The Sunday called
Quinquagesima
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church Windsor NS, AD
2003
“I will show you a yet more excellent way”
“I will show you a yet more
excellent way”, St. Paul says. That more excellent way is his
love-song. The image of our lives together as a body encompassing diverse
gifts and distinct parts where each works for the good of the whole has its
ultimate perfection only through the activity of love, the perfecting
virtue. Charity is love, love in its profoundest sense, love as
“setting love in order” and bringing to perfection each and every part of
the complex of the body, each and every form of love. Ultimately, that
body is the body of Christ, the Church, the body within which every other
body, both individually and collectively, finds its place and voice.
Love is motion towards another.
It does not arise simply from ourselves. For in ourselves our love
towards one another is always suspect and self-serving; in short, selfish.
It is always less than what it should be, even less than what we want it to
be. The poverty of our own loves convicts us. In ourselves, our
loves, our desires are incomplete, dangerous, destructive and even quite
deadly.
We have to learn this in one way
or another. At the same time, we have to learn the greater lesson of
the perfecting grace of Christ. Christian love is not about comfort
and convenience. It is about sacrifice and commitment. The love
of Christ would teach us about the true love of God in and through the forms
of our unloveliness but only so as to set us right in love. Without
the love of God - so clearly and strongly indicated on this day - there
could be no journey, no pilgrimage, no Lent; in short, no love. What
that really means is death. Without love we are dead.
“Behold we
go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus tells us. He has something in mind that
is greater than death. In that going up he would teach us and he would
heal us. He would set our love aright. For it is simply the case
that we do not really know what we want, we do not really know what is truly
good for us, we do not really know what is rightly to be wanted except
through the perfecting path of his love. In the Gospel for this day,
Jesus tells the disciples what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem with
them:
Behold, we go
up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning
the Son of man shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered unto the
Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and
they shall scourge him, and put him to death; and the third day he shall
rise again.
He speaks of
terrible things which we do, terrible things which our hearts and minds in
disarray think and do towards one another and ourselves, terrible thoughts
and deeds which, ultimately, we do or try to do to God. In short;
Christ speaks about his passion. It is not a dream. It is the
deeper reality of the love of God which wills to pass through our loves in
disarray and disorder so as to set our loves in order.
Christ speaks
of his passion. He speaks to us about the depth of God’s love for us.
“But they understood none of these things.” We understand so
little. It was hid from them and it is hid from us. In a way, we
can’t understand except through the journey of Lent. We have to go
with Christ. We have to journey with love so that love can set us
right. It is a life-long journey. It is simply concentrated for
us in the pilgrimage of Lent. It is the way of the rood, the way of
the cross.
The problem is
that we are blind. We both cannot and will not see what is set before
us and what is proclaimed in our midst. There is the ignorance and the
arrogance of our self-righteousness; there is the pettiness of our envyings
and resentments; there are the posturings of our self-assurances and vanity,
and so on. We are blind to ourselves and to God. We do not
understand.
Yet to know
our blindness is to begin to see and to begin to understand. At the
very least, it might signal an openness to the healing mercy and love of
God. Christ does not simply pass us by. He comes to be with us.
He would have us journey with him so that we might indeed see and hear and
understand. That, too, is part of the Gospel on this day.
We are blind,
to be sure, but perhaps we will be like that “certain blind man” who
called out ever so persistently: “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on
me.” Lent would teach us to avail ourselves of the only mercy
there is, the mercy of God towards us. Lent, from that standpoint, is
one long Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy upon us.
You see, if
love is motion towards another and if our motions of love are altogether
compromised and, ultimately, deadly and destructive - so often, we hurt
those whom we love the most - then surely we need, totally and absolutely,
the love of God. The motion of this perfect love of God towards us is
what is given to set our loves in order. There can be no love apart
from the love of God.
Jesus wants us
to see and understand this. He wants us to enter into his project of
redeeming and perfecting love. It means the pilgrimage of Lent with
its disciplines and devotions. For such things are the vehicles of the
lessons of love. They teach us an understanding of love. For
love is not blind - at least, not the love of God - and that is the love
which makes all other loves lovely without which they are not only blind
but deadly.
Lent is the
pilgrimage of love. It is the season of mercy. We are called to
repentance for without that we cannot turn to God. Socrates, Plato
tells us, once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Perhaps, we might add, “the unrepentant life is not worth saving.” It
is through repentance and prayer, through discipline and devotion that we
enter into the perfecting ways of love. We live in the mercies of
God’s love towards us. The love of God is made visible to us in the
drama of Christ’s going up to Jerusalem. He goes up to set our lives
in order. Will we go with him? Or will we persist in our
blindness and folly?
