This year’s Lenten Quiet Day was cancelled due to poor weather conditions, but Fr. David Curry has compiled the addresses he was to deliver into a pdf document, which can be downloaded by clicking on the cover posted below.
The Litany is quite a work-out, a spiritual work-out, we might say. In a way, it is about learning what to ask for and about what prayer itself means and looks like. It belongs to our life with God in Christ. “Prayer signals all the service that ever we do unto God”, as Richard Hooker notes. “Teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.”
This brings out an important point. Our good – our blessedness – does not lie simply or primarily in our knowing that we know God, a kind of self-consciousness, as it were, but rather in God himself. Prayer then is more than a self-reflective exercise; it is about “acknowledg[ing] him [as] our sovereign good.” That is the point of the Litany. It is grounded in God and grounds the whole of our life in God and with God. It is, to be sure, a kind of intellection, an activity of the understanding in which all the various aspects of human life are gathered to God in prayer. There is in the Litany a going out from God, revealed as Trinity scripturally and credally, and a return to God in and through the sequence of intercessions “for all sorts and conditions” of our humanity.
Our praying the Litany this morning complements the Epistle and Gospel readings. The Epistle from Hebrews is a tour-de-force of theological thinking about the mediatorial role of Christ. He is, to use the later and necessary theological language, both God and man, who in his pure and true humanity effects human redemption from sin and death. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Such is the nature of his being “the Mediator of the new covenant.” What is that new covenant? Our life in God and with God in Christ as no longer defined by sin and sorrow, by death and despair. How is it accomplished? “By means of death,” by means of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
And yet this is something which we see “but in a glass darkly.” Its full meaning and truth are veiled and hid from our eyes. We know it, of course, at least partially. The cross is veiled before us, but we know it is there. The point is that we don’t really feel its meaning deeply enough. And that has to do with us, with the state of our souls, with the nature of our self-awareness or lack thereof. We both know and do not know ourselves.
But we think we do. We think we know what we want. We think we know what is best for our children and for one another. That is what makes today’s Gospel so challenging and so compelling. It simply points out that we really don’t know completely and fully what is good for ourselves and for one another. In a way, the Gospel challenges and counters our ambitions, our desires for what we think is the good for us and for one another. We are very much like “the mother of Zebedee’s children,” who seeks prestige and prominence for her two sons, James and John; in short, power and position “in thy kingdom.” In such a request we understand a very common desire and one which drives so much of our world. ‘Look at me, looking at you, looking at me’ is one way of capturing the narcissism of the contemporary world and a feature of the selfie culture. We want power and prestige; ‘like me on Facebook! On Snapchat! On Instagram!’
This powerful Gospel story speaks profoundly to the nature of the Christian pilgrimage of faith. We are, to be sure, in the wilderness of modernity, but wilderness itself is such a significant image about sin and alienation. It is in the wilderness of our lives and experiences that we may learn the greater goodness of God. In the wilderness of our own insufficiency and incompleteness, we learn about God’s Providence and his provision for us.
God, and God alone, makes something out of nothing. God, and God alone, makes something great and wonderful out of such meagre provisions as “five barley-loaves, and two small fishes.” As Andrew says to Jesus, “what are they among so many?” We confront the radical insufficiency of our humanity considered in itself. On the one hand, this challenges the hubris and presumption of our technocratic culture in the idea that we can endlessly manipulate and dominate nature for ourselves without consequences for either ourselves or nature; on the other hand, this confirms our deepest uncertainties and fears precisely about our humanity and our domination of the world and ourselves which leads to a kind of paralyzing pessimism, to our dread and despair. This powerful story counters both our presumption and our despair.
In a way, this is the point of the story in John’s account of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a Gospel story which along with the Epistle gives rise to the wonderful ways in which this Sunday is known as Mothering Sunday, Refreshment Sunday, and Laetare Sunday, the latter indicating the idea of rejoicing drawn from the introit anthem marking the mid-point of Lent which was Thursday past. None of these designations make much sense apart from these readings. It is also underscores the important point about rejoicing even in the midst of suffering which has been an emphasis in our Lenten Programme on The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation.
Jesus asks Philip about the great company “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat? (And this he said to prove him”, John suggests, adding “for he himself knew what he would do.)” John’s parenthetical remark opens us out to the radical meaning of God in Christ and Christ in us. It is about what he wants for us.
This is the third of three Lenten meditations on “The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation”. The first is posted here and the second here.
Isaiah’s words of comfort and strength that mark the beginning of The Book of Consolation, chapters 40 through 55 of The Book of Isaiah, have their Christian counterpart not only in terms of Christ’s passion but also its application to us in our lives by way of St. Paul. Nowhere is that perhaps more clearly seen than in the wonderful words that belong to the beginning of his Second Letter to the Corinthians.
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2nd Cor. 1. 3-4). It is a wonderful and, dare I say, comforting passage and one which belongs to the consideration of consolation. Meister Eckhart, one of the masters of the Consolation Literature, begins his treatise The Book of “Benedictus”: The Book of Divine Consolation with these words from 2nd Corinthians. In the words which immediately follow in the fifth verse of 2nd Corinthians 1, the connection between comfort and consolation is made explicit, yet again, and yet again, through the reality and the dynamic of suffering. “For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” Suffering is paradoxically and inescapably an essential feature of the consolation literature.
We meet tonight in the commemoration of St. Perpetua and Companions, early third century martyrs. “Another liveth in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said, and that sense of the indwelling of Christ in us speaks to the profoundest theme of the consolation literature, the idea of our intimate participation in the goodness of God even in the face of suffering and death, such as the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions. It is really all about Christ in us and us in Christ. Therein lies the greatest good, the greatest comfort and consolation.
And yet, so many things stand in the way of our realizing this truth, a truth predicated precisely on how we look at things, upon our assumptions about the good and about happiness.
Blessings!? Where do we see any blessings in this rather dark and dismal Gospel, a Gospel story which I am tempted to call the Gospel of despair? But then, to call it a Gospel is to say that it is, indeed, a blessing, that it is, indeed, good news. So what is the good news in this troubling and challenging Gospel story? The blessing is in what we are given to see about ourselves in our disorder and disarray, ourselves in contradiction with ourselves and God, ourselves in our presumption and pride which separate us utterly from God and ourselves.
“I awoke,” Dante says in the opening and introductory canto to the Divine Comedy, “to find myself in a dark wood,” a selva selvaggio, a wild wilderness, “where the right way was lost and gone,” and yet he says, “there I found a great good.” This is the essential insight of Lent that brings us to the cross of Christ, the paradox that through evil we may learn the good, the insight that God and God alone can bring good out of evil. This, too, it seems to me, lies at the heart of our Lenten considerations about ‘The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation.’ In other words, we are being opened out to the radical nature of the goodness of God which is greater than all and any evil in our hearts. To learn that means confronting the darkness of our hearts. That is the great good of this difficult Gospel story.
But should we want a clearer and more direct affirmation of blessedness, it can also be found in the longer rendition of this Gospel story. Already a rather long Gospel, it was for centuries upon centuries even longer by way of what follows upon the rather cryptic and gnomic ending that we heard this morning that “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” What follows immediately upon those words is Jesus’ encounter with a woman in the crowd who blesses Jesus by way of reference to Mary, his mother, with the words, “blessed be the womb that bear thee and the paps that gave thee suck.” Jesus replies “blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.”
It is worth noting that this Gospel passage both in its present form and in its longer form does not appear in the Revised Common Lectionary used in many of the contemporary liturgies; perhaps because it is just too difficult and dark, too challenging. And yet the words of Christ to the woman in the crowd illumine the deeper meaning of the Gospel and the Lenten project. It is about our hanging upon the words of Christ and learning more and more about ourselves even in the darkness of our sins. But that means learning about the light and life of Christ who alone overcomes our darkness and conquers our death. Our blessing is found not in ourselves, certainly not in the forms of self-contradiction, and certainly not in terms of our presumption and pride.
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God.” So begins the fortieth chapter of The Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It marks the beginning of what has come to be called The Book of Consolation comprising chapters forty through fifty-five of The Book of Isaiah. From the outset we may note the connection between comfort and consolation. In short, this section of The Book of Isaiah, also sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah, belongs to our consideration of the Comfortable Words and the literature of consolation.
The literature of consolation is a great collection of writings that deal in one way or another with the question of how we face loss and suffering. There are many examples ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Homer – one thinks of Achilles consoling Priam on the loss of his son, Hector, in The Iliad – from Sophocles’ Chorus in Electra to the letters of Seneca, Plutarch and Cicero, from some of The Psalms of David to Augustine, not to mention one of the great classics of consolation, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. All of these contribute in one way or another to later works of consolation, particularly in terms of mystical theology.
The Book of Consolation in Isaiah appears to deal with the fortunes of the people of Israel close to the time of the ending of their exile in Babylon. In the Jewish perspective, any political change of fortune is really about God’s power and grace. Thus The Book of Consolation highlights the idea of God restoring his people, comforting them in terms of strengthening them theologically, we might say, with respect to the majesty of God, on the one hand, and the compassion of God towards Israel, on the other hand. The last chapter of this section of Isaiah, for instance, emphasizes the distance between God and man. “For my thoughts and not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This strong sense of the difference between God and man is a critical theme and is the condition for the grounding of our lives in the will of God. For immediately before that passage, Isaiah exhorts us in ways that anticipate the Comfortable Words of our liturgy.
Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call upon him while he is near,
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon (Isaiah 55.5-9).
Such words anticipate the Comfortable Words and underscore the point that consolation is found in our being returned to truth, to God, to a principle which greater than our experiences and our suffering.
Matthew’s account of Jesus’ encounter with “a woman of Canaan” is masterful. There is a perfect equipoise between her three statements and the three statements of Jesus. And yet, the encounter also reveals the silence of Jesus. To her first request for mercy, “he answered her not a word.” That silence marks the turning point because she does not turn away and even refuses to be sent away and continues persistently to persevere in getting Jesus’ attention.
It might seem that what is at issue is how we get Jesus’ attention. But that is to miss the real power and truth of the dialogue. Ultimately, it is about God’s attention and care for us and about our attention to God intentionally and with strength. In a way, this Gospel story for The Second Sunday in Lent is about our active attention to God. It means perseverance, indeed, great perseverance. Nowhere is that shown more wonderfully than in the story of the Canaanite woman. Here is the story of a strong woman and a story about the strength of faith. She holds on to what she senses and knows about God in the person of Jesus Christ.
No story in the Gospels suggests so much about the necessary interplay of our humanity with God in Christ. In the story, it seems that what drives the entire argument is the perseverance of the woman who seeks the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil,” itself an interesting malady. It is a malady of the soul, a torment of the mind, not altogether unlike the forms of mental instability and confusion which belong to our culture. And, to be sure, the Canaanite woman here is a great exemplar of the true meaning of faith. She recognizes something divine in Jesus which alone can provide the healing she seeks for her daughter. The healing she seeks is entirely psychological and spiritual, not physical.
The point is that she will not be put off but persists in her quest to get Jesus’ attention. As it turns out, she actually has Jesus’ full attention. The problem is that the others, such as the disciples, don’t. She has Jesus’ attention so much that he insists on her articulating the full meaning of her request. He has heard about her daughter in her opening question to him. “But he answered her not a word.” Why? Because it is not simply about her and her daughter. It is equally about the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity seeking our good in his glory. It is a lesson about the universality of Christ’s mission which is through Israel but not confined to Israel.
The “comfy words,” as they are affectionately or pejoratively called, are a peculiar feature of the Prayer Book liturgy however much one might find some precedence in the psalms surrounding the words of absolution in the Liturgy of St. Mark and the Liturgy of St. James in the rites of Eastern Orthodoxy or in sixteenth century Lutheranism such as Hermann of Cologne’s Consultations which is probably the more immediate source. That work places the Comfortable Words before the words of absolution rather than after the absolution. “Here what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him,” is what we hear in the Prayer Book Communion Service just after the surpassing comfort of the words of absolution, the words of the forgiveness of our sins pronounced after confession.
What we hear are a selection of Scriptural words that are, well, comforting and powerful. But why? And what do they mean in this context? What is meant by “comfortable”? Even more, do they have any connection to the tradition of Consolation Literature, both non-Christian and Christian? This will be our Lenten consideration: to consider the Comfortable Words in relation to the literature of consolation, attending to one or two works in particular in that extensive tradition.
Our Lenten series cannot pretend to be an exhaustive consideration. The richness and the wealth of the material is just so great and vast, each work worthy of so much more consideration in its own right. It will not even be possible to name all of the works that might be included in the catalogue of the literature of consolation. But in general, the literature of consolation deals with the question about how we face suffering, sorrow, and loss philosophically and religiously. The terms are complementary.
But what about the term “comfortable”? The great mystery writer, Dame P.D. James, in a work which stands outside her oeuvre of mystery novels, The Children of Men, makes the acute observation about contemporary Christianity that “the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism”. What this means, the novel suggests is the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” Good-bye Jesus. The cross, traditionally seen as the symbol of comfort and consolation, becomes “the stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty”. Good-bye redemptive suffering. There is just the sense that for some, particularly unbelievers, the cross “has never been a comfortable symbol.” But in the context of her novel which explores more or less completely the dystopian qualities of contemporary culture, what is more cruel and more barbaric? The cross or “corporate social responsibility” which in the novel includes the Quietus, a euphemism for euthanasia of the elderly and the inconvenient? What is more cruel? The cross or “sentimental humanism” in a world devoid of purpose and meaning? These are not merely rhetorical questions.
The temptations of Christ belong to the logic of redemption, to the Passion of Christ. Christ wills to be tempted for us even as he suffers for us on the Cross. The accounts of the temptation show us the intensity of the encounter. There is a real struggle, a struggle for what is good and right that is greater than anything we can imagine because we have become so used to giving in and going along with the things that draw us away from our true happiness and good which is found in the will of God.
The story of “The Temptations of Christ” is about our temptations as endured and overcome by Christ. As the Fathers so often observe, Christ is our Mediator who not only overcomes our temptations but also gives us an example for doing the same. The temptations belong to the reality of the human condition. They take us back to the Fall and they point us to the Crucifixion. Strange as it may seem to say there is something good and necessary about temptation. Why? Because what is good and true has to be known as good and true and willed as such.
The temptations comprehend all of the temptations known to us. All temptation, in other words, is brought in under the three temptations of Christ as presented by Matthew and Luke, even though the second and third temptations are reversed by them. Luke presents the second temptation of Christ which Matthew presents as the third. Yet whatever the order they are, by all accounts, a summary and comprehensive view of our temptations. They put us to the test about what truly defines us. They do so after the fact of our awareness of our separation from the goodness of God. In a way, the temptations raise the question about what is the good.
“Fire ever doth aspire, / And makes all like it selfe, turnes all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” the poet, John Donne, notes in a poem celebrating married love. His point about love and about marriage is that it is not wanted that it should end in ashes. God seeks something more for us.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, a beginning not an ending of the pilgrimage of love. We begin with ashes. It is not wanted that we should end in ashes. Ashes are the proverbial and biblical symbol of repentance which is always about how we turned back to God. They are part and parcel of the project of how, through penitence, “new and contrite hearts” are “created and made in us.” It means “the lamenting of our sins and the acknowledging of our wickedness”. How will that be realized except through humility?
We are turned to the dust of creation in the words that belong to the Imposition of Ashes, the words of the Penitential Service. “Remember O Man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,” words which are said at The Imposition of Ashes. Note the connection between words and actions. We are reminded of the dust out of which we have been formed, the dust of creation which connects us to every other living thing. And the ashes? They remind us of our sins and follies which in acknowledging signal that we are seeking something more. There is something more than dust and ashes in the mystery of Lent.
We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The dignified dust of our humanity is about who we truly are in the sight of God. The ashes remind us of our sinfulness, to be sure, no way around that necessary but saving truth, but even more they remind us of the possibilities and the necessities of repentance. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned.” That is the Scriptural basis for the prayer for grace “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee.”
Ash Wednesday launches us upon an upward journey that seeks the attainment of virtue that belongs to who we are in the sight of God and speaks to our care and service of one another. It can only happen by recalling us to our creaturely origins and to our Fall from grace into a world of dust and death, of suffering and sorrow. The only antidote and the one which is prescribed on this day is humility: ashes in the form of the Cross upon our foreheads. Love recreates us in love and for love.
It is not about boasting of our humility, the kind of Uriah Heep humility which is really self-promotion (there is no one so humble as I!). No. It is about the real humility which on the very ground of creation does not presuppose or presume any standing with God and knows instead its own failings and misery. Humility looks to God. That is the point really of the words of The Epistle from St. James. Humility not presumption is the key to the journey of Lent.
Fr. David Curry,
Ash Wednesday, Feb. 14th, 2018