Author: CCW

“Now these things were our examples”

Examples of what exactly? Of things good and bad such as is illustrated in the Gospel where “the unrighteous steward” is praised by his master not for his unrighteousness but for his “prudence,” the one bad, the other good. There is always, of course, the prospect of learning hard things the hard way: “Teach your children about taxes, eat 30% of their ice cream,” as we saw on a road sign the other day!

Yet these readings challenge us about how we journey in the wilderness by recalling us to the things that we should know about our spiritual life in Christ particularly through our communion in the body of Christ. The Gospel actually ends with a warning and negative note about unrighteousness and a strong and positive note about faithfulness.

The point of both Epistle and Gospel is that we learn from both things good and bad. Such is prudence, the practical wisdom that is meant to guide us. Prudence here is seen as having to do with the God-given “spirit to think and do always such as be rightful,” as the Collect puts it, yet full knowing, and this is key, “that we cannot do any thing that is good without thee.” To live according to God’s will is our desire but one which requires our recognition of God’s grace. Here the classical virtue of prudence is seen not simply as a human excellence in itself but as properly belonging to our life in Christ.

Thus Jesus’ parable is a criticism of “the children of light” for their lack of prudence. What does that mean? It has very much to do with using the things of this world with a view towards our life in God and not as ends in themselves. When we forget that then we fall into idolatry, treating the things of the world as divine, a massive category mistake, a confusion of the creator and the created, and, paradoxically, a loss of true human agency.

“Apart from me,” Jesus famously says, “you can do nothing.” As Augustine observes, “all that we can do of ourselves is sin.” But to know our sins and failings is itself to know the goodness of God as prior and absolute. Paul in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians provides a profound spiritual commentary on the pilgrimage of our souls. He looks back to the ancient Exodus of the Hebrews and connects the images of the Exodus with the forms of our sacramental participation in Christ. “All our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,” he says, recalling God’s providential guiding of the people of the Hebrews at the Passover, “a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of light by night,” and leading them across the Red Sea. We forget how powerfully paradigmatic and symbolic these Passover images are in the Judeo-Christian understanding.

(more…)

Print this entry

“We are children of God”

Our readings set before us, it seems, a series of binary opposites: in the Epistle, flesh versus Spirit, servitude versus sonship, suffering versus glorification, and in the Gospel, prophets outwardly “in sheep’s clothing” but “inwardly ravening wolves,” good fruit versus evil fruit, a good tree versus a corrupt tree, saying versus doing. But are we simply left with a series of binaries, caught in the back and forth, the to and fro of division and opposition? What would be the good in all of that?

We are being tasked with thinking through these binaries to grasp an underlying sense of spiritual integrity and wholeness, to who we are in God, and, as the Collect suggests, under the Providence of God. This transcends the binaries and oppositions though without negating them. The Epistle is emphatic that we have “received a spirit of sonship” that frees us from slavery and fear. “We cry aloud, Abba, Father; the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit, that we are children of God,” and “fellow-heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Such is the greater vision and vocation of our humanity in the midst of the turmoils of our souls and our world.

Some of you will recognise this reading from Romans as one of the lessons provided for the Burial of the Dead in our corporate parish life. It speaks directly to us as mourners in the face of death highlighting the awareness of our own mortality yet reminding us of our life in God through the sufferings of Christ. In other words, it recalls us to our sonship as the children of God not in a flight from the world and the flesh but through our redemption and freedom in Christ.

This belongs to the radical meaning of the doctrine of the Incarnation, to the reality of the Word made flesh who is Christ Crucified, and to its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our lives as eloquently expressed in the Eucharistic Prayer. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, gave his “only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”

(more…)

Print this entry