Author: CCW

“Her sins which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much”

To my mind it is one of the most moving stories in the Gospels. In relation to our first lesson from Ezekiel it challenges us about our hearts: hearts of stone or hearts of flesh? What Ezekiel envisions, it is not too much to say, is what is illustrated in this Gospel story, namely, the hardness of our hearts of stone and whether we can be moved to compassion and seek forgiveness.

Ezekiel is speaking about the condition of Israel, about God’s strengthening and providential presence with his people in the places of their exile, about a change in them by his grace and spirit. One heart and a new spirit; a heart of flesh in contrast to a heart of stone.

There is just that sense of contrast between a hard and inflexible spirit and a forgiving and compassionate spirit that is also brought out ever so personally and powerfully in Luke’s story. It is not about being soft and wimpy; it is about something vital and living that moves in us if we will set aside the empty dogmatisms of our empty lives. In a way, this gospel story challenges us about what really matters and about what kind of hearts are actually in us. It brings us to some of the essential and central teachings of the Christian faith. Of course, that is the real challenge: to acknowledge and name the essential teachings which ultimately shape our lives.

It is this unnamed and unspeaking woman who teaches us so much. Jesus is at pains to show the importance of her action and its meaning. He knows what is moving in her heart. Her act, extravagant and moving, is an act of love in repentance. I cannot stress enough how powerful and important that is. I cannot stress enough the importance of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins of which this Gospel story is such a compelling witness. Jesus says to her, “your sins are forgiven.”

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“Be not anxious”

I like to think of this as “the anxiety gospel” but that runs the risk of only adding to the problem. “Behold, the fowls of the air,” Jesus says, “consider the lilies of the field” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. Behold, consider, and  seek are strong words  that offer a compelling antidote to our anxieties.

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. And it makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to see, to consider what he wants us to ponder, to seek what he wants us to desire counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even the anxiety about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” and he says it more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “The Martha Syndrome” as Jesus diagnoses it elsewhere: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them.

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“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire.

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the late summer with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14^th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise in the resumption of studies at our Colleges and Schools. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life that belongs especially to academic communities. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

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