Quinquagesima – Seeing God and Ourselves

Corinthians 13:1-13       St Luke 18:31-43

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem. 

Here are some questions for each of you this morning:

Who here wants a more profound spiritual relationship with God?

Who here lacks some understanding about love, about God, and wants to see better?

Who here is willing to let something in them die that they might rise anew in Christ?

Well today’s readings are for you.  They are the culmination of this short season called pre-Lent.  It is a season stirring up in us a desire to change, to grow, and that comes by dying and rising with Jesus.  We consider how we might observe a holy Lent as we go on a pilgrimage with Jesus to the Cross, to the grave, and to His Resurrection.

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Our Gospel reading from Luke is the third foretelling by Jesus to his disciples that he must suffer and be killed and then rise again.  This threefold warning is recorded also in Matthew and Mark.

But they understood none of these things; this saying was hid from them, and they did not grasp what was said.

And it is clear in hindsight that the disciples did hear what was said, because later they remembered Jesus had said it to them more than once.  So the words landed in their minds but they were blinded from understanding at the time what it meant.

And we also find it hard to conceive of this way of God.  Maybe we remember the story and we get the rationale of Jesus dying for us and rising, and yet it is landing on the surface, not affecting our day to day lives as deeply as we would like.

The Gospel follows with a story immediately after, that is completely connected:

The certain blind man who was by the roadside begging is for us a picture of the bewilderment of all of us, desiring deeper insight, a deeper knowledge and understanding of the workings of God for us in his passion and death and resurrection.

In the Gospel story, it is the faith of the blind man that God can open his eyes, and his acting on that faith by begging Jesus for it, praying, that we are being taught, is the response that will be rewarded as we enter Lent.

Have we been doing that?  Have we been begging in prayer to God to see Him?

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The Epistle reading is similar in describing a blindness in us and its healing.  St Paul says,

“Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Here the blindness is not about God’s working but about ourselves.

We know that we are a mystery to ourselves, that much of what moves us is unconscious, like an iceberg with 90% hidden and 10% on the surface.  Why we do what we do and say what we say is a surprise to us sometimes.  I think we all sense this, that we are not engaging in the world in as loving a way as we would like.  And I think we all sense that our gifts and talents are being hidden from the world in some way for mysterious reasons.  For now we see in a mirror dimly.

But there is a way St Paul says, to no longer be a child, but to grow up: it is “to put away childish things.”  He’s not talking about childlike innocence or childlike trust – things most necessary and commended highly by Jesus, if we would enter the kingdom of heaven – but St Paul is talking about being carried away childishly by our passions, an unthinking following of our desires which further blinds us.

We look at the disordered passions of the human soul during Trinity season, I hope they are becoming a part of your knowledge of your soul – pride, vainglory or envy, wrath, dejection, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust.

It is typical that each person in their personality type is subject especially to one or two of these passions.  Does one or two of these passions come to your mind (or does the Holy Spirit bring one or two of them to your mind) when you think of a childish way you need to temper or put away?

As we mature in our outward actions, following the way of authentic love, we can expect to grow in self knowledge – coming to see ourselves even as God sees us.  “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

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What does all of this have to do with Lent and how we might observe it?

Lent is about maturing in our faith, our hope and our love.  It is about seeing God more clearly and seeing ourselves more clearly and in doing so, becoming more fully alive and in love.

Lent is about stepping out of our normal patterns, to break through our complacency, our being content with who we are and how we are engaging with God and with our neighbour in the world.

It is to step out of the Shire (remember Frodo’s reluctance, for the Tolkien fans among us), and to go on an adventure.  It is a kind of initiation rite – like initiation rites in societies around the world that are aimed at us moving from childhood to adulthood, of becoming more mature.

In the Christian world Lenten discipline has typically, from earliest times, involved a change to our disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, augmenting them temporarily, and some practices might end of becoming a more permanent part of our life discipline.

• It involves some sort of fasting from food – it may mean less food, or if the amount is not a problem for you, it may mean a different kind of food – giving up meat, sugar, alcohol. It should be tailored to whatever is our unhealthy excess.  And if excess is not a problem, it is to come to understand this most basic desire.  Can the want of immediate satisfaction physically, be transferred, as we hesitate, to a drawing closer to God?
• It should involve some sort of fasting from other activities that you are aware are making you less human, less loving, less engaged.
  • I don’t know if you are nervous about our involvement with technology, I am greatly concerned. Your fasting might involve how and how much you use your phone and computer.  What is wasting your time with useless information? What is making you more distracted in your thinking? What is making you less present to the people who are right in front of you, less loving?
  • Your Lenten fast might (I think, should) include some fasting from entertainment that is not really lifting you heavenward and replacing that with some added study of God’s Word and contemplative prayer or worship.  During Lent, on Wednesday nights, we are offering an online study of Hebrews concluding with Compline and three of those Wednesday nights we are instead worshipping here at church – on Ash Wednesday, at our monthly Evensong and Litany service (March 11), which very few people from our congregation are attending, and the Feast of the Annunciation to Mary (March 25).
• With regard to almsgiving – you may wish to consider what you can give of your time and/or money to a charitable project. Of course to give something away is counter intuitive to our acquisitive fallen natures, but the practice is to cut to the heart of covetousness in our souls.  “Covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is proper among saints,” says St Paul [Eph 5:3].

Lent is to be seen as an adventure, an initiation rite, with the highest aims of knowing God and knowing ourselves better, of becoming closer to God and so more loving, as God is love and becoming closer to our neighbour.  Greater love, as St Paul reminds us in our Epistle, is to be the motivation of any discipline we take on, otherwise it is worthless.

The giving up something is the dying, and the rising to new life is the promised reward.

You have three more days to decide what you will do, if you want to join this adventure, with others, this Lent.  May God’s Holy Spirit guide you.

And now we prepare ourselves for Holy Communion.  As we ponder our own decisions about what to die to that we might rise to new life, we feed ourselves on the One who out of love for us, went to the Cross and rose from death on the third day.  He is calling each of us:

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.

Amen +