of the world and the beauty of human affairs but only through our awareness of our emptiness, our nothingness in and of ourselves which stands in such stark contrast to the abundance of the divine life. His confession complements his exhortations to us in the Epistle to “be of one mind” and to “sanctify Christ as Lord in [our] hearts.” Such things are only possible through his confession here.

Peter’s confession is usually understood to refer to his response to Jesus’ question, “Whom do men say that I am?” to which Peter replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” His insight into the divinity of Christ solicits, in turn, Christ’s words, “Blessed art thou, Simon son of John: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it  unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” But that doctrinal confession complements this confession of sin. Why? Because all confession of sin is equally a confession of the truth of God. Confession is equally praise, an acknowledgement of God’s truth without which there can be no acknowledgement of our sins and failings. As such Peter’s awareness of the gulf between himself and God is the condition of our being with God, of our abiding in the holiness of his Word. That theme of abiding in the Word and Truth of God belongs to our sanctification, to our holiness as found in our abiding in the holiness of God.

How does that work? Through our attention to the things of God in our midst. “The people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” Luke tells us. Do we? Or we are caught up in all of the false forms of knowing that belong to our technocratic world? We are easily caught up in an instrumental reason that limits us to what we think is practical and useful only to find ourselves as the willing slaves to the devices and desires of our lives. The devices are even now quite literal and they so easily define us. But Jesus “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” What was that teaching? “Master” Peter says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” What was that word?

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Audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 4 in Petertide

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye,
and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye

The blind leading the blind is a common image mostly familiar to us from Luke’s ‘Gospel of Mercy’ in the parable where Jesus speaks about leaders leading others astray. It has its antecedents in the prophetic criticisms of the leadership of Israel such as “You have turned aside from the way; you have caused many to stumble by your instruction”(Malachi 2.8), or “Those who guide these people have been leading them astray” (Is. 9.16) and, “His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge”(Is. 56.10). The image has very much to do with a critique of our claims to know. “Eyes have they and see not” extends the image to all of us in our blindness about what we think we know when in fact we are ignorant, and, yet, judgemental about others, hence the moral point about hypocrisy; judging others while exempting ourselves from the same judgment, unable to see ourselves in the other.

The image of the blind leading the blind is not unique to Christianity. It belongs as well to Siddhartha Gautama’s strong critique of Hindu religion out of which arises classical Buddhism. For him the Brahmin caste, the gurus of the Upanishads, are the blind leading the blind. He rejects the Brahmins even as he rejects the caste system altogether in favour of a more inclusive ‘enlightenment’ available for all.

The image of the blind leading the blind belongs to a self-critique of reason and knowing. Perhaps nowhere is it better illustrated than in Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex (Wayne Hankey, Wisdom belongs to God), and in ways that speak to our current confusions about the self and the modern managerial technocratic culture which consumes us. Oedipus thought that he knew who he was both in terms of his parents and in his confidence about his form of knowing when in fact he was blind to both. The play is about how he comes to know that he didn’t know. He comes into collision with himself in thinking that his form of knowing, a kind of discursive reasoning, is absolute, only to discover that it is at best limited and partial. His discovery happens through the encounter with prophecy, in his case, the blind prophet of Apollo, Teiresias, who, though blind, nonetheless knows the truth about Oedipus. The play explores how Oedipus comes to know this truth and in so doing discovers that his form of knowing belongs to a higher form of knowing; it is incomplete and partial in itself. To use a later language (Boethius), he comes to know how ratio participates in intellectus.

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Rejoice with me

“The deepest impulse of the human soul is for that which is greater than herself,” the great 3rd century (AD) pagan philosopher, Plotinus observes. His statement looks back to the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and has its resonances in Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of others in the spiritual imaginary of the philosophical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It counters the narcissisms and obsessions with the self that are part of contemporary culture: ‘look at me looking at you looking at me,’ as it were. The point is that everything is not about you, about the sovereign self in its splendid isolation. You are not the centre.

What Plotinus highlights is intellectual humility signaled in the Epistle and illustrated in the Gospel. Humility is the condition of grace, our openness to what is greater than ourselves, the condition of being exalted in due time, “after that ye have suffered a while.”

Without this insight, we misunderstand the Gospel. The 15th chapter of Luke’s Gospel presents us with three parables, two of which we heard today: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and then there is the concluding parable of the prodigal or lost son. All three are about repentance, metanoia, a thinking after the things of God, the things that are greater than ourselves. The word metanoia is used several times here. It has very much to do with our being lost and found, being lost from God and the company of our humanity with God and then being found and restored to that company. The parables are told to convict the judgmentalism of “the Pharisees and Scribes” who murmur against Jesus because of the company he keeps with “the publicans and sinners.” Yet they are those who “drew near for to hear him.” They are seeking what is greater than themselves as opposed to the smug self-righteousness and conceit of the Pharisees and Scribes. What is a common complaint and failing of religion is now a defining feature of our culture in its obsessions with its “assurance of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, The Preludes IV) about self-identity which create endless division and enmity.

Metanoia or repentance is about our being turned back to what is greater than ourselves in which we find the deeper truth about ourselves. It is found in communion. The Church is not simply a human construct; it is, divinely speaking, an article of Faith, “the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as we profess in the Creed. The lost sheep and the lost coin are returned to the company of others. The most profound image for the Church is that of the body of Christ. Rejoice with me means to rejoice in “the blessed company of all faithful people” as our liturgy puts it (BCP, p.85), reminding us that salvation or being whole is not simply about the individual self but about our incorporation into the mystical body of Christ.

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