“Friend, go up higher”
It is one of
those wonderful biblical phrases that can act like a maxim, an ordering
principle, for how we proceed with our lives. In this case, this phrase,
along with “set love in order” from the Song of Songs,
provides the biblical maxims governing my understanding and approach to the
pastoral and priestly ministry. It is about “set[ting] love in order”
and constantly raising the bar, challenging each of you as “friend[s]”
in the Gospel of Christ to “go up higher”. You see, Jesus wants more
for us; he wants the very best for us and he expects the very best
from us. Against the easy complacency and acceptance of mediocrity in
our world and day, and, especially, in our churches stands this challenging
statement; “Friend, go up higher”.
We may not like
to be challenged. We may not like the implication of such a call. It means
accepting, after all, that things are not altogether excellent, right or
good with us in our lives. We may prefer instead to expect God to take us
as we are, “to bless our mess”, as it were, and to leave us where we
are and to make no demands of us. But that is not the Christian religion.
That is neither true mercy nor genuine charity. It is fundamentally false.
It denies the transforming power of God’s grace in human lives.
And if we are
hostile to this teaching, then we are exactly like those before whom Jesus
speaks and acts. There was a healing done on the Sabbath under the watchful
eyes of hostility. There was a parable spoken in the face of resentful
silence; a parable told to counter our arrogance and our hypocrisy, a
parable told to challenge us. Jesus speaks and acts. He teaches. At
issue, then and now, is whether we will be teachable. Only so can we ever
hope to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith [we] are called”.
Make no
mistake; we are called. There is the inescapable and challenging fact of
our common vocation. We have heard the Gospel. We may be in some doubt or
uncertainty about how to understand certain things and how exactly to act in
certain circumstances but for the most part there is little ambiguity about
the call to love and service in Jesus’ name, to the loving worship of God
with the whole of our being. Our uncertainties often mask something much
more serious, namely, our willing unwillingness; in short, our despair, our
denial and our disobedience. The problem really isn’t that we don’t know
better. The problem is whether we are willing to press on with the upward
call of our faith.
We are called
out of ourselves and we are called to God. We are called to the service of
God in our life together with one another in the body of Christ. It is
really the purpose of our being here today, a purpose which must extend into
every aspect of our lives. We cannot just be Sunday Christians. Nor can we
pretend that we are Christians in our week-day lives if we are not
worshipping God in his Church on Sundays. The struggle is to be faithful to
Christ in all aspects of our lives. That means the constant struggle to
allow God’s grace to “set [our] love[s] in order”. That means the
constant struggle to “go up higher”, to seek our perfection in the
grace of Christ with humility and in charity, without presuming ourselves to
be better than others or, and, this is our contemporary problem in the
churches especially, without yielding to the tyranny of mediocrity, as if to
say, that the second-rate and the left-over is good enough, particularly for
the church.
St. Paul
reminds us to the qualities of that vocation, about how we should seek to
be, about how we should act, namely “with all lowliness and meekness,
with long-suffering, forebearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep
the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. These qualities arise
from the doctrine, the teaching, which has been given to us and without
which these qualities cannot live in us. “There is one body, and one
Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through
all and in you all”.
It is a high
calling, to be sure. And it would be impossible except for this. The means
whereby it is accomplished in us is the same as what has been shown to us.
Jesus himself is the teaching. He is what he says. In other words, it is
grace – what comes from God to us. Grace goes before us and
follows after us, as the Collect puts it. “Prevent” in its older
and fuller sense does not mean hinder but a “going” or a “coming
before”. Our grace-ordered lives are about the teaching, the doctrine,
of Christ living in us. Our being teachable is about whether we will allow
the teaching to live in us. You see, it is given to be known and lived.
“Friend, go
up higher” is not about our presumption but our calling. Christ has
come to where we are but not to leave us there. He wants something better
for us. He has come to us and we find our vocation in him, in what he says
to us and in what he does for us. Our vocation is about the quality of our
being with him.
Christ is not
simply the visitor who comes in and out of our lives. He is the Ultimate
Other, or stranger who has become the intimate neighbour in our
midst to communicate to us his abiding love for us. We live in that
love. As love it is not something static and unmoving. It is dynamic and
challenging. It calls us to something more. “Friend, go up higher”
signals the dynamic and transforming quality of the grace of Christ in our
lives. We are on a journey, a pilgrimage in which there is to be a
deepening of our understanding of the faith.
The comings and
goings of Christ as he makes his way through the entire landscape of
creation, having “set his face to go to Jerusalem”, does not mean
that Jesus is merely the visitor in our midst, here today and gone
tomorrow. No, by his incarnate presence he encounters all and every place
and aspect of our humanity to bring us into his abiding love, the love in
which we find our highest good and the perfection of our being. The story
of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, for instance, shows us
that God not only comes near but that he enters into the very fabric of our
lives. Such is the Incarnation. Jesus is the Father’s Word and Son who has
identified himself with us as “the Word made flesh”. He has come
down to us so as to raise us up into higher understanding of God and
ourselves. He has identified himself with us only so as to bring us into
his essential identity as the Son of the Father in the bond of the Holy
Spirit, the communion of the Trinity. Such is his grace. We are raised up
by the love of God and into the love of God. “Friend, go up higher”.
Christ is not
simply collapsed into the world to be taken captive by the culture, to
become another casualty on the highway of life, another mediocrity in the
triumph of mediocrity that defeats us all. Such is not the meaning of the
Incarnation. A proper incarnational theology seeks to be in the midst of
the world’s confusions but with the clarity of Christ’s teaching and in the
quiet confidence of the Gospel. Our constant struggle is to be teachable so
as to let that teaching live in us. It isn’t a question of our intellectual
capacities. Those vary from one person to another, for there are varieties
of gifts, including different gifts of understanding. No. What is at issue
is always our willingness, our willingness to learn each “according to
the capacity of the beholder to behold”. What stands in the way is our
pride, our hostilities, our envyings and our resentments; in short, our
wills. Indeed, even our claim to mediocrity, endlessly crying ‘the poor-me’s’
and ‘I can’t do that’ are but the protestations of pride. The
antidote is humility.
Humility is not
about putting ourselves down which is not to say that it means putting
ourselves up! Rather, it is about our being open to God’s raising us up. It
is about our being open to the motions of God’s grace in our lives, to what,
in fact, is proclaimed and set before us here in our liturgy and service.
The true and proper note of humility is sung by Mary; “be it unto me
according to thy word”. Through her Christ comes to us who calls out to
us, “Friend, go up higher”.
That call is
present here in our liturgy. “Lift up your hearts” so that the whole
of your life can be lifted up into the presence of Christ. No doubt we
shall stumble and stutter but what we seek is always the triumph of his
grace in our lives, the triumph of grace that lifts us up out of ourselves
and into the vocation to which he has called us. In him we are lifted up,
if we will be teachable.
“Friend, go up higher”
