Author: CCW

“Well, Master, thou hast said the truth”

There are two ways of turning back to God, the one in thanksgiving, which we saw last Sunday, the other in repentance. Both are an acknowledgment of the truth of God which measures us and not the other way around; both are a kind of redire ad principia, a return to a principle. That measure redeems and sanctifies our loves and our experiences. How? By bringing them to the truth of God without which “most loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare notes in As You Like It (Act 2, sc. 7).

Paul in the Epistle gives thanks to God on behalf of the people of Corinth for the grace of God which has been given them which enriches them “in all utterance – speech – and in all knowledge.” In the Gospel, we see the idea of repentance as the turning of our minds to the truth upon which our thinking and being ultimately depend. In both readings, love and understanding are interrelated and speak to the truth of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings; in short, to the interplay between knowing and loving that belongs to “follow[ing] thee the only God, with pure hearts and minds” over and against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil”, as the Collect puts it, reminding us of the baptismal renunciations.

The Gospel comprises two parts: first, an intriguing dialogue between Jesus and one of the scribes and, secondly, Jesus’ powerful teaching about the Christ, the anointed one, or Messiah as more than just a son of David, that is to say of the royal Davidic lineage and therefore more than a political saviour. Drawing on the Psalms of David, he points to what David himself says about the Lord by the Holy Spirit, calling God his Lord therefore acknowledging God’s transcendent and eternal nature, ultimately just as we say in the Creed that Christ is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”

Two things are intriguing about the first part of the Gospel: first, it is a positive and not a negative encounter between Jesus and one of the scribes, and secondly, here in Mark’s account we have Jesus himself proclaiming the Summary of the Law, unlike what we heard five Sundays ago in the lead-up to the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the cynical lawyer who tried to put Jesus to the test was compelled by the truth itself to pronounce the love of God and the love of neighbour, and through the parable, its meaning. Here it is given by Jesus: Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. In our liturgy, Matthew’s ending rather than Mark’s is added that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Here Jesus himself sums up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and at least hints that the commandment of twofold love is summed up in himself. This is what Paul will recognize and proclaim: love as the fulfilling of the Law in Christ. Something of the transcendent truth of God is being made known through conversation and dialogue and debate. It is made known through scriptural interpretation that is itself proto-credal in shape and substance.

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“One turned back … giving him thanks”

It is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel that embraces all the forms of thanksgiving, both harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgivings. It does so in the face of poor harvests and trying political, social, and economic times. Thanksgiving is profoundly spiritual. As the Gospel shows, in returning and giving thanks, we are made whole. Here is the deeper meaning of thanksgiving for it is about the greater gathering of all things to God, from the lowly zucchini to the mighty pumpkin, and of our humanity to its truth in God. This is signalled in the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, thanksgiving as rooted and grounded in the love of Christ for us and for our world.

Thanksgiving is the freest thing that we can do. Like learning and religion, it can’t be forced. It has to come freely from our hearts and minds. We constantly remind children to say ‘thank-you’, but real thanksgiving can’t be coerced. It belongs to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of our humanity as embodied spiritual and intellectual beings. It counters all and every aspect of the entitlement culture in the assumption that we are owed whatever we want and think we deserve. Its significance is captured in the power of prepositions. Prepositions?! Why prepositions? Because we can’t make any sense of thanksgiving without giving serious consideration to prepositions, particularly three prepositions, namely ‘for’, ‘to’, and ‘with’.

What is so special about prepositions? What are they? They are one of the parts of speech. They are those little words which carry a great weight of meaning and are often so hard to master when learning a new language. They position nouns and verbs in relation to one another to indicate meaning and purpose. Theology is really all about prepositions in the idea of the gathering of all things into unity in God: the God from whom all things come, the God to whom all things return, and the God in whom all things have their being, especially our being with God – to use but a few. Paul in Ephesians, the Epistle for Trinity 17, recalls our vocation to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all;” more prepositions that complement the thanksgiving theme of the gathering of all things to their truth and fullness in God.

First, thanksgiving is for something or other acknowledged as good. Rather than taking all the good things of life for granted and/or thinking that we deserve what we enjoy, we give thanks for the good things we have as a gift. Secondly, there can be no thanksgiving without the idea of giving thanks to someone; ultimately, in the religious and spiritual traditions, to God, the ultimate source of all and every good. We give thanks to God for what we recognise that we have received through the labours, the care, the thought and the actions of ourselves and others. At harvest thanksgiving, those labours and the fruits of the earth in their season are only conceivable by human labour working with the good order of creation. And all because of the providential care and love of the author of all that is, God.

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