Author: CCW

“Charity never faileth”

“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love. Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of experience and life, as one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs in his latest album, O sun O moon, puts it. Well push has come to shove as we stand on the brink of Lent for which this Sunday wonderfully prepares us. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and in a kind of Providential paradox it is also Valentine’s day! It’s all about love! But what do we mean by love? This Sunday teaches us about the divine love which redeems and perfects our human loves.

Lent concentrates the whole Christian pilgrimage to God into the span of forty days. It is a journey into light and understanding about the radical meaning of God’s love accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells the disciples and us in today’s gospel. Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration and desire for an absolute good or end. It is “Jerusalem which is above,” our heavenly end in God.

We know, at least in part, I suppose, what that going to Jerusalem means: the overcoming of all sin and evil in the Passion of Christ; in short, the free gift of Christ for us and for our wounded and broken humanity. It is altogether about the accomplishment of “all things written by the prophets concerning the Son of man,” as Jesus himself says. The challenge for us is to take a hold of that radical love of God revealed to us in the Passion of Christ. It is nothing less than learning and living the love of God in our lives. Jesus speaks about his Passion, death and resurrection but, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things,” for as yet they have not happened. We know about them after the fact but are here being given the interpretative means to understand exactly what they mean.

Paul’s great hymn to love complements and shapes the understanding of the journey to Jerusalem. It celebrates the eternal love of God made visible in Christ’s Passion. The love he is talking about is the divine love, the love which never faileth. Charity means love in its strongest sense. Caritas in the Latin carries over into English as charity and charity is more, though not less, than our compassion and outreach to those in need, the acts of charitable giving, as it were. Yet those acts are grounded in the deep love of God. The Greek word here is agape and belongs to the theology of amor, for the pilgrimage of the soul by love, with love, and to love, the love of God which is the true end and meaning of all our loves.

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“They … having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

The analogy is straightforward: good ground and good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought “forth with patience.” How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of springtime and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! Already Marilyn is consulting the seed catalogues and planning the vegetable and flower beds. But how wonderful too to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? And what will be the fruit of our planting? In Basil’s image, our talk, too, is the fruit borne out of our winter’s evenings, huddled by our fires in the long nights of winter.

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all, this is a world of too much talk, a Panglossian world of all talk and no action, of talking heads, and talk, as is so often said, is cheap, not to mention dangerous and destructive of lives and careers. Yet Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, reminds us of two things: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart in which it is sown. Yet there can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests. Therein lies the challenge that is our part.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must surely be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds. Only because that Word has been planted and sown within us but if neglected and ignored? What then?

That is the point of the parable. There can be no fruit without the planting and without our nurturing of what is planted in us. The great parable of this day is the parable of the sower. “A sower went out to sow.” We are given the wonder of the parable and then, there is the greater marvel of the interpretation of the parable. Deeds and words, we might say; things done and things thought upon. Jesus gives us both in Luke’s account. This points to a particular kind of challenge which belongs to the season of the ‘gesimas’. There is what God makes known and provides, to be sure, but then there is the question about our taking a hold of his Word and truth; about it living in us. Something is required of us. Such is the great and surpassing dignity of the Christian faith. It is about God with us and us with God and with the good order, too, of creation. That is about the disciplines of spiritual life in attending seriously and thoughtfully to the things of God, bringing them to fruition in our lives.

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