The Sunday called Sexagesima
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church Windsor NS, February 23, AD
2003
“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 mornings first lesson. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once
signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, 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. The
ground of creation becomes the place of 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 man. 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 man - it is only to man that a commandment can be given - is also by
definition good. It is implicitly known as good.
Alone of all creation, mankind, that
is to say, the Adam, is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but
in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to
have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature
with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the
Creator.
The Fall is about the disorder of
that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God.
Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable
of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a
commandment.
In the form of the story, the serpent
is the occasion for the disobedience through the raising of questions. As such
the serpent signifies the agency of man’s reason. The problem, however, is not
with the raising of questions per se but with the direction or the intent
of the questions. For the questions of the serpent do not seek an understanding,
rather, to the contrary, they seek to undermine what is known as good, though
not known as known. They insinuate doubt and instigate revolt. Adam and Eve
prefer the lie of their wills to the truth of God’s will. The rest, as they say,
is history, “of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden
tree.”
And it is our
history. Children have a way of asking profound theological questions such as
“Why did God make blackflies?” How do you answer that one? ‘So that we
would be reminded that this isn’t heaven’. Indeed, but neither is this world
paradise. And it isn’t paradise because of the Fall. But, then you may say,
‘It just doesn’t seem fair that we should have to suffer things like colds,
flues, aches and pains because of what Adam and Eve did so long ago’. Right.
It doesn’t seem fair until the lesson is learned that they are we. This is our
story. This is what we do. And what we do and what others do have consequences
for all of us. We turn towards the ground of our self-will and away from God.
And yet the ground
is God’s good ground. He made it. The question is what will we make of it. The
story of the Fall mercifully contains the promise of redemption as well. The
toil of Adam and the pain of Eve are not external punishments but just
consequences which have in them redemptive lessons. “Remember, O man, that
dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.”
The remembrance of
the dust is equally the remembrance that we are God-shaped, the dust into which
God has breathed his spirit. The ground is to be the place of our being recalled
to God. The labours of our lives are to be the occasions of our learning the
lessons of God’s will for us. The lessons are to be learned through the fact of
hardship and toil and in the face of suffering and death. The ground holds the
promise of redemption.
The ground of our
lives becomes more than simply the place of our opposition and separation from
God. By God’s grace the ground may be the place of the making manifest of the
works of God. For however much suffering and death are inescapably connected to
our sins and the sins of others, there can be no simple equation between the
particular sins in our lives and the particular forms of our suffering. The Fall
which shows our reason turned towards the dust – “a creeping wisdom”, as
John Donne calls it - means that our understanding is dust-covered as well. We
cannot be sure that we truly know ourselves let alone to presume to judge
others. The mercy is that we are given to know the God who knows us and knows us
in his love for us. The works of God are made manifest even in the ground of our
opposition to God. God’s works a greater good out of human folly. “Then shall
the fall further the flight in me”, as the poet George Herbert puts it, not
our flight from God when we were hiding in the garden, but the flight of our
return to God.
For the Lord God
who walked in the garden in the cool of the day also walked in the wilderness in
the heat of the day. Jesus Christ works the ground of our lives to restore us to
fellowship with the Father and with one another in the bond of their unity with
the Holy Spirit. That he does so in the midst of great opposition shows us the
deep problem of human sin and wickedness, the continuing reality of the Fall in
us.
The gospels are
full of the wonderful stories of God’s redemptive work in the mercies of Christ
Jesus. Jesus waters the stony ground of our self-righteous condemnations of
others with the gospel of forgiveness in the story of the woman taken in
adultery, “Go and sin no more”. Jesus makes out of the ground of our
accusations the ointment of salvation in the story of the healing of the eyes of
the man blind from birth “that the works of God might be made manifest in
him”. Jesus is the stricken rock - the ground that is struck - out of which
pours forth the life-giving water, the sacraments of the Church to which Paul
refers in this morning’s second lesson.
The cursed ground
of our disobedience becomes the place of our participation in the life of God.
But only if we will be that good ground – “they that in an honest and good
heart, having heard the word , keep it and bring forth good fruit with
patience.” It is the challenge of our lives in Christ, the challenge which
is wonderfully concentrated for us in the season of Lent for which these
‘gesima’ Sundays wonderfully prepare us.
