Author: CCW

“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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“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger”

He is named, by Jesus, as “this stranger,” the one who is the other, the foreigner, literally, the alien. An outsider, too, we might say, to capture all of the inflections of meaning in this text and story. Luke sheds further light on “this stranger” in the simple phrase “and he was a Samaritan.” He was in the company of nine others sharing with them a further identity of exclusion; they were ten men that were lepers – the rejects and outcasts of ancient society. And on top of that, a Samaritan, the outcasts of the Jewish culture.

What stands out in the story is that “this stranger” is the one who gives thanks and “this stranger” is the one who is not only healed, like the other nine, but more importantly is made whole. Salvation, it seems, is more than just the healing of our physical infirmities.

This is a powerful story about the power and truth and the beauty of a profoundly spiritual activity, the act of giving thanks. A thanksgiving story, it appears in our liturgy in the late summer and early fall as well as being appointed for the Gospel for Thanksgiving Day, meaning our national day of Thanksgiving which in Canada is coincident with the older traditions of Harvest Thanksgiving and often eclipsed by them. It illustrates profoundly, I think, the spiritual nature of all our thanksgivings.

The giving of thanks is a free act, perhaps, the freest act that we can do. And yet, that act of thanksgiving, so central to religious and spiritual life, is not simply about ourselves. It is more about the movements of God’s grace in us; God in us, if you will. This is part of the deep Christian insight that relates to who Jesus is for us. I think this Gospel story provides the Christian understanding that transforms the idea of thanksgiving. It is, ultimately, about our participation in the act of human redemption accomplished by Jesus. His life, and therefore his life in us, is about thanksgiving. His life is his thanksgiving to the Father; the thanksgiving of the whole of redeemed creation has its highest expression in the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. Like the stranger, in returning and giving thanks we are being made whole.

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