Author: CCW

“For now we see in a glass darkly.”

Love without truth is empty sentimentality while truth without love is simply death.  Love is not simply an emotion or a feeling. In Paul’s great hymn of love we enter into a tradition of reflection about love which reaches back to Plato and ahead to the theology of amor which shapes Christian culture in its medieval and modern expressions. In a way, Paul’s 13^th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians is the Christian manifesto about love as the foundational principle of the Christian religion. What he identifies here are the great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity or love. These three, the greatest of which, he says, is love.

They are the trinity of virtues, you might say, that signal God’s grace as the moving force and principle that seeks our good. They are the virtues which belong to the spiritual perfection of our humanity, the virtues that are about our life in Christ. Why is love the greatest of these? Because love joins faith and hope, uniting what is known with what is hoped for.

In a way, love is about our participation now, however imperfectly, in the realities of God’s life of love, the community of the Trinity. That is the truth of our fellowship. Without it we are nothing. “If I have not love,” Paul says, “I am nothing.” The Collect reminds us that this is Jesus’ teaching. “All our doings without charity are nothing worth,” and that charity or love is “the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee.” There is such a thing as being dead right; in other words, right but dead, because love is missing.

For “we see in a glass darkly,” meaning imperfectly and unclearly. Our vision and our understanding is limited; human love, too, on its own terms, is limited and incomplete. Where there is no clarity, there is no charity, too. The challenge of our lives is to see more clearly and to love more dearly. It takes a journey. It is the journey of our souls into the heart of God.

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The gospel which orders our understanding on this day is the parable of the sower and the seed. It focuses our thoughts on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. The cultivation of the ground, however, immediately recalls us to the story of the Fall in this morning’s first lesson. The ground is cursed. Adam, who signifies our humanity collectively and individually speaking, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God (pun intended). The ground of creation becomes the place of our alienation from God.

In a delightful image, the Lord God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence in the fearful beginnings of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe but in the disobedience of our humanity. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to us – it is only to humans that a commandment can be given – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

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