Christ the Light
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on the 29th of October 2006, by Abbot Hugh Gilbert.
Readings: Jeremiah 31: 7 - 9 and Mark 10: 46 - 52
Sermon:
"So, my brothers and sisters, our whole business in this life is the healing of the eye of the heart, that eye with which God is seen. It is for this the holy mysteries are celebrated, for this the word of God is preached, to this that the Church's moral exhortations are directed" (St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 88, 5). So said St. Augustine around the year 400, preaching on the Gospel we've just heard.
'Our whole business in this life...' St. Augustine had heard what we hear: one Gospel, one passage, one passing incident, one healing of a blindness, and he could say, 'Our whole business'. He could see that whole in the part. Read St. Cyril of Alexandria or John Chrysostom or Gregory the Great on this same Gospel - or, for that matter, on any - and it's clear they see the same. For them, for the Fathers of the Church, the Bible is an organic whole, fully present in any part. So, my brothers and sisters, our whole business in this life is the healing of the eye of the heart, that eye with which God is seen. If the Fathers are right, then, any passage of Scripture, a fortiori any passage from the Gospels, can yield us a vision of the whole. Let us try then to see the kind of thing the Fathers of the Church might see in a Gospel like this.
'They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho...' (Mk 10:46). Christ is on the move, that is the first thing that strikes: this solemn procession. And as he was moving, 'Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, a blind beggar was sitting by the roadside' (10:46). This is the second thing, contrasting, a sedentary, suffering man, Bartimaeus. The scene is set, the action can begin. And the action is this sedentary, suffering man being taken up healed into the movement of Christ. 'Immediately - ends the passage - he regained his sight and followed him on the way' (10:52). 'As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho...'
Questions haunt us, and at the risk of embarrassment I must mention one that has haunted me. Put simply, 'What's really going on?' In life, in the world. What on earth is really happening? It has bothered me from boyhood, this. Is it what's on the news? Somehow I've felt that, almost by definition, it isn't. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked apropos Bl. Theresa of Calcutta: 'She never read a newspaper and so knew what was really going on in the world. But then what is? If it's not what's on the surface of world events, if even The Economist can't tell me, who can? Where do I turn? To the sum of my health and my work and my relationships, the things that fill my life? To what's going on inside me, my little stream of consciousness? But that's only me. I have to look more widely. Is there anyone who can tell me? One could play with a famous passage of Augustine's Confessions. I asked the psychiatrist and he said, 'Not I'. I went back to the historians, and 'they made the same confession.' I turned to the poets and film-makers and philosophers, and they said, 'Look beyond us.' I apologise to the scientists; I never asked them. But is there no answer? Are the postmodernists right, and the only meanings private and partial? Well, I could deny my metaphysical itch, at a price. I could dismiss this urge for meaning, for seeing the whole, for a narrative at the heart of things, as just a cruel, random trick of Nature. But that's to deny myself.
Then I hear, 'As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho...'What is going on here? To an historian, it's a moment in the journey of a 1st c. Galilean rabbi and his followers to Passover. To the Gospels, it's part of the final journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, due to issue in his death and resurrection. And to the eyes of faith, it is - without exaggeration, quite soberly - the answer.
'As he and his disciples and a great crowd were leaving Jericho...' This is a moment in the most momentous journey anyone has ever undertaken, the journey of which literature's odysseys and history's great treks are either adumbrations or extensions. It is the Son of God, the Word made flesh, going up to Jerusalem, to death and resurrection, and so the sacrament, sign and reality, of God's great matter, his business, his work in the world, what is really going on.
Here let's return to Jeremiah and our first reading. It is a promise of return from exile. 'See [says the Lord], I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labour, together, a great company, they shall return here' (Jeremiah 31:8). 'As he and his disciples and a great crowd were leaving Jericho...'
This is one and the same journey, for all the centuries between. No negative experience, not even the Shoah, has so marked Abraham's children as that of Exile, the Exile to Babylon in the 6th c. before Christ. Jewish liturgy still laments it, still asks for its reversal. Is there any image of the human plight after sin so expressive as 'exile'? The returns to the Land that took place, by the grace of the Persians, in the 6th and 5th cc., were only, Israel knew, a beginning. All the varied expectations that fired the Jews contemporary with Jesus come back to a hope for a real, definitive undoing of the Exile. When Jesus himself proclaimed the kingdom of God, the coming of God's reign, he would have been heard as promising precisely this. But there is more too. There is not only one exile in the Bible, there is another. There isn't only Israel's, there's humanity's. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden' (Gen 3:23). Israel's state of exile was her reduction to the common state of exiled humanity. And correspondingly her return from exile - she 'the chief of nations' (Jer 31:7) - would be the return of all humanity.The passage from Jeremiah ends, 'For I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my first-born' (31:9). The bringing-back from exile is an act of the Fatherhood of God.
'As he and his disciples and a great crowd were leaving Jericho...' He was leaving, Israel and humanity in person, carrying us (as the Fathers put it) in order to go himself into the exile of rejection, suffering and death, with his last earthly word, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), and so, still carrying us, to be brought by his Father to the glory of the resurrection, to the promised Land of a life stronger than death. 'You are my Son: today I have begotten you.'
What is really going on in the world? The Bible, Faith, give their answer: it is this mysterious, half-hidden, half-revealed, work of God. It is the Father's work through his Son; it is the bringing back of his sons and daughters from the place of exile and abandonment to the house destined them from all eternity. This is no small matter. It is the work for which the first promise of salvation after the Fall, and the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Israel and the house of David all prepare. It is the work achieved when Christ for the last time left Galilee, and Jericho, for Jerusalem, 'took the toss / And rode the black horns of the cross - / But rose snow-silver from the dead' (R. Campbell, To the Sun). It is the work carried on, offered to the whole of humanity, through the preaching and sacramental life of the Church, already visible in the communion of the Church, to be completed in the Land, the City, the House and Temple of the everlasting Kingdom. It is the bringing of creation to its goal: the begetting of humanity to sonship in the Son. 'For I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn' (Jeremiah 31:9). What is really going on in the world? Faith has the nerve to say that under, in and through all things, even apparently contrary things, even the random, inexplicable, un-connectable things, it is this that is going on. 'I am going to the Father's house,' were the last words of John Paul II.
'So, my brothers and sisters, our whole business in this life...' After the question of meaning comes the question of purpose, of action. After the revelation of God's business comes the revelation of my own. After disclosure of the Father and the Son comes the work of the Holy Spirit. After sight of the secret movement in history's heart comes the drawing into it of the sedentary beggar. It's as if a dilapidated truck abandoned in a lay-by suddenly spurts into life and finds the motorway. For the Fathers, once again, every detail is significant: his being named, being blind, a beggar, sitting, hearing, shouting out, the words, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!', the protests of the crowd, his unstoppable, louder cry, the pausing of Christ, 'Call him here', the throwing off of the cloak, the springing up, the coming to Jesus. Physical gestures, but charged with spiritual and sacramental sense. 'What do you want me to do for you? 'Rabbouni, let me see again,' 'Go; your faith has made you well.' 'Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way'. For the Fathers, seeing the whole in the part, the whole of that personal, sacramental process by which we connect to Christ and live as a member of his Body is summarised here. After all, wasn't enlightenment, illumination, an early Christian word for baptism?
First, there is God's business: the solemn march at the heart of things. And then there is our own, our connection, our taking part, our movement into the movement of God, the work of the Holy Spirit. But if there is, in Bartimaeus, one particularity the Fathers see, one lesson peculiarly his own, it is the place in this for persevering prayer. He's an icon of it, for St. John Chrysostom. 'Son of David, have mercy on me!' It is all but the Jesus Prayer. For St Gregory the Great: 'Let us hear what the blind man, still unenlightened, did'. He cried out all the more. In proportion to the tumult of our unspiritual thoughts must be our eagerness to persist in prayer. The crowd opposes our crying out' frequently we endure the images of our sins even in prayer. But the more harshly our heart's voice is repressed, the more firmly it must persist'. I believe that everyone observes what I am saying in him or herself. When we turn our minds from this world to God in prayer, when we are converted to the work of prayer, what we once enjoyed doing we endure in our prayer as demanding and burdensome. Holy desire only with difficulty banishes the recollection of them from our hearts; the sorrows of repentance scarcely overcome their images. But when we persist ardently in our prayer, we fix Jesus to our hearts as he passes by. So Jesus stopped and ordered him to be brought to him. You see how one who was passing by stopped. While we are still suffering the crowds of images in our prayer, we realize that Jesus is in some sense passing by; but when we persist ardently in prayer, Jesus stops. He revives the light, because God is fixed to our hearts, and the light we have lost is restored' (St Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospel, 13).
What is really going on? God is at work in the world, the Father is always about his gracious, mysterious endeavour of bringing his exiled sons and daughters back to their home in the crucified and risen Son. And the Holy Spirit, completing the work from within, is forever inspiring what he inspired in Bartimaeus: desire, faith, prayer, a coming to Christ and a life in him. What is really going on is this work of the Three in One. The vision of faith is a vision of the Holy Trinity, of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And our whole business in this life, in and beyond any particular, honourable businesses that occupy us, is, in faith and prayer, to see this work of God and, in hope and love, to take our place within it. Everything pales before this, everything is illumined by this. It is the healing of the eye of the heart, that eye with which God is seen.
I hope to show, said Eric Mascall once, introducing a course of lectures, that the Faith which the Church has proclaimed throughout the ages is fuller, more interesting, more comprehensive, more demanding, more liberating, more satisfying, that it synthesizes a wider range of human thought, embraces and coordinates a wider range of human experience, opens up more possibilities of human living and offers in the end a deeper and richer ecstasy of fulfilment than any alternative way of life and thought; that it is in every way grander, more inspiring and more fruitful (The Christian Universe, p. 11). May such a vision and such a life be ours!
Abbot Hugh Gilbert, Abbot of Pluscarden.